The Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences’s curriculum is founded on the premise of the essential unity of human knowledge in all its diversity, and on it ultimate grounding in transcendent values drawing on the principles of unicity, the oneness of God. Complementing and corresponding to its view of knowledge is an understanding of the unity and purposefulness of life in a world attuned to the humanistic and civilizing vocation of the individual person as vicegerent of God on earth (al khilafa). This affirmative premise informs its two-pronged approach at critiquing and reconstructing the current legacy of human knowledge as it is encountered in the two principle domains that constitute the School’s mission focus: namely, the classical Islamic sciences (ulum al sharia and ulum al maqasid) and the modern social science disciplines.

By reformulating the basic matrix of inquiry in terms of a unifying and transcendent vision, the way is paved for integrating, consolidating, and building on the best in the traditional and the modern sectors of a new academy along lines that reinforce its intrinsic sense of integrity, integrality, and moral purpose.

The test of a vision lies as much in the caliber of the scholars it engenders, as in re-grounding and re-orientating of disciplines it fields. It is also lies in its timeliness — not withstanding the element of the perennial that inheres in a vision grounded in transcendence. In this vein the School sees its nascent institutional core a vital link in the current millennial initiatives at civic / civilizational renewal. The Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences is simultaneously committed to a range of responsible choices and realizing strategies and goals that include bridging cultures, building on affinities, bonding origins, and aiming at transcendence as a defining compass for recovering the bearings of a global culture that is at once more ethical and humane.

Chief among the objectives of education at The Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences is to encourage students to develop the capacity for critical, independent and mature scholarship. At the School, faculty and students work together closely in the spirit of open academic inquiry, personal and professional integrity, and mutual respect. Students are encouraged to take advantage of the rich classical Islamic studies collection in the Ibn Khaldun Library.

The School provides curriculum designed to clarify the vision of Islam, revitalize its traditions of learning in a communal setting, and prepare a future generation of Islamic scholars to understand, interact with, and contribute creatively and positively to the universal culture and humanistic civilizations in North America and throughout the world.

The graduate program in Islamic and Social Sciences is one that combines the best in both the Islamic and Western academic traditions and has attracted serious attention from students and scholars from around the world. The School provides a curriculum that enables students to gain an effective and dynamic understanding of Islam and its relevance in today’s world and serves as a bridge for mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence.

The School seeks to cooperate with Western institutions with a similar interest and vision to bring values back to learning. Its curriculum has been designed in a way that develops the critical faculties of students and encourages them to question the dominant assumptions of their respective field within the social sciences. In this undertaking, the experiences of critical scholars have been drawn upon to show how social sciences may be understood within the context of an Islamic vision of life, man, and the universe; and how these sciences may be developed to bring about Islamic models of social organization and global order.

The curriculum aims at exploring the nature of the classical Islamic disciplines and the circumstances which qualified their development. Emphasis is laid on the pivotal position of the Quran and Sunnah in the study of Islam, and on the need for developing new methodologies to understand and interpret them. The curriculum is focused on developing an “ijtihad orientation” that is capable of overcoming the drawbacks of the classical legacy, while benefiting in a positive manner from its contributions.

Students are expected to be serious academics with the ability to select an area of specialization and explore it thoroughly. The students’ intellectual activity should be oriented toward interaction with the theoretical structure of the Islamic sciences and the social sciences. This is achieved through a critical viewpoint and a comparative epistemology that begins with skepticism and builds toward certainty.