Message Of Thanks from Hamza Karamali

Bismillah wa al-salatu wa al-salamu `ala rasul Allah

Assalamu Alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu, 

This is Hamza Karamali and I’m the founder of Basira Education. I'd like to thank all of you for your tremendous support and encouragement since I launched the Basira project just over a month ago. 

We have two programs at Basira—a Young Adults Program designed for high-school and college students who are learning how to fit their school and college education into a religious Islamic worldview, and a year-long Advanced Program for more experienced students of the Islamic sciences who are proficient in the Arabic language.

Both programs quickly filled up as soon as they were announced. The response for my “Why Islam is True” course was overwhelming and we had to open a new section to accommodate all of the students. 

Registration is now closed. Students began taking their classes on September 1st and are now enjoying their third week of classes. I and my colleague Shaykh Tabraze are enjoying watching them expand their horizons as they learn about contemporary religious challenges and how the classical tradition of Muslim scholarship responds to those challenges. They are learning about Christianity, they are reading the Bible, they are analyzing Dawkins, they are discovering the relationship between Muslim arguments for the existence of God, science, and Pavlovian conditioning, all while they study the traditional Islamic sciences. 

My goal at Basira is to fill an educational gap, the gap between the modern education that we have all received, and between the traditional religious education that we would like to receive. Everyone is welcome at Basira, but my particular focus is young adults—young adults who are making the transition from childhood to adulthood. This is a precious and crucial stage of their lives. If they can gain religious clarity and purpose at this stage, they won’t have to undo, they won’t have to unlearn, they won’t have to unravel the religiously harmful ideas that made their way into most of our minds when we were their age. And perhaps Allah Most High will bring forth a generation of intelligent and conservative young religious men and women who will altogether renew the religion of the Holy Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) and make it shine brightly again as it has for most of the last 1400 years.

Thank you again for your support. Over the next two months, I will insha’allah be publishing content on raising Muslim children, on religious culture, on the Bible from an Islamic perspective, and on the traditional Islamic sciences. Registration for our next semester will begin in December. Please stay tuned!

May Allah Most High bless you all.

Assalamu `alaykum

Hamza Karamali