Suhba Essentials
Dates: October 2024 - June 2025
Join Al-Madina’s global spiritual community where you’ll find solace, strength, and the tools to face today’s challenges with unwavering spiritual and intellectual fortitude.
Under the guidance of Shaykh Mokhtar Maghraoui, our Suhba Essentials Program offers a unique curriculum blending spiritual fellowship, essential knowledge, and practical character transformation. Embrace the journey of inside-out change with Suhba Essentials.
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Overview
Why Suhba Essentials?
To change inside-out, connect experientially with Allah and His Messenger ﷺ, find solace and strength in a global spiritual community, and gain spiritual and intellectual fortitude to face the challenges of today’s world.
What is the Suhba Essentials Program?
A curriculum of spiritual fellowship (suhba), essential knowledge (‘ilm), and practical character transformation (‘amal and akhlaq) designed and supervised by Shaykh Mokhtar Maghraoui.
How do I change inside-out and connect experientially with Allah and His Messenger ﷺ?
By studying everything within an envelope of purification of the soul (tazkiya al-nafs), diving into your inner world and understanding what limits your spiritual potential, cultivating beautiful inner character, and learning to practice what you learn, step-by-step, with consistency.
How do I find solace and strength in a global spiritual community?
By a pedagogy of fellowship (suhba) with both teachers and students, sharing and learning from each other’s reflections and life-experiences, group remembrance circles, personal one-on-one mentoring, and year-round opportunities in Istanbul for in-person study and fellowship.
How do I gain spiritual and intellectual fortitude to face the challenges of today’s world?
By nurturing your SQ (spiritual intelligence quotient), learning the spiritual and rational principles of Islam and applying them to real-life case-studies, and cultivating an ethic founded on experiential and rational certainty (yaqin).
The Subha Essentials’ Curriculum
The curriculum has many program offerings, each realizing the following:
- Knowledge (‘Ilm)
- Practical Character Transformation (‘Amal and Akhlaq)
- Fellowship (Suhba)
Customize Your Own Program!
Students should begin with three foundational elements, and then may add other classes depending on their interest, time and commitments.
The three foundational elements are:
- Seven Core Knowledge modules [Essential]
- The weekly Fellowship and Practice (F&P) class [Highly Recommended]
- The weekly Journey Through the Qur’an with Shaykh Mokhtar and the Family Remembrance Circle [Recommended]
Program Offerings
The full program offering includes the following:
There are seven Core Knowledge modules that provide necessary, beneficial and practical knowledge for Muslims living in modern times.
Each module is a total of ten hours, or two hours a week for four to five weeks.
They are:
- Tazkiya al-Nafs (Purification of the Self)
- Usul al-Fiqh wa al-Maqasid (Legal Theory and the Objectives of the Law)
- al-Haqiqa al-Muhammadiyya (On the Realities of the Messenger ﷺ)
- Tafsir (Qur’anic Exegesis)
- ’Aqida (Islamic Theology)
- Hadith (Prophetic Tradition)
- The inner and Outer Dimensions of the Fiqh (Law) of Worship
The aim of the F&P class is to contextualize the class material, listen to summary-reflections from students, and learn and gradually practice a daily litany of devotional remembrance.
The F&P class is weekly for an hour.
In the Journey Through the Qur’an, Shaykh Mokhtar shares timeless Qur’anic spiritual wisdoms that give us purpose and direction in in our day-to-day life. This is followed by the Family Remembrance Circle where we read the Qur’an and the evening remembrance (dhikr) together, and listen to spiritual poetry.
This is weekly for 1.5 hours.
There are seven Advanced Elective modules which correspond to the themes of the seven Core modules.
Each module is a total of ten hours, or two hours a week for four to five weeks.
They are:
- Divine Mindfulness (Muraqaba)
- The Ethics of Disagreement
- The Virtues of Sending Blessings upon the Messenger ﷺ
- The Principles of Exegesis
- A Study of al-Fiqh al-Akbar by Imam Abu Hanifa
- The Historicity and Preservation of Hadith
The History of Islam through the Abbasid Caliphate
One-on-one mentoring sessions are available throughout the year with teachers and staff.
In every module, there will be a general fellowship check-in session with one of the teachers for both brothers and sisters, as well as a session dedicated only for sisters.
Applied-Learning Seminars are a series of innovative, practical seminars on eight themes that apply Islam’s rational and spiritual principles to specific life challenges.
The eight themes are:
- Growth and Productivity
- Setting the Record Straight
- Family and Youth
- Education and History
- Society and Technology
- Art and Aesthetics
- Activism and Politics
- Travel and Nature
Potential topics include:
Why and How to learn: A Framework for True Islamic Education
Wa al-’Asr: Principles of Time Management
A Strong Mu’min: The Sunna of Exercise and Nutrition
The Rites of Passage into Manhood and Womanhood
Marriage: A Union of Souls
Sacred Resonances: Islam, Nature and the Environment
Inviting to an Inhabited House: Principles of Da‘wa
The Seminary Program
Students who wish to continue their studies after completing Suhba Essentials may apply to the Seminary Program.
Suhba Essentials is the first year of the five-year Seminary Program.
For more information on the Seminary Program, please click here.
FAQs
Admissions
Everyone. The Essentials program offers three flexible learning streams. One can be a self-paced/audit student and take any course, anytime, without evaluation. Or a student may enroll in one of two certification tracks with evaluation requirements.
The program commitment depends on which stream a student chooses. Overall the time commitment may range between 4 hours per month to 8 hours per week.
Yes, commitment and maturity. Younger students — such as teenagers —who fulfil this criteria may enroll.
There are no mandatory prerequisites. A student may do whichever course he or she likes (if not seeking certification).
Program Related
Yes, many. The Essentials program is a combination of knowledge, action, fellowship and applied learning. And each field of the four above has multiple ways to realize its objectives.
Each module contains a summary of decades of study of countless classical and modern texts. The intent of the Essentials program is not to restrict the student to one text per course, but for the student to acquire essential knowledge necessary for intellectual and spiritual development in a modern context. That said, many modules will provide core and supplementary readings.
Yes, if you wish to pursue a certification stream. You will need to attend or watch the courses, complete weekly summaries, and pass the assessments. You may pursue a certificate for the Core modules only or both the Core and Advances modules.
The fiqh module will likely be taught through one madhhab with select discussion of other views.
Committed, actively engaged students will continue to have access to the class recordings, through our course platform, at the close of the academic year for as long as the Essentials program exists in an online format.
This on-demand version of the course will include the class recordings and will not include student support and access to various live, interactive elements — which will cease at the close of the yearly program.
Suhba Essentials is a standalone foundational program. But, Suhba Essentials is also the first year of the five-year Suhba Seminary Program as well. For more information on the Suhba Seminary, please click here: www.suhbaseminary.com.
Orientation: Sunday, October 6th, 2024
First class: Monday, October 7th, 2024
Final session: Sunday, June 15th, 2025
Dates to be announced shortly
Class Related
Classes will be a combination of synchronous and asynchronous learning.
The weekly Core Module and the Advanced Elective classes will mostly be taught live. Other live classes will include: the Fellowship & Practice (FP) class, the Weekly Remembrance Sessions, the Mentoring Sessions, and the Applied Learning Seminars (ALS).
Recordings of live sessions will be posted between 2-3 days after the conclusion of live sessions.
Students will also have access to:
One-on-one mentoring with the teachers
The ability to send class-related and general life questions or ask them live to the teachers
Access to a reflection group with their fellow students and teachers
Access to a brothers or sisters Suhba group.
All classes are recorded and made available on the Suhba Essentials course page for students to watch and review the material at their convenience.
Recorded classes will be posted between 2-3 days after the live class.
In-person attendance (from abroad or those living in Istanbul) will be subject to space availability and an additional On-Site Application process.
Students may attend the live current year Core Module or Advanced Elective classes, the Weekly Remembrance sessions, and other on-site activities that take place throughout the year.
More details coming soon.
Program Logistics
October 6th, 2024
$2500
The Suhba Essentials Application Form includes the option to request sponsorship, ie: financial aid, Please click here
No student will be rejected on the basis of financial reasons.
Full refunds will be provided to those that request it up until after the first class on October 7th, 2024. No refunds will be provided thereafter.
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Yes. The tuition for the first student registering from a given household is $2,500 USD. Each additional student registering from the same household is an additional $500 USD until a cap of $4,000 USD is reached for 4+ students from a single household.