Religious curricula that are taught at home or in the mosque are disconnected from the curricula that children and young adults are taught in schools and colleges. This creates a conflict in the minds and souls of religious students.

The conflict lies in two areas: (1) in the physical sciences, which train students to analyze the universe through the lens of materialism, and (2) in the humanities, which acculturate them into a non-religious worldview that moralizes autonomy and suspects authority and tradition, particularly when it is religious.

This conflict sows confusion into the minds of religious students. Strong relationships with healthy religious families and communities can overpower the confusion and the religious students can grow into religious adults who are successful in their families, communities, and careers.

But when these relationships are absent, or when they turn sour, or when they are overpowered by other non-religious relationships, then the seed of confusion grows into religious doubt, and students’ religious confidence in public settings begins to wither. Eventually, their faith can shrink, their religious practice in private settings can wane, and they may lose interest in their religious identities.

Atheism is spreading rapidly among all religious communities, and Muslims are no exception. It is spreading even in the Muslim heartlands, where some have estimated rates of atheism as high as 5%. The justifications of formerly-Muslim atheists always return to one of the two areas of conflict—the materialism of the physical sciences or the moralized autonomy of the humanities.

Abu Munir al-Sha’ar

Shaykh Abu Munir is an inheritor of the beautiful Damascan tradition of spirituality and service. He was the companion and personal servant of Shaykh Abdul Rahman al-Shaghouri, the renowned Shadhili master of Damascus, who he served for decades. He then became the personal servant to Shaykh Abdul Rahman’s successors, Shaykh Mustafa al-Turkmani and Shaykh Shukri al-Lahafi.

He is beloved by scholars, students of knowledge, neighbors, children, and anyone who meets him. His way, like that of his teachers, is of unconditional love, humility, and tireless concern for others. Having previously hosted Imam Zaid Shakir and other Western students of knowledge in Damascus.

Shaykh Abu Munir teaches from the Quran, the Sunna, statements of classic scholars of Islamic spirituality, from the stories of contemporary saintly men and women in Damascus, and, most importantly, through his lived example of deep love for the Divine and service to all. At Basira Education, he has taught a series on Beautiful Character with Hamza Karamali and continues to advise on matters of good character and spirituality.

Hamza Karamali

Hamza Karamali earned his BASc And MASc in Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, after which he moved abroad to study the Islamic sciences full-time in private one-on-one settings with distinguished traditional scholars in Kuwait, UAE, and Jordan, reading and memorizing traditional works in all of the Islamic sciences, and earning Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Islamic Law and Legal Theory from Jamia Nizamiyya in Hyderabad, India.

He specializes in developing authentically Muslim responses to the problem of atheism (visit his personal website: www.hamzakaramali.com). He is developing The Thinking Muslim’s Guide to Atheist Arguments (a free YouTube series) as well as a curriculum of courses that are designed to take our Islamic education to a new level by basing all of their conclusions on rational evidence. All of his work is grounded in the scholarly traditions of traditional Muslim seminaries such as al-Azhar of Cairo, the Qarawiyyin of Fez, the Zaytuna of Tunisia, and the Deoband of India. He has described the evidence-based curriculum of these classical seminaries in his The Madrasa Curriculum in Context, and will develop that scholarly vision further in a forthcoming work that presents traditional Islamic logic in the idiom of contemporary logic and philosophy.

He has taught the Islamic sciences online at SunniPath.com, then at Qibla.com, then taught advanced Arabic grammar and rhetoric at Qasid Institute, and then joined Kalam Research & Media, where he worked for three years, designing, managing, and participating in research and education projects around the integration of modern analytic philosophy and science with traditional Islamic theology and logic.

In the summer of 2019, he founded Basira Education to fill a gap in the religious education of Muslims in the modern world — his goal at Basira is to develop a deploy an original seminary-level curriculum that is grounded in the traditional Islamic sciences but fully integrates modern science and culture into an intelligent and God-centered worldview.