Bismillah:
photo: Gibraltar
As I run towards the finish line, my M.A. in Liberal Arts I recall my very first class I was given a list of 20 books. I thought my advisor was joking. I told him that I have never read 20 books for my undergrad in Geology. He smiled and said, “You will get used to it.”
I was told that with liberal arts education I will learn how to read, write, and think on another level. I was exposed to the Western thought with some sprinkling of the Eastern philosophies and religions.
Here and now, I think about great books series in the Islamic thought. The revival of knowledge through books in the Muslim world as it was done via Darul Hikmah. I think of the permanent faculty of a Muslim liberal arts school. I know Zaytuna had published a list of prominent Muslim scholars throughout the Islamic history for Tabari College.
How great is the depth of knowledge and scope of wisdom in the work of Sa’di Shirazi, Ghazali, Tabari, Subki, Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Maududi, Ibn Taymiyya, Nujaym, Rumi, Iqbal, Ghalib, Farahi, Islahi, etc.
Lets continue to read, write, speak, think, and give a vision until either we are inspired or we inspire others to do great work.
Faraz
Thomas Aquinas College:
on Liberal Arts
The term “liberal arts” is commonly used when discussing the kind of learning that characterizes the education of men and women suited to the privileges and obligations of a free society. But exactly what those arts are may not be so well known. The liberal arts are indispensable means for exercising the power of thinking and for gaining access to the intellectual tradition of civilization. They are traditionally divided as follows:
The Trivium (“the three ways”)
The Quadrivium (“the four ways”)
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“The liberal arts are not merely indispensable; they are unavoidable. Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant, undeveloped one, or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining. The question, in short, is whether he will be a poor liberal artist or a good one.
The liberal artist learns to read, write, speak, listen, understand, and think. He learns to reckon, measure, and manipulate matter, quantity, and motion in order to predict, produce and exchange. As we live in the tradition, whether we know it or not, so we are all liberal artists, whether we know it or not. We all practice the liberal arts, well or badly, all the time every day. As we should understand the tradition as well as we can in order to understand ourselves, so we should be as good liberal artists as we can in order to become as fully human as we can.”
– Robert Maynard Hutchins, former president of the University of Chicago
Permanent Faculty for a Western Liberal Arts College:
(How many names do you recognize?)
Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus, Euripides, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Archimedes, Plato, Euclid, DeKoninck, Fabre, Aristotle, Galen, Harvey, Linnaeus, Driesch, Gould, Marler, Tinbergen, Virchow, von Frisch, Porphyry, Vergil, Lucretius, Plutarch, Tacitus, Epictetus, St Augustine, Boethius, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Martin, Horace, Galileo Galilei, Cicero, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Apollonius, Kepler, Avogadro, Dalton, Gay-Lussac, Berthollet, Couper, Lavoisier, Mendeleev, Richter, Wollaston, Cannizzaro, Empedocles, Heraclitus, St. Athanasius, St. Anselm, St. John Damascene, Cervantes, William Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Bacon, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Lang, Santayana, Millay, Montaigne, Pascal, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Swift, Gibbon, Corneille, Racine, Rousseau, Spinoza, Vico, Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Smith, de Tocqueville, Douglas, Mozart, Viete, Descartes, St. Thomas Aquinas, Griffin, Frege, Newton, Tolstoy, Leibniz, Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Feuerbach, Malthus, Marx, Engels, Darwin, Mendel, Nietzsche, Twain, Austen, James, Freud, Jung, Abraham Lincoln, Newman, Melville, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski, Eliot, St. Pius X, Leo XIII, Pius XI, Pius XII, Taylor, Dedekind, Lobachevski, Einstein, Huygens, Maxwell, Gilbert, Ampere
