Zaytuna College, a Muslim liberal arts college located in Berkeley, California, is unique among Islamic institutions. It is simultaneously a Muslim institute of higher education and one that aspires to find a place in American academia. These two aspects, the American and the Islamic, are what quintessentially shape Zaytuna, including its function and its religious outlook.

Hamza Yusuf, a white American convert to Islam, founded it in 1996 as Zaytuna Institute—named after the famous Tunisian madrasa—in nearby Hayward, California, with the help of Hesham Alalusi, a businessman and philanthropist from Iraq who had settled in California. A physical building was established in 1998, and the early years of Zaytuna were devoted to offering classes and lectures to the Muslim community in the San Francisco Bay Area. As Yusuf and the institution grew in prominence it attracted a number of Muslim activists and educators to its programmes, and the scope of its activities grew. An imām training programme was inaugurated in 2004, and in 2008 the transition to a four-year liberal arts curriculum began, with a move into its current buildings in Berkeley and Zaytuna College's first graduating class beginning in 2010.

Zaytuna College, under the leadership of Yusuf and Imam Zaid Shakir, a black American convert and Muslim scholar, is oriented toward the spread of knowledge of Islam and Islamic tradition, self-consciously within an American context. As a Muslim institution led by American Muslims, it seeks to create a space for Muslims and Islam within the religious and educational landscape of America. Its leaders’ Americanness, as native converts, plays a large role in Zaytuna's acclimation of Islam to the American setting, a setting in which both Yusuf and Shakir are at home.

Hamza Yusuf

Hamza Yusuf was born Mark Hanson in Washington state in 1958. His family moved to northern California soon after, and he spent his childhood in Berkeley. His family was Christian—his father Irish Catholic and his mother Greek Orthodox—and he received education in both traditions as a child.

Yusuf converted to Islam in 1977, after a period of religious reflection that followed being seriously injured in a car accident. He became acquainted with some members of the Shādhilīyah Sufiorder in California, who encouraged him toward Sufism.