ALIM Virtual Program

The ALIM Virtual Program curriculum addresses traditional subjects such as Fiqh, Hadith, Purification and Tafsir interwoven with references to our current situation as American Muslims. Whereas our Summer Program gives a much more in depth and intensive focus on the subject areas, the Virtual Program seeks to give a survey of the subject matter through mini courses via an online platform. The study of tradition fosters critical thinking, whereas the contemporary courses invoke tradition, thus empowering the participants with the tools to balance contemporary realities with traditional sciences. We hope through this glimpse of the topics that students will be encouraged to delve deeper and consider attending our Summer or Winter Programs when we are able to resume them.

​Comparative Fiqh – Islamic jurisprudence, Fiqh in Arabic, is comprised of the rulings by Islamic scholars to direct the lives of the Muslim faithful. The general consensus among scholars is that Shariah is the collection of legal rulings that Allah has determined but are not wholly accessible by the jurists. The numbers of rulings in this subject are large and expansive; the topics of salat, tahaara (cleanliness), marriage, and siyam (fasting) are some of the main areas of concentration in the course. These rulings are taught with the perspective of one madhab, while expanding upon the differences between the other madhaahib. Students will see firsthand how the four schools of thought share many of their final decisions, but differ on the grounds of particular hadith they accept as authentic, or the weight they give to analogy and reason (qiyas) when determining their rulings. Usul al-Fiqh, the science behind determining these rulings based on the best understanding of the texts and practices at hand, will be examined in another course.

Diseases of the Heart – Diseases of the Heart inhibit our soul and psyche from functioning at their most beneficial level. Being aware of how these diseases affect our soul can help people fight them and guard against recurrence and contraction of other diseases. This class emphasizes that the heart can be diseased in terms of perception, will, or affection, causing inabilities to see, know, and understand. Students will learn how to improve their moral character by nurturing a close and honest relationship with their Creator. They will also gain life-altering skills to become more emotionally intelligent and cognitively aware to identify and battle both their personal diseases and those that may spread throughout the community.

History of Islamic Law – Pursuant to ALIM’s overall aim of promoting Islamic literacy, the aim of this course is to trace the broad outlines of the development of Islamic law and Muslim legal discourse. The goal is to show how Muslim legal discourse developed in tandem with concrete historical realities confronting Muslim communities in different times and at different places. Thus, rather than see everything in a fiqh manual as having come directly from the Prophet, this course aims to show how Muslim jurists struggled to come to terms with their concrete historical realities in light of the legacy handed down by the Prophet, during the time in which they developed ways of applying Islamic law to dynamic and changing circumstances with full integrity. Special attention is paid to the development of Muslim educational institutions and to such issues as ijtihad, taqlid, the madhabs and the ijazah system.

History of Science - Given that no other form of knowledge is as highly esteemed as science in our societies today, it is crucial that we learn at least some of the basics of how it got this status. In order to do this, this short course treats science as a local product of human activity, with all its flaws and complexities. Unpacking this perspective—which at first sight might appear to be a simple matter—will profoundly challenge how we see the production of scientific knowledge. For instance, we will come to appreciate how scientific knowledge was negotiated in ways sometimes so unfamiliar precisely because such negotiations occured in cultural contexts entirely different from our own. When this perspective is coupled, furthermore, with the fact that despite being local and human, science is nonetheless regarded to have global and even universal application, we are better positioned to grasp its power; even when that power is sourced in industry and empire building. Understanding how science achieves these impressive but contrary sounding feats, will help us better to situate science in the contexts of its times and places. Catered to a Muslim audience, this short course will outline some of the basic ways in which the discipline of the history of science has critically approached the formations of science. The course introduces themes that have been extensively pursued by historians of science, which when taken together, begin to suggest an alternative view on science and its place in history, culture, and society. This, it will be shown, has major revisionary implications for how modern Muslims continue to recast their own history, particularly in relation to modern western science. It will also begin to give context to "scientism" and its consequences.

Women and Gender in Tafsir – This course will explore a cross-section of classical and modern Quranic exegesis on specific verses that have garnered heated controversy in academic literature on women’s treatment in Islam. The scholarly tradition of Qurʾanic interpretation, known as tafsīr, has been blamed by several authors for introducing misogyny and patriarchy into Muslims’ understanding of their scripture. Scholars have described the classical genre of Qurʾanic exegesis as “consistently and monolithically patriarchal,”[1] “decidedly misogynistic,”[2] and “voiceless” of women’s perspectives.[3] Yet much of the conversation on gender and tafsīr evades a substantive engagement with tafsīr as a scholarly genre with methodological boundaries.[4] These sessions will bridge the distinct fields of tafsīr studies and gender studies by situating the genre of tafsīr in the center of a scholarly analysis of gender in the Qurʾan.