English, Language, and Meaning

Teaching English from the Qurʾānic Worldview

All lectures are held at 11 am MST

Sunday, March 29, 2026

Lecture 1: Language as Divine Gift

Bayān, Meaning, and Responsibility

This lecture establishes the Qurʾānic foundations of language. Teachers explore bayān as a divine endowment, the moral weight of speech, and the Qurʾānic understanding of words as vehicles of truth, falsehood, remembrance, and forgetting.

Sunday, April 5, 2026

Lecture 2: Words, Worldview, and the Making of the Self

Narrative, Voice, and Identity

This lecture examines how modern literature and language instruction subtly form the student’s sense of “I”: autonomy, desire, alienation, or resistance. Teachers are guided to contrast secular narrative assumptions with the Qurʾānic self—addressed, accountable, purposeful.

Sunday, April 12, 2026

Lecture 3: Truth, Meaning, and Imagination

Against Relativism and Cynicism

This lecture addresses the modern crisis of meaning: irony, nihilism, and the reduction of truth to perspective. Teachers explore the Qurʾānic grounding of truth (ḥaqq), imagination as moral faculty, and the difference between ambiguity and meaninglessness.

Sunday, April 19, 2026

Lecture 4: Reading the World through Texts

Literature, Power, and Moral Law

This lecture situates literature within history, power, and moral consequence. Teachers are trained to help students read texts as products of particular moral worlds—colonial, industrial, secular—without flattening them into ideology.

Sunday, April 26, 2026

Lecture 5: Teaching English as an Islamic Language

From Skill Acquisition to Formation

The final lecture integrates the course into classroom practice. Teachers reflect on how lesson design, discussion questions, writing prompts, and assessment can reflect an Islamic worldview without preaching or dilution.