Iqra Fellowship

The Iqra Fellowship is a year-long initiative that seeks to empower students and young professionals with the traditional, philosophical, and spiritual foundations and leadership development needed to navigate modern challenges and thrive as Muslims in America. The fellowship aims to support the development of more effective, compassionate, and knowledgeable Muslim leaders to better our mosque communities and Islamic institutions.

We will survey the philosophical traditions that shape the modern world, including scientific materialism, liberalism, feminism, racism, and secularism. As we make visible the “philosophical air that we breathe,” the fellowship aims to equip young Muslims with a compelling representation of their own rich spiritual, intellectual, and philosophical tradition and the resources it contains to face the existential questions and crises of our time. We will be exploring the spiritual traditions of Islam to guide and motivate this intellectual pursuit of Truth and the deepening of our relationship with Allah. The long-term goal is to equip fellows with the tools, knowledge, confidence, and community to faithfully serve as the next generation of American Muslim leaders for the Ummah and our communities at large.

We are looking for a cohort of applicants who are interested in exploring and enriching the lenses through which they see the world and are ready to wrestle with important and complex questions, ideas, and knowledge. Our fellowship environment requires active participation, being unafraid of asking questions to deepen knowledge, adab (proper conduct), intellectual humility, sincere truth-seeking, and a willingness to challenge ourselves and each other to be and do better, particularly in areas in which our community can be improved to become a spiritual home for the diversity and entirety of Creation. Our pedagogy calls upon students to engage with the text (Iqra), reflect upon the context (Tadabbur) and cultivate their agency (I’mal) in a spiritually rich environment.