From New York Times
By MARK OPPENHEIMER
Published: April 12, 2013
BERKELEY, Calif. — I was a bit late for my meeting last week with 19-year-old Mussab Abouabdalla, who I hoped would explain to me why anyone would attend Zaytuna College, an unaccredited three-year-old Muslim institution with about 30 students and not even 10 professors. I found Mr. Abouabdalla at Caffe Strada. He had arranged his books on the table as if to answer my question.
By his right hand, on a neat stack, was the Koran, the Muslim holy book. Beneath it was the quadrivium, the Renaissance curriculum, comprising arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. And at the bottom was the trivium, comprising grammar, logic and rhetoric, traditionally taught before the quadrivium. These seven arts were once the basis of a European education, and they have recently become popular with some Christian home-schoolers.
Now, at Zaytuna College, the Greeks, the scholastics and the whole Western tradition are being taught alongside the Koran.
“I believe the liberal arts are key to understanding Islam,” Mr. Abouabdalla said, as he began to sip his tea. Reading scripture alone, he suggested, could lead to closed-mindedness, fear, violence. “We need to understand our tradition trans-historically. When someone makes a lampooning of the Prophet Muhammad, why do we react with violence? Why don’t we react with art and literature?”
Ever since Hamza Yusuf, an American convert to Islam, founded Zaytuna in 2001 as a loosely organized seminary, I had heard it described either as a Muslim version of the great Catholic colleges, like Georgetown or Notre Dame, or as the Muslim version of Brandeis, a school without a religious curriculum but with a strong Jewish cultural identity.
