A good teacher is hard to find. A good religious teacher is harder still. A few years ago, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Suspect No. 1 in the Boston Marathon bombing, wanted to learn more about Islam. He’d been arrested on a domestic-abuse charge and his boxing career was faltering; maybe he thought religion would help. Who was his teacher? His uncle and former brother-in-law say it was a family friend named Mikhail Allakhverdov. “Somehow, he just took his brain,” the uncle says. But Allakhverdov denies it: “If I had been his teacher, I would have made sure he never did anything like this,” he told Christian Caryl last month.

A good teacher is hard to find, but it’s easier when there are good institutions where you can look for one. Back in 2000, a Catholic nun named Marianne Farina noticed a gap in the world of religious higher education. She issued a challenge to her friend, a forty-two-year-old Muslim teacher named Sheikh Hamza Yusuf. “You’re one-fourth of the world’s population. Where are the Muslim colleges?” she asked. “You need to do it.” Yusuf, an Irish-American convert who wears horn-rimmed glasses and a Vandyke beard, is perhaps the most influential Islamic scholar in the Western world, and he took Sister Farina’s question seriously. Three years ago, in Berkeley, California, he joined with Imam Zaid Shakir, an tall, slender Oakland-born black convert whose influence rivals Yusuf’s, and a Muslim academic named Dr. Hatem Bazian to found Zaytuna College, the first Muslim liberal-arts college in the United States. (Zaytuna is Arabic for olive tree.) In his new book, “Light Without Fire,” the religion writer Scott Korb followed Zaytuna’s inaugural class of fifteen students through their first year, and his reporting reveals one of the most intriguing recent American experiments in providing a religious education.

An early motto of Zaytuna’s was “Where Islam Meets America,” and in many respects Yusuf and Shakir are perfect emissaries for that meeting—in their own ways, they’re all-American guys, and they speak in an American vernacular. Their struggle is always primarily for Islamic ideals, but they think American ideals are also worth struggling for, and that in some important ways it’s the same struggle. Both America and Islam, they’d argue, strive to be cosmopolitan and egalitarian societies that place a high value on equal access to justice and religious freedom. Yusuf offers particular praise for Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr., whose civil disobedience he calls “the essence of Islam.” Yusuf has called America “the best model we have to have a multi-faith, multicultural society,” and that he sees the roots for such a society in the historical example of “conviviality in the Muslim world.”

Zaytuna’s curriculum is modelled on the Great Books Program, a style Yusuf grew up with—born Mark Hanson, and raised in Northern California by academic parents, he was named after Mark Van Doren, a champion of the Great Books approach. He converted to Islam in 1977, after nearly dying in a car crash, and subsequently spent ten years training with leading Muslim scholars in the Middle East and North and West Africa. When he returned to California, he earned degrees in English, religious studies, and nursing, and he’s currently pursing a Ph.D. in Islamic studies at U.C. Berkeley. His writings and lectures are peppered with references to Goethe and Auden and Frost, James Madison and Patrick Henry, Dante and Plato, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. He recites not just the Koran but also Shelley and Yeats from memory. Shakir, Zaytuna’s other star founder, likewise converted to Islam in 1977, while serving in the Air Force; he was the first American to graduate from Abu Nour University, a famed seminary in Syria, and he also holds American degrees in international relations and political science. Zaytuna’s course offerings increasingly reflect the founders’ wide-ranging interests—American history, logic, rhetoric, ethics, anthropology, composition, poetry—but all of it, Korb told me, “inflected by Islam.” For Yusuf, Korb writes, Zaytuna’s liberal-arts curriculum “is part of a larger ambition to bring the sacred knowledge he gained throughout the Muslim world into conversation with classical texts of the Western tradition.”

Yusuf and Shakir can be highly critical of America—its permissiveness, its foreign policy in the Middle East, its attitude toward Muslims—but they’re also quick to say that in some ways, Muslims have it a lot better here than they would in certain Muslim-majority countries. (One exception is American public education, which Yusuf bitterly opposes, insisting that it ignores “basic human decency” and produces “no more than functional literates.” “If you want a fatwa from me,” he said at an event in 2011, “I really consider it prohibited by Islamic law to send a child to public school in this country.”) And they often draw on their own American experiences in the classroom: Shakir as a black American and a child of the civil-rights movement, and Yusuf as a descendent of Irish Catholic immigrants who were abused by Nativists in Philadelphia in the eighteen-forties—but who responded, as Korb puts it, “by building churches and schools as a way to create safe institutions that would eventually serve the entire community.” And they have; as the Times reported last year, American Catholic colleges have seen a marked increase in Muslim students over the past decade.

So far, Zaytuna’s focus is on the Muslim community; the student body, now thirty-one students, is a hundred per cent Muslim, as is the faculty, and Korb says he doesn’t see that changing anytime soon. But it’s not a seminary or madrasah; the goal isn’t to train imams, but, as at any liberal-arts school, to give the students an education that will serve them in whatever career they choose. All the students are American citizens or longtime permanent residents—California and Michigan are most heavily represented—and as racially diverse as American Islam itself, with a large proportion of African-Americans. They dress pretty much like students at any explicitly religious American school, in a style you could call modern modest, topped off with hijabs for most of the women and kufis for some of the men. There’s no requirement to be religiously observant, but, in Korb’s experience, all the students are. Zaytuna is a convivial place, and the male and female students socialize freely and gather often, but it’s no party school. The tuition, at eleven thousand dollars a year, is well below average for a private four-year college, and the students are well aware that their education is largely made possible by donations from Muslims around the country who believe in Zaytuna’s experiment—and they feel keenly the pressure of the donors’ expectations.

Some of the students have already earned bachelor’s or even master’s degrees from other schools. Whatever its other merits, the school’s main draw is the chance to study with Yusuf and Shakir. To their Muslim students, many of whom grew up seeing Yusuf and Shakir speak to rapturous crowds at Muslim gatherings across the U.S. and Canada, they’re celebrities, even saints, and around Zaytuna, Korb writes, there’s a certain “longing for the scholars, a strange covetousness that you don’t find at other liberal arts schools.” Yusuf in particular is often referred to as a “rock star” by his admirers; he’s the headliner of any bill he’s on. His appeal among his followers, Korb writes, “is rooted in the way he argues against Islamic violence and in favor of Islamic mercy.” Shakir’s teachings tend to emphasize social justice, particularly as it relates to poverty and racism. Both derive their authority among Muslims by basing their arguments in their deep knowledge of Sharia law. But despite their renown among Western believers, “if you’re not Muslim you probably don’t know who they are,” Korb says. “And even if you do, the knowledge they possess that professors at other liberal arts schools don’t is sacred knowledge.”