Our goal is to give Muslim learners the tools and insights they need to seamlessly fit whatever they study into a Quranic view of themselves and the world. Whether it be fiqh or physics, every science should be a path of closeness to The One.
This spring (Tue 05/27/25 – Sat 05/31/25, 1pm-4pm), Inara Education will be offering its “Foundations” course for Muslim high schoolers in the North San Jose area. Click here to register.
Modern mass education (K-12, college) gives us a framework for understanding ourselves and the world that is more influenced by 18th-century European Enlightenment principles than the Quran, even though we are believing Muslims.
Modern mass education gives us three things, of which only one is really essential:
1. Knowledge Content – the content taught in the sciences, in English, mathematics, etc.
2. Mental Habits – the default framework of thoughts by which we understand our selves and the world.
3. Fundamental Concepts – foundational understandings of important concepts such as “evidence”, “knowledge”, “human being”, “reason”, “science”, “world”, etc.
All we need is #1, but we also get #2 and #3.
The Inara Foundations course aims to recalibrate our Fundamental Concepts and open a window to what the human being and the world look like through a functional mental framework rooted in the Quran. At Inara we believe it is possible to recalibrate our worldview in a simple, intuitive way, without using long philosophical words and intellectual gymnastics, by using a handful of Quranic words, as unpacked for us by the luminaries of the Islamic tradition.
By the end of this program, participants will, insha Allah, have opened a door in their minds to see things anew (starting with developing a single mental bucket); enlightened, not by the framework of 18th-century Europeans embedded in us subtly through our education, but instead by the light of revelation and its beautiful and robust intellectual tradition.
For: Muslim high schoolers (14-17) who want to learn the framework that brings meaning back to science and see the world in a new way.
Dates: Tue – Sat, 05/27/25 – 05/31/25, 1pm to 4pm (Juma details to be announced)
Location: In-person, in the North San Jose area (details to be announced). Sorry, no online option.
Fees: $195 per person, $50 per additional family member (no one turned away for lack of funds).
Registration: Click here to register.
One of the dominant problems of our time is the idolization of “science” that is built into modern education, both formally and informally (through culture, video clips, books, etc). The Inara Introduction to Sciences course builds on the Inara Foundations course, introducing students to a universal understanding of what a science is and how it works. Through this course that draws on writings from the Islamic tradition, the students, bi’ithnillah, will be able to see for themselves how the word “science” is legitimately applied to both fiqh and physics, Arabic grammar and biology, and will be able to see why there is a hierarchy of sciences and how understanding that hierarchy is important for their lives. See the outline of the program below for a thousand-foot view.
For: Muslim learners 14+
Dates: TBD
Location: TBD
Cost: TBD
Registration: TBD
The study of modern biology is nothing less than a path to the ma’rifa of Allah (closeness to Allah). It is filled with magnificent meanings. In this year-long class, students will be guided through the Holt Biology Text Book, 2017 student edition, using the principles and understandings they developed in the Inara Intensive courses (which serve as prerequisites to this class). Students will be guided in applying what they learned in the Inara Intensive to the study of modern biology, to help them see the meanings and the beauty present in the study of life from the modern perspective. The goal is that by the end of the class, bi’ithnillah, the students will have practiced how to understand the meanings present in biology, while fulfilling a biology high school knowledge requirement. There will be particular highlights on the following chapters and sections from the text.
1. Introduction – What is Modern Biology?
2. Cells, Energy and Cell Division
3. Meiosis, DNA, Heredity and Genetics
4. A Principled Evaluation of Evolution
5. Classification and Diversity
6. Plants
7. Animals
Prerequisite: Inara Foundations and Introduction to Sciences
For: Muslim learners 14+
Dates: This course is not being offered at this time.
Location: N/A.
Cost: N/A.
Registration: N/A.
(2) History of the West (9th/10th graders)
(3) Inara Chemistry (9/10th graders)
(4) Inara Physics (9/10th graders)
(5) Inara English (9th graders)
My name is Saleem Niazi, and I was raised as a Muslim during a time when Western civilization was politically and intellectually dominant. For this reason, even though I had Iman in my heart (alhamdulillah) my habits of thinking about the world, about life, about what is right and wrong, came – not from the Quran and Sunnah – but rather from what’s called “a secular education system” which is a very refined system of teaching 2,000 years’ worth of the Western intellectual tradition.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with learning from any intellectual tradition (that’s my understanding of the hadith, “Wisdom is the lost beast of the believer, wherever he finds it, he has more right to it”). As Muslims we assess the truth of something no matter where or who it comes from. However, I noticed that there were certain aspects of my thinking that did not seem compatible with my Iman, and I had to ask: why? Was there something wrong with my thinking? Or was there something wrong with my Iman? Could it just be that my Iman was weak, or was there something else going on as well? I constantly felt a subtly painful tension within me – a split between my secular way of thinking and my faith. Eventually I came to name this split, the “Two-Bucket Syndrome” – everything I learned went into two distinct buckets in my mind: the “Islamic” or the “secular.” I saw symptoms of this “Two-Bucket Syndrome” not only within myself but everywhere I looked – in every “Islam and…” book, pamphlet, or conference. “What is the relationship between Islam and Science? Islam and women? Islam and politics? What is Islamic knowledge? What is Islamic belief? What is… Islamic? And before something is deemed Islamic… what had it been? What is my understanding of science to begin with if I then need to ask what Islamic science is? A lot of my time and energy was spent exploring these questions. Because of this split, I felt deeply challenged by things like evolution, materialism, atheism, etc. The Two-Bucket Syndrome, I began to feel, represented a crack within my soul that could be exploited by doubts too easily. I suffered as a being split in two.
Feeling strongly that the Two-Bucket Syndrome shouldn’t be, I started on a journey that began over twenty years ago and is still underway. On this journey I asked Allah for help, I read voraciously, I sat with scholars, and I traveled to the Muslim world and spent several years at the feet of intellectual and spiritual giants who provided me with lights with which I explored the inner recesses of my own soul and mind. I found a lot of stuff inside me that didn’t seem to belong there because it didn’t make sense when put to the test of reason, or to the test of revelation. Eventually, it became clear to me what the problem was: after spending years being educated by Western institutions, my mind had become a place that was not 100% compatible with the Iman that was in my heart. This had created cracks in my soul through which even illogical arguments about truth and falsehood could enter and create doubts and difficulties regarding various aspects of my religion, and ultimately affected my ability to become closer to Allah.
During this time, Allah blessed us with children. As I continued my own journey, I became very concerned that I should not educate my own children in a way that would create the same Two-Bucket Syndrome that I suffered from; the same split between their secular education and their “Islamic” one; between the Iman in their hearts and the habits of thought in their minds.
So, whatever I learned from my teachers during my own journey, I taught them. I took certain teachings of the Quran and Sunnah that would be known to any child raised in a religiously conscious household, brought in some basic aspects of aqida (mainly epistemology) as well as spirituality (stuff that is usually found in the first couple pages of the book); I thought about what kind of challenges my children would face as they went through a secular education system (whether delivered via a school or a homeschooling curriculum), and tried to put the basics together in a way that would make it easy for them to understand, and provide a foundation on which they could build all the rest of their knowledge – no matter where it came from. The goal was to give them a foundational understanding of knowledge and the world and ourselves such that there would no longer be any need to designate one kind of knowledge as “secular” and the other as “Islamic.” I would regularly check what I was teaching my children with my teachers, to make sure I stayed on track. The beautiful thing about the truth is that it just needs to be put into place as is – the only modification necessary is not in the truth itself, but in the configuration by which it is presented, so as to face the challenge of the times. And when you do that, any falsehood that is encountered simply melts away.
In the 1700’s, Europeans did away with the “shackles of religious [Christian] thought” by “shining the light of reason” upon it. Inara is my attempt to reverse that process for myself and my family. This effort is simply the sharing of my journey to shine the light of pure revelation on my own secularly educated mind to mend the Two-Bucket Syndrome, while giving my children the foundations they need to make sure their minds and habits of thought are always grounded in truth and certainty. In my view, that is the real enlightenment. In Arabic, the word “Inara” means, “lighting” or “enlightenment.” My prayer and my hope is that Allah blesses me, my children and all Muslims who need it, with minds that are enlightened by what Allah has sent.
