The American Learning Institute for Muslims, founded in 1998, is an organization dedicated to promoting the healthy and religiously sound development of American Muslim individuals, families and society. According to its website, it does this through the promotion of Islamic literacy — the establishing and critically engaging with both the intellectual and spiritual foundations of Islam.
Through dialogue, it bridges the textual and historical traditions of Islam and the daily realities — sociopolitical and cultural — of American Muslims.
Ubaydullah Evans is ALIM’s executive director and its first scholar-in-residence. He’ll continue the Week Seven Interfaith Lecture Series theme of “Wonder and Awe — Reverence as a Response to the World” when he speaks at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy.
Evans converted to Islam while in high school, going on to study its foundational texts while simultaneously pursuing an undergraduate degree in journalism at Columbia University.
Since then, he has studied at Chicagoland’s Institute of Islamic Education, in Tarim, Yemen, and Al-Azhar University in Cairo, where he was the first African American to graduate from its Shari’a program.
Among ALIM’s programs are a book club, a lecture and conversation series titled “Frames,” and a three-week summer intensive, for which Evans is core instructor, teaching courses on the history of Islamic law, Shama’il, and aphorisms of Ibn Ata’illah, among others.
In his work, particularly with students, Evans tries to empower people to contribute to their communities and shape the future of the Muslim community in the United States.
“Not everybody will feel compelled to be a religious scholar, but everybody should feel compelled to do something in their capacity, as an expression of their individual talents, that seeks to give victory to Islam in America,” he said at the annual Ivy Muslim Conference at Yale University last fall.
There, he encouraged religious literacy, and creating “modalities of being that are authentically Islamic and fit within the world you live.” He advised his audience that to improve their relationships with God, that relationship should be viewed as a “covenant of love” rather than transactional.
At an Eid banquet, also at Yale, in 2015, Evans told attendees to “embrace nuance” in their faith and in life.
“Don’t look for cookie-cutter black-and-white answers,” he said. “Fundamentalism, of which there are all kinds, appeals to the youthful desire to know what’s right and what’s wrong. Prepare for life full of gray. Stay away from generalizations and absolutism.”
From the core tenets of his faith, to how to live those tenets authentically in everyday life, Evans work touches on a wide array of topics. In a 2021 podcast interview with Oludamini Ogunnaike for Renovatio, the journal of Zaytuna College, Evans discussed — in a word — beauty. The two talked about the quiddity of beauty, beauty as it relates to a fuller understanding of God and the correlation between beauty and spiritual maturity.
“The Islamic requirement (when creating art),” Evans said, “is that your work be excellent.”
