A three-year, forty-week arc of theological formation.
The architecture of FIKR's postgraduate specialization: its duration, format, and reading model.
The Anchor-Text Model
Each weekly class has one primary anchor text or anchor corpus. Other works function as satellite readings, reference works, research texts, or optional fellowship readings. This keeps the curriculum honest: foundational books are completed, while major works are read through guided study rather than pretended cover-to-cover.
Five tiers of textual engagement.
Complete or near-complete anchor texts
Foundational works read in full as the spine of a module.
Substantial guided selections
Major works approached through curated, scholarly selections.
Reference works
Encyclopedic and reference texts consulted throughout the program.
Research and paper texts
Works engaged through directed research and the four yearly papers.
Fellowship and director-level mastery texts
Texts reserved for advanced fellowship and director-level engagement.
For whom this program is built
ʿUlamāʾ, ʿālimāt, imams, teachers, researchers, academics, graduate students, and advanced students of sacred knowledge. The program presumes literacy in Arabic and seriousness of purpose; it is not a survey for beginners.
Why this, why now
Contemporary theological responsibility demands fluency in classical creed, post-classical kalām, logic, philosophy, and modern doubts. The program forms scholars who can read primary sources, reconstruct arguments, compare traditions, and engage modernity with discipline.
What graduates will be able to do
- Read foundational and post-classical Arabic texts in the three Sunni traditions.
- Reconstruct and evaluate kalām arguments on their own internal terms.
- Move fluently between classical manṭiq and modern analytic logic.
- Engage Western philosophy from Plato to contemporary analytic thought.
- Respond to contemporary intellectual challenges through neo-kalām.
- Produce sustained scholarly writing across all three traditions.