A Reflection on Zaytuna Campus Visit

by: Gary Pence, PLTS Faculty

It was a crisp and sunny Sunday afternoon, November 5th, when I returned to the hilltop campus where I had taught for more than 40 years and enjoyed the company of so many beloved students and colleagues. Zaytuna College, the country’s first and only Muslim liberal arts college, had bought the property, and on this afternoon they were ceremonially cutting the ribbon and opening the campus to the view of several hundred Muslim students and supporters, neighbors, and guests.

The mood on the lawn outside Sawyer Hall was exuberant among the happy throng, many women in their hijabs, some men in kufi hats and kaftan robes, others in ordinary street dress, children running around delightedly. We were welcomed warmly and invited to share the pita and hummus and baklava set out for our refreshment. I struck up a conversation with a woman who said she was deeply affected, thrilled, by the beauty of the place. It was so quiet and peaceful. Its Spanish architecture seemed so harmonious with Muslim spirituality. She felt so grateful the school had a place that would so well nurture Muslim students in their faith.

I talked to a man, an engineer, a supporter of the school, who described to me his appreciation of the generous, open voice within Islam that Zaytuna offered. He gave me his card and invited me to visit him and his wife at their home on Mount Davidson in San Francisco.

The ribbon-cutting ceremony, conducted on the stone stage at the far end of the Sawyer lawn, began with a breathtakingly beautiful chant in Arabic by a young man who sang the lengthy sacred text from memory. There were words–both serious and witty–from an imam. But the high point was an address delivered without notes by the Zaytuna president, Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, who spoke about the importance of a religious response to a culture that he described as increasingly secular and vulgar, where competition and pursuit of consumer goods replaced lives of generosity and care for one another.

Afterward one of the young Zaytuna students, a recent convert he told me, approached me to tell me how Islam had offered him a “moral compass” that he needed in his life, how his studies at Zaytuna had brought him peace and increased his compassion for others.

I left our former campus late that afternoon inspired by the people I had met and confident that the place we had loved had been left in good hands. It occurred to me that a religion can well be measured not so much by its belief system as by its practical impact on the character and life of its adherents, by its “fruits.” The campus, now of Zaytuna College, continues to be a “holy” hill!