Ali Ataie – Realize Your Full Potential the Liberal Arts
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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.