Commencing a De-Pixelated Education

The 2021 Zaytuna College Commencement marked an important transition as, God willing, the last commencement of the College’s remote period. It was a fond and heartfelt farewell to the BA and MA graduates, recognizing the difficulties that they endured as virtual learning overtook their usual collaborative model. As President Hamza Yusuf aptly put it, “Our graduating class today persisted through the challenge of learning online, and you made it. You persevered, and you kept your heads down in the books as well as your eyes up listening and conferring with our teachers on these pixelated screens of your computers. The pandemic, it seems, has caused all of us to become a little pixelated.” He drew a contrast between this unplanned transition and the usual dialectic classroom experience, explaining that “the education we have attempted to offer you here at Zaytuna is designed to help you experience the profound pleasures of deep study.” Despite the challenges and uncertainties, the class of 2021 carried forward, with excellence, the techniques that had been instilled in them at the start of their Zaytuna journey. President Yusuf congratulated them on this achievement and prayed for their continued success. In her commencement address, the inimitable Dr. Eva Brann—who has represented St. John’s College for more than sixty years as arguably one of the greatest revivers of the liberal arts in the modern age—spoke on the importance of learning. She explained to the graduates, “You’re a certified candidate for admission to a life of learning. For learning, being educated, is one of those strange experiential activities. The more you engage in it, the more of it you’re ready for. The more you’ve learned, the more you both want to and are prepared to learn.”

She spoke on the nature of a liberal education and shared lessons from her own extraordinary life, recounting her arrival in America as a Jewish refugee from Germany, whose first language was German. Underscoring the importance of the trivium, she related her experience of learning English grammar and drew a parable from the deceptive simplicity of the verb “to be.” She highlighted the contrast of “to be,” which is both “the most colorless… the merest auxiliary or copula, and the most determinative and selfsufficient of all the words in the world.” Dr. Brann instructed students about the value of asking questions, distinguishing between questions that reflect the sincere search for truth and those that do not. She explained how “questionasking should be, and is primarily, an act of care, even of love.” Such Dr. Eva Brann gave the commencement address to earnest questioning, she Zaytuna’s class of 2021. explained, is inherently different from the quasiaggression that presents itself as “questioning everything.” “Not only is Zaytuna a true college of liberal education, but it is also faith-based,” she concluded. “Though its intellect is gathered from all the world, its soul is Islamic. And finally, in normal times, it is a living community. Face-toface and tangible.” The great scholar’s encouragement of Zaytuna’s graduates, students, faculty, and staff was palpable even through the lens that pixelated the ceremony. A commencement is both the end of something and the beginning of another; this year, that was so not only for the graduating students but for all of Zaytuna College as it emerges from remote learning de-pixelated—and perhaps, even, with a heightened awareness of the real. d