Education has been a foundational aspect of Muslim culture dating back to the earliest generations of Muslims. Indeed, as the great historian and translator Franz Rosenthal put it, `ilm is the determinative concept of Muslim civilization. `Ilm may be rendered as “knowledge,” but as Rosenthal notes, this translation does not express its full factual or emotional salience. His insight is well-buttressed by the record, written and living, of Muslim civilization in all of its regional forms. A sophisticated apparatus of learning, Muslim `ilm spans well beyond what people expect from confessional study, including philosophical, linguistic, and scientific inquiry that probes the ‘big questions’ that transcend the specifics of a single culture or period.

From West Africa to Asia Minor to South and South East Asia, traditional Muslim students (usually rendered tullab al-`ilm, ‘seekers of knowledge’) continue to study a comprehensive curriculum that combines reasoning skills and deep reading of classical texts. These teachers, with their reservoirs of knowledge and insights, are an invaluable resource. However, academics researching these subjects in the west find themselves in a very different cultural milieu. There is not an indigenous tradition of Muslim scholarship in the country, and those traditionally-trained scholars in the west received their education in a wide range of countries.

Thanks to this unique intersection, English-speaking scholars of Islam are uniquely leveraged to provide a bridge both between academia and traditional scholarship and as a nexus point for traditional learning from across the Muslim world. The American Society of Islamic Philosophy and Theology (ASIPT) aims to provide this bridge.