Our History
Zaytuna College was founded in 2009 by Imam Zaid Shakir, Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, and Dr. Hatem Bazian to restore broad-based and pluralistic scholarship to its proper place as a central priority of Muslims.
In 2004, Imam Zaid initiated a pilot seminary program at Zaytuna Institute, which was useful in Zaytuna College’s refinement of its Islamic Studies curriculum and its educational philosophy. For four years, students in the pilot program were engaged in the study of contemporary and classical texts, and in 2008, three men and two women graduated from the program.
Since the culmination of the pilot program, the Board of Directors has been guiding Zaytuna through a major transition that has oriented the organization toward the goal of establishing Zaytuna College as America’s first accredited Muslim institution of higher learning.
Zaytuna Institute was founded by Shaykh Hamza in 1996. During its early years in the San Francisco Bay Area, Zaytuna rapidly established a national reputation for providing premier educational programs, publications, and audio and visual materials for the local and national Muslim community.
“[Zaytuna] is far and away the single most influential institution that's shaping American Muslim thought. On the one hand they speak so much about being American. On the other hand, they have also plugged these American Muslim students into the global Muslim curriculum, that has all the rigor of traditional Islamic scholarship.”
Dr. Omid Safi
Professor, University of North Carolina
