The other classroom: Returning to sacred knowledge

Why some doctors, lawyers and other professionals are turning to Darul Qasim in Chicago to rediscover Islamic scholarship.

xwhatsapp-strokecopylinkgoogleAdd Al Jazeera on GoogleinfoChicago, Illinois - The breathing machine was too loud for the dying man's son to hear his father's final words.

Tariq Lateef held the phone to his patient's mouth anyway. When the words disappeared beneath the mechanical hiss, Lateef repeated them himself, sentence by sentence, into the speaker. Although the son arrived before his father died, by the time he did, his father was no longer conscious.

The moment stayed with Lateef.

Six months earlier, he had cared for the man's wife through the same illness, helping the family reach the decision that allowed her to die peacefully at home. Now the husband had reached the same point. He was exhausted. The treatments keeping him alive had become the very thing preventing him from saying goodbye.

Lateef, 40, did everything medicine had trained him to do. Afterwards, he says, he "felt so inadequate" trying to understand the role of the physician when death could no longer be postponed.

It wasn't simply that he wanted better answers. He wanted to understand the problem itself.

What is medicine actually for? What makes a death good? Who gets to decide?

Lateef is a hospice and palliative care physician, yet the longer he has practised, the more he has found himself reaching beyond the limits of everything he has been taught.

He began pulling at the foundations beneath modern medical ethics.

"At the application level, it felt very sophisticated, but when you trace back to what all of this rests on? It felt very flimsy, honestly."

One seminar has never left him. Academics debated whether monkeys have more right to live than human babies because of their greater perceptual capacity.

"That's what happens when you get too abstract," he says. "That is not how normal human beings think."

The search took him somewhere unexpected. It began with a chance conversation about Islamic bioethics. At a conference at the University of Chicago, he listened to Dr Aasim Padela move effortlessly between clinical medicine and Islamic thought.

"It was the first time, honestly, in my life that I felt like this is someone who's whole," Lateef recalls. "He didn't sound like someone who was just throwing out disconnected Islamic terms. It just felt so whole."

The lecture answered one uncertainty, and it exposed another. If this knowledge existed, why had it taken him so long to find it?

Lateef often describes himself as someone with "a million-dollar education". But another thought had been troubling him long before he ever walked into that lecture hall.

"If Allah gave me life to 80 or 100," he says, "I wouldn't even be able to understand the Quran."

For years, he had lived with what felt like two separate educations. One had taught him how to become a physician. The other, he feared, had barely begun.

At the time, he was finishing his residency and fellowship training in Ohio. He moved to Chicago with his wife, intentionally choosing the city so he could pursue both bioethics and Islamic studies. Their children were born there. To support his growing family, he took a job as a hospice and palliative care physician while enrolling in the Saturday programme at the Darul Qasim religious college and starting a master’s programme in bioethics at Northwestern University.

He hadn't expected the two educations to meet. "To my surprise," he says, "it all came together here.

"I no longer had to check my Muslim hat at the door of the hospital. Knowledge is wherever Allah places it. But I needed an Islamically rooted framework first, so that I can continue to learn."

Tucked between office parks and chain restaurants in the Chicago suburb of Hoffman Estates, Darul Qasim occupies a low-rise building. There is little to suggest from the outside why people like Lateef uproot their lives to study here.

A gold plaque on one corridor wall bears the name of Mawlana Mohammed Qasim Nanautavi, the 19th-century scholar who founded the Islamic seminary Darul Uloom Deoband under British colonial rule in India. He built schools at a time when many Muslims feared their scholarly tradition would disappear.

Beside the plaque, a wrought-iron willow tree spreads across the wall. In folklore, a willow is said to signal water beneath the ground. To Shaykh Mohammed Amin Kholwadia, Darul Qasim's founder, the tree is an allegory of the college itself.

"Water being knowledge," he says, "and the explorer being the student of knowledge looking for water." Every classroom in the building bears the name of a scholar. None bears the name of Kholwadia. That omission is deliberate.

Kholwadia, who grew up in the United Kingdom before moving to Chicago in 1984, studied at seminaries in India and Pakistan under senior scholars of Islamic law, theology and theosophy. He sees his work as part of an intellectual lineage that runs through Nanautavi, though not as a replication of it.

Chicago was a natural place to build the college, he says, both because he was already there and because the city had become a hub for Muslim life and institutions unlike almost anywhere else in the United States, so much so, he jokes, that some call it "Chicago Sharif."

But the choice of city was only part of it. Kholwadia was also thinking about what an Islamic seminary in contemporary America should be.

He speaks quietly, often pausing before answering.

"We have a philosophy that is broader than the original philosophy because the times are different," he says.

The role of the scholar, he argues, was once far broader than leading prayers or teaching children the Quran. Historically, Islamic scholars advised rulers, shaped legal and ethical thought, and helped guide public life. Colonisation, he says, steadily narrowed that role until it was largely confined to the mosque.

Noman Zaheer, the college's director of outreach, sees that broader philosophy as an attempt to rebuild something he believes was broken.

Zaheer's office looks like any administrator's: a red desk cluttered with pens and a water bottle, a nameplate reading "Hafiz Noman Zaheer", a whiteboard behind it crowded with travel dates scrawled in marker. A small prayer rug sits folded in a corner near the window. As he speaks, a student stands across the desk with folded arms, listening quietly.

He says Darul Qasim is trying to reclaim that broader vision of scholarship.

"We're not only raising the bar," he says. "We're re-establishing the bar that's been lost on defining what a scholar is and who should be representing Islam in the context we live in today."

Founded by Kholwadia in 2000, Darul Qasim offers both traditional seminary programmes and graduate degrees, including a master's degree in Islamic law and theology rooted entirely in the classical Islamic tradition. Students entering the master's programme are expected to have already completed years of advanced study in the foundational Islamic sciences before they are admitted.

For Kholwadia, Darul Qasim's distinctiveness lies both in what it teaches and where it is teaching it.

"He was responding to colonial power," he says of Nanautavi. "We are in the superpower."

The idea isn't difficult to spot in the classroom.

One of Lateef's Saturday morning lessons opens with a study of Surah Baqarah, the Quran's longest chapter.

On one desk sits a copy of Tafsir al-Jalalayn, a 15th-century Quranic commentary. Beside it lies Turabian's Manual for Writers, the style guide familiar to generations of American graduate students.

The discussion moves easily between classical Quranic exegesis and the present day, touching on constitutional law, philosophy, medical ethics and the ordinary dilemmas of contemporary life.

This, Lateef says, is what convinced him he hadn't stumbled across another seminary.

"In science, there's usually one correct answer," he says. "In Islamic studies, the teacher is a guide who helps you acquire the tools to reason and think for yourself."

This summer, he is completing a thesis he could never have imagined writing five years ago. Its title sounds academic: The Ontology of Medicine from a Prophetic Lens.

Its question is simple: What is medicine?

Lateef is not the only student who arrived with an impressive education and the feeling that something was still missing.

Mariam Rahman chose Darul Qasim over a doctorate after earning a master's degree in Islamic studies from the University of Chicago.

Her university training had taught her how to examine the Islamic tradition, she says, but not necessarily how to think from within it.

"My Western academic training did not necessarily equip me with the tools to meaningfully confront Islamophobic assumptions. Rather, it perpetuated them, whether in scholarly works or in conversations with students and professors."

What she found at Darul Qasim was something she describes as more durable: confidence in the depth and integrity of the tradition itself. In many respects, she says, the intellectual conversations at Darul Qasim have been more demanding than what she encountered at the University of Chicago.

Then there's Ayesha Mohsin. She travelled from Melbourne after searching unsuccessfully for comparable opportunities to pursue advanced Islamic scholarship as a woman in Australia, through online programmes and in Muslim-majority countries. At Darul Qasim, she found what she had been looking for: rigorous, in-person study alongside established scholars.

Female and male enrolment at the college is roughly equal, according to the administration. Mohsin happened to be one of only a few women in her advanced class that term because relatively few students, male or female, continue into the most demanding levels of study.

At first, being one of only a handful of women in the room unsettled her. Shy by nature, she was accustomed to rehearsing questions silently rather than speaking them aloud.

"I've come to realise that it was a blessing in disguise," she says. "It forced me to open up, speak up in class discussions and benefit from my teachers in a way I probably missed out on in many classes throughout the years due to my shy and timid nature."

If Darul Qasim's classrooms are where ideas are tested, its leaders say the real measure of success lies outside them.

For Lateef, that meant returning to the hospital.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, he was the only palliative care physician at his hospital, caring for an overwhelming number of patients nearing the end of their lives. Faced with ethical questions his medical training had never fully prepared him for, he turned to Darul Qasim's Al-Amin Ethics Institute, a network of Muslim professionals and scholars working through contemporary ethical dilemmas.

Together they developed an Islamic framework for end-of-life care, thinking beyond treatment alone: How should dignity be protected? When does preserving life become prolonging suffering? What does compassion require?

Lateef later presented the work at a medical journal club.

Two nurse practitioners told him they planned to adapt parts of the assessment framework for cognitively impaired patients. A local pastor said the approach was both coherent and practical.

For Zaheer, moments like these matter more than institutional milestones.

The hope, he says, is to help graduates find space in places where ideas shape public life.

"Change comes through academia, research publications, think tanks that will influence lobbies that will be funded and that will become law."

Its leaders are also careful not to overstate what has been achieved.

Asked how he will know the model is working, Kholwadia doesn't point to enrolment figures or new buildings.

Instead, he imagines graduates serving as advisers to lawmakers, expert witnesses in federal courts and scholars able to contribute confidently to the societies they already inhabit.

"At the moment, we're not there yet."

Kholwadia hopes the institution will one day become a fully fledged Islamic university.

For now, Darul Qasim remains a small institution with big ambitions.

Darul Qasim's influence extends beyond its own classrooms through scholars who now teach and lead communities across the Chicago area.

For Imam Haroon Ahmed, a graduate of the college who now serves as director of Islamic affairs at the Islamic Foundation, overseeing its mosque and school, the impact is measured through individual lives rather than institutional reach. Much of his development as a scholar and imam, he says, was shaped and tested during his years at Masjid Uthman and Uthman Academy, a mosque and Islamic school serving Chicago's western suburbs.

After Jummah, the Friday congregational prayer, Ahmed remains in the prayer hall at the Islamic Foundation as most of the community files towards the doors. A handful of people, young and old, stay behind near the front. Some settle onto the carpet, backs against the wall, phones facedown beside them. Others linger at the edge of the gathering before eventually stepping forward. As the hall empties and grows quiet, those with the most personal questions often wait until everyone else has left before they speak.

Since Israel's genocidal war on Gaza began on October 7, 2023, the external pressures have been, in Ahmed's words, real: heightened scrutiny, emotional volatility, strong expectations pulling from multiple directions. What concerned Ahmed most was not his own steadiness but what was happening to the young people in his community. They were absorbing narratives of suffering and injustice in real time through social media and school corridors and dinner table arguments while simultaneously trying to answer questions about who they were.

The conversations often returned to the same themes: Why is there evil and suffering in the world? Why do Muslims endure hardship if they believe they are following the true path? Am I primarily American or Muslim?

The conversations often returned to the same themes: Why is there evil and suffering in the world? Why do Muslims endure hardship if they believe they are following the true path? Am I primarily American or Muslim?

"These conversations became especially pressing when many young people were wrestling not only with theology but with belonging and moral clarity."

His instinct is not to answer immediately.

Instead, he says, his years at Darul Qasim taught him to slow the conversation down, locate each dilemma inside a tradition of thinking, and encourage reflection rather than reactionary responses.

He calls it "internal immunity". That's not immunity from hostility but from allowing hostility to dictate who you become.

"The only true vulnerability is stagnation," he says.

When Ahmed explains where that instinct comes from, he traces an intellectual lineage stretching back centuries.

It begins with Shah Waliullah al-Dihlawi, the 18th-century Delhi scholar who argued that revelation, ethics, law and human welfare were never separate disciplines but parts of the same moral whole. His ideas have shaped Islamic scholars from Nanautavi to Kholwadia.

And Ahmed believes they continue to shape the students filling Darul Qasim's classrooms today.

Lateef still spends his days where he always has: beside people whose lives are drawing to a close.

Death has not become any less complicated. Families still wrestle with impossible decisions. Patients still seek answers that medicine alone cannot settle.

The difference, he says, is that those questions no longer leave him feeling untethered.

"There must be a knowledge source beyond what can be originated from human capacity," he says. "A suprarationality that helps shape our rationality."

For years, Lateef feared he might spend a lifetime mastering one body of knowledge while remaining a stranger to another.

That fear has not disappeared entirely, but now it has somewhere to go.

Every Saturday, he makes the drive to suburban Chicago, joining doctors, lawyers, teachers and students who have all arrived carrying versions of the same unease: the sense that the education that made them successful had left another education untouched.

This time, he is not making the journey alone.