Living Insights: Aims and Vision

Vision: To give life to traditional, holistic education materials needed by budding English-speaking Islamic institutions including Islamic schools, seminaries, liberal arts colleges, and for homeschoolers.

Living Insights aims to do this through providing the materials and training needed to give life to the traditional subject disciplines in English translations which are faithful to the originals and work in the classroom and society. This living education acknowledges that the full classical curriculum was an integrated set of complementary disciplines covering not only religious sciences, but also the humanities and natural sciences and mathematics. These disciplines map reality in a manner which covers nearly all of the modern curriculum, but this is only realised by a foundation which has a critical grasp of both traditions.

Without this insight, education results in lost opportunities and in a busy world, curriculum must hit two or more birds with each stone. Otherwise, our tradition and its humanising power will be lost on another generation. A well-designed curriculum should prepare students of any level to perform competitively and spiritually (with Ihsan) in all fields of life.

In the 1970s to 1990s, English-speaking scholars gathered for the World Conferences on Islamic Education, responding to what was widely considered a crisis in Islamic education. This foundation aims to take the best of the insights from these conferences and complement them with a deeper appreciation of the modern and classical traditions.

The Team

Shaykh Mustafa Styer

Mustafa Styer is an American-born, Oxford University-trained educator and researcher of Islamic Philosophy. Specializing in curriculum development from the University of London, Mustafa has devoted many years in developing an Islamic education curriculum in the UK. He has worked as head-teacher, deputy head, curriculum coordinator, and a teacher trainer in tarbiya for the Association of Muslim Schools UK established by Yusuf Islam. When the secretary of state encouraged Muslim schools to join the state system, he was seconded by the AMS to produce curriculum in Islamic music (Nashid), citizenship, and PSHE (Personal, Social, Health Education) and produced a 99-Names Scheme. Mustafa began his traditional Islamic studies in Damascus in 1995 in the Department of Usul al-din at Abu Nour and attending the lessons of Sheikh ’Abd al-Rahman al-Shaghouri and others and now continues his studies in Konya learning the Ottoman syllabus from Sheikh Salih al-Ghursi. Mustafa splits his time between the UK and Konya, working as the Project Lead for LIFE while continuing his research as part of Tabah Foundation's Classification of the Sciences project.

Sarosh Arif

Sarosh is an award-winning teacher, training and program specialist, artist, and an ivy-league educated social entrepreneur. Through her experiences with TeachForAmerica, the United Nations, and the NYC Department of Education, Sarosh has studied the needs of various communities and childhood education and identified the necessity for diverse and innovative initiatives. With parallel experience in the media sector including NBCUniversal, NY1 News, and most recently TRT World News, Sarosh has devoted her life to educating children through multiple platforms. With international media companies like TRT World, she develops specialized character-building curriculums with a global citizen perspective and coordinates targeted programming like the Journalism for Juniors program that empowers Syrian refugee children to reclaim their own narrative. The program now serves nearly 1000 refugees in various camps across Turkey. She bridges her background in character-development and SEL-based instruction with her passion for the visual arts and media industry. Currently operating from a dual home base of NYC and Istanbul, she designs and provides education and training consulting to various individuals, schools, mosques and organizations around the world.

Ismael Rumzan

Ismael is a graduate of Imperial College, London who fell in love with educational technology in the early days of the web in 1996. After completing a post-doctoral research at the University of Alberta in 2001, he was given the opportunity to turn a hobby into a passion by joining the e-learning team at the university. He has not looked back since then. After many years at the University of Alberta, where he was inspired by instructional designers to always focus on the use of technology to solve a real educational need, he travelled to Jordan in 2006 to join an e-learning startup. He has since worked with other educational institutes and helped found new programs and initiatives in Jordan, focused around solving social and educational problems. He embraces the concepts of flipped classroom and calm technology, which are his topics of ongoing research and publications.

Abdullah H. Mirza

Abdullah is studying the Great Books program at St. John's College, Santa Fe, where he is the Editor-in-Chief for the student newsletter, The Moon. Previously, he was a reporter for The Daily Californian, the independent student newspaper of the University of California, Berkeley, and copy-editor and opinion editor for the award-winning Berkeley High Jacket at Berkeley High School. His interests include writing and editing, copywriting and copy-editing, and translating and reading ancient philosophical texts.