Welcome to the Muslim College, London

Muslims living in the West have for long felt the need for establishing a religious academic institution specialising in the study of Islam, its culture and history. It is not difficult to recognize that religious education and guidance in Western societies requires a type of scholarship that is in many ways different from the scholarship available in Muslim countries.

Muslims living in the West face two major challenges. The first is a challenge to religious faith in general and to the Islamic faith in particular; the second is a challenge to the ethical and social values enshrined in the Holy Qur'an and the Sunna.

These challenges have been faced largely without the guidance of adequately-trained scholars. In matters of religion, Muslim communities in the West have come to rely for religious leadership on Imams and scholars whose training is mainly rooted in the cultural and educational environment of their countries of origin.

This training is not always sufficient to deal with the cultural environment of modern Western Europe and the USA nor with problems arising from interaction with Western societies. With the growing number of Muslims living in Western Europe and the USA, and the accelerated movement of people and ideas across national and cultural borders, Muslims today are living an unprecedented experience of multiculturalism.

This widely recognized development in the nature of relations between religions and cultures imposes new theoretical as well as practical issues on Muslims whether in minority or majority situations. Western societies also face no less acute questions. A greater degree of mutual understanding cannot be to the detriment of either; Muslims both in the West and in the Muslim world stand to gain a great deal from such an enterprise.

The West and the world of Islam are now much more aware of each other than in previous centuries. This calls for a new and more objective analysis of their common characteristics and differences.

Islam is a religion of long and established traditions of learning. These traditions, however, developed in a largely favourable milieu, and by absorbing various elements of their local environments became highly diversified and differentiated.

It is, therefore, imperative to understand Islamic traditional culture in its historical and social context. This is a prerequisite for the revitalising of Islamic thought and making Islamic contributions in the realm of ideas relevant to the human condition.

In answer to these needs, the Muslim College came into being.