Ali Ataie – Realize Your Full Potential the Liberal Arts

Universities of today have really degenerated into these

anti tradition, anti nature, anti god institutions

where, you know, quote, free speech and free

thought are sort of propped up as these

apparent ideals. But in actual practice, these institutions

are just highly intolerant postmodern echo chambers. Muslim

students,

who enter these,

institutions,

they often feel a strong sense of inadequacy

and even alienation.

If a young man or woman, completes the

undergraduate program here at Zaytuna

and earns a bachelor's degree in liberal arts

and Islamic studies, that graduate will be an

absolute force to be reckoned with. The liberal

arts make you a better lawyer or doctor

or whatever. The liberal arts are tools that

really help you realize your full potential.

The liberal arts are grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

The word liberal actually comes from the Latin

for freedom.

So these are the, the freeing tools, grammar,

logic and rhetoric. These are tools that free

our minds. The most influential people in the

his in history were masters

of these tools.

These really teach us how to write properly,

how to think properly,

and how to be persuasive.

The goal is really to achieve excellence

in reading,

in writing,

in speaking and in reasoning. The prophet

said,

that God, exalted as he, has prescribed excellence

in all things.

This striving toward Ihsan is at the heart,

of Zetun'a's mission and we want our graduates,

these Marcinin, to go out into the world

and extend that excellence to the broader community.

Zetuna College is not a seminary.

We are a liberal arts college.

At Zeitouna, we teach the Islamic and Western

traditions.

Our students

really inherit,

the timeless or evergreen texts of both intellectual

traditions. Our students engage in Ghazali and Aquinas,

Aristotle and Ibn Sina. All of this is

buoyed by the liberal arts.

Students really have a very strong foundation

in the liberal arts when they go out

into the world. Those tools of learning that

they took from this college, Insha'Allah, they're going

to remain with them forever, and they can

integrate that in every aspect of their lives

by becoming

more effective communicators, by becoming leaders, by becoming

people that realize their full potential as human

beings within their families and within the greater

community.