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One to Three-Year Structure
A part-time program for working ʿulamāʾ, ʿālimāt, and academics: exit after 1, 2, or 3 years with a named credential · 40 weeks per year · 5 days per week · 8.5 contact hours weekly · up to 1,020 hours of instruction.
FIKR, Postgraduate Program · Next Cohort Opening Soon
Next Cohort · Opening Soon
The Medinan ProjectPostgraduate Specialization in ʿAqīdah, Kalām, Manṭiq, and Western Philosophy
One to three years, five disciplines, one aim: scholars who read the aqidah and kalam tradition in its own words and answer the modern world in its own terms.
A part-time program for ʿulamāʾ, ʿālimāt, imams, teachers, researchers, and academics: forty-week arcs, primary Arabic texts, weekly oral quizzes, and four sustained papers a year.
Each year is a complete stage of formation in its own right. Continue to the next year, or conclude your studies: either way, you leave with a real credential.
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A part-time program for ʿulamāʾ, ʿālimāt, imams, teachers, researchers, and academics: forty-week arcs, primary Arabic texts, weekly oral quizzes, and four sustained papers a year.
Each year is a complete stage of formation. Continue, or conclude your studies: either way, you leave with a real credential.
Five Lenses, Every Week
- MonḤanafī / Māturīdīcreed & kalām
- TueAshʿarīthe classical school
- WedLogic & Argumentmanṭiq & munāẓarah
- ThuWestern Philosophy & Worldviewancient to contemporary + the isms
- SunḤanbalī & SeminarAtharī creed + integration
- MonḤanafī / Māturīdīcreed & kalām
- TueAshʿarīthe classical school
- WedLogic & Argumentmanṭiq & munāẓarah
- ThuWestern Philosophy & Worldviewancient to contemporary + the isms
- SunḤanbalī & SeminarAtharī creed + integration
The Vision
The Medinan Project
“An effort to recreate a Medinan civilization, beginning with a paradigm shift to a Medinan worldview.”
When the Prophet Muḥammad came to Yathrib, he founded a civilization. Medina became the first community to take revelation as the measure of its whole life, from law and learning to trade, manners, and the way its people pictured the world. That transformation did not begin with buildings or armies. It began with a change in how a community understood reality.
The Medinan Project treats that history as a model for renewal. Our conviction is that the crisis facing Muslims today is, before anything else, a crisis of worldview. We have taken on the questions and anxieties of other civilizations without standing firmly on our own ground. A Medinan society cannot be rebuilt until a Medinan way of seeing is recovered first: one in which tawḥīd orders all of knowledge and life, and revelation sets the terms of the discussion rather than asking permission to join it.
This is the work the specialization was built for. A civilization is carried first by its scholars. The program forms people who have read the tradition in its own words, who can reason and argue with genuine rigor, and who understand the rival worldviews of the age from the inside, well enough not to imitate them but to answer them and move beyond them.
The rebuilding begins there, in how a people sees, long before it takes shape in what they build.
Three Credentials, One Program
Exit after any year with a real, named qualification.
Students may complete one, two, or all three years. Each year concludes with its own credential, a genuine qualification in its own right, and the completed program is awarded a Postgraduate Certificate of Specialization.
Year I · Exit Credential
Certificate in Foundations of ʿAqīdah, Kalām & Philosophy
Certifies command of the concise creeds of the three schools of ʿaqīdah and kalām, introductory manṭiq, and the ancient and medieval foundations of Western philosophy: the theological and philosophical grammar on which advanced kalām is built.
Year II · Exit Credential
Advanced Certificate in Systematic Kalām & Comparative Theology
Certifies working fluency in full Māturīdī and Ashʿarī systematic kalām, the classical Ḥanbalī tradition on its own terms, post-classical logic and disputation, and the early-modern philosophical framework in which contemporary theological questions were formed.
The Completed Program
Year III · Exit Credential
Postgraduate Certificate of Specialization
The completed program. Awarded on completion of all three years: high scholastic kalām, Ibn Taymiyyah and the mature Ḥanbalī tradition, modern neo-kalām, analytic philosophy of religion, science, mind, and language, and an original capstone paper.
The Three-Year Ascent
A single arc from foundation to synthesis.
Year I
Foundations
The concise creeds of all three schools of ʿaqīdah and kalām, classical manṭiq (Isāghūjī, al-Sullam), and Western philosophy from Plato and Aristotle through Neoplatonism to Aquinas: the vocabulary on which everything above is built.
Exit Credential
Certificate in Foundations of ʿAqīdah, Kalām & Philosophy
Year II
Systematic Argument & the Great Debates
Full Māturīdī and Ashʿarī kalām, the internal Ḥanbalī disagreements around Marʿī al-Karmī and al-Safārīnī, the Rāzian turn, post-classical logic and disputation, and early modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant.
Exit Credential
Advanced Certificate in Systematic Kalām & Comparative Theology
Year III
Synthesis & Contemporary Engagement
Sharḥ al-Mawāqif or Sharḥ al-Maqāṣid, Ibn Taymiyyah and the mature Ḥanbalī tradition, modern neo-kalām, and analytic philosophy of religion, science, mind, and language, ending in original research.
Exit Credential
Postgraduate Certificate of Specialization
Parallel Track
The Worldview Program.
Where the philosophy component reads Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche as authors, the Worldview Program studies atheism, secularism, liberalism, Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism as living systems of thought, each through its own primary texts and principal representatives.
Year I
Contemporary Challenges to Belief
- Atheism & New Atheism
- Scientism
- Feminism
- Secularism
- Materialism & Physicalism
- Naturalism
Year II
Political & Social Order
- Liberalism
- Conservatism
- Marxism & Socialism
- Capitalism
- Utilitarianism
- Nationalism
Year III
Meaning, Identity & the Postmodern Turn
- Existentialism
- Nihilism
- Postmodernism
- Critical Theory & Postcolonialism
- Multiculturalism & Identitarianism
- Transhumanism
Program Highlights
Six pillars of the program
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Forty-Week Anchor-Text Model
Each year is one continuous forty-week arc, organized around a primary text per class rather than two disconnected semesters.
III
All Three Schools of ʿAqīdah and Kalām
Ḥanafī/Māturīdī, Ashʿarī, and classical Ḥanbalī/Atharī read in parallel every week, from concise creed through full systematic kalām.
IV
Classical & Modern Logic
Manṭiq from Isāghūjī through al-Shamsiyyah and ādāb al-baḥth, then propositional, predicate, and modal logic for analytic engagement.
V
Western Philosophy & the Worldview Program
Plato and Aristotle through the medievals, Descartes to Kant, and contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, science, mind, and language, paired with a parallel Worldview Program on the modern isms.
VI
Neo-Kalām & Contemporary Engagement
Muṣṭafā Ṣabrī's Mawqif al-ʿAql, Said Nursi, al-Attas, and analytic theology of ʿaqīdah and kalām, meeting naturalism, scientism, and secularism head-on.
Who It Is For
A program for serious scholars and students of sacred knowledge.
FIKR's postgraduate specialization is designed for ʿulamāʾ, ʿālimāt, imams, khatībs, teachers, researchers, academics, and graduate students who already possess a basic command of Arabic, creed, and the core Islamic sciences and now require sustained training in the theological and philosophical architecture of aqidah and kalam.
- ʿUlamāʾ
- ʿĀlimāt
- Imams
- Khatībs
- Teachers
- Researchers
- Academics
- Graduate Students
Why This Program
Classical formation for contemporary scholarship.
The modern scholar is asked not only whether a creed is sound but whether belief is rational, whether miracles violate science, whether the soul exists, whether religious language is meaningful, and whether evil disproves God. Three pillars organize the response.
PILLAR 1
ʿAqīdah and Kalām
The three central theological trajectories of ʿaqīdah and kalām, Ḥanafī/Māturīdī, Ashʿarī, and classical Ḥanbalī/Atharī, read in their own primary Arabic sources rather than through summaries or slogans.
PILLAR 2
Manṭiq and Argumentation
Isāghūjī, al-Sullam al-Munawraq, al-Shamsiyyah, ādāb al-baḥth wa-l-munāẓarah, and modern propositional, predicate, and modal logic, the architecture of theological argument.
PILLAR 3
Western Philosophy & Neo-Kalām
Plato to analytic philosophy paired with Ṣabrī, Nursi, al-Attas, and analytic theology of ʿaqīdah and kalām, a living argumentative tradition rather than improvised reply.
Answering the Modern World
The questions of the age, met with the tradition's own resources.
The curriculum is built so that a graduate can move from a page of classical kalām to a live debate about God, science, and the mind without changing intellectual gears.
The Modern Challenge
New atheism & scientific materialism
Kalām cosmological arguments from ḥudūth, read beside Craig, Plantinga, and the philosophy of science.
The Modern Challenge
Scientism
A dedicated philosophy-of-science module (Popper, Kuhn, Quine) set against Ashʿarī causation and God's action in the world.
The Modern Challenge
Secularism & the ‘neutral’ public square
Modern neo-kalām, Muṣṭafā Ṣabrī, Said Nursi, and al-Attas, confronting secularism and its concept of knowledge directly.
The Modern Challenge
The problem of evil
Kalām theodicy studied alongside Mackie, Rowe, and Plantinga's free-will defense in both its logical and evidential forms.
The Modern Challenge
Materialism about mind and soul
Philosophy of mind (Nagel, Searle, Chalmers) beside Ibn Sīnā's flying-man argument for the immateriality of the self.
The Modern Challenge
‘Religious language is meaningless’
Philosophy of language (Frege, Wittgenstein, Kripke) beside the classical debates on the divine names and analogical predication.
The Modern Challenge
Moral relativism
Classical ethics and uṣūl read against Kantian duty, utilitarianism, and natural-law theory.
Begin the path toward advanced theological and philosophical scholarship.
Applications are now open for the next cohort.