The Project

A living culture

This project shows the contemporary relevance of Islamic culture: its beauty, its links with the Mediterranean world, the influence it has exerted in Spain, Sicily and beyond. A world that is receding elsewhere — Riad Al-Uns keeps it alive in the present.

→ Full vision & mission

Neither madrasa nor college — a third way

Riad Al-Uns exists between two models that it refuses, each for a precise reason.

A madrasa forms through instruction (taʿlīm) — memorisation of the text, study of fiqh and tafsīr, transmission of religious knowledge while seated, mostly immobile, in a position of listening. It is an essential place in the Muslim world, but a place of the text, not of the gesture: the body remains largely silent there.

A Western college, by contrast, forms through the accumulation of secular knowledge and preparation for a diploma — without ever questioning what the philosopher Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas called the loss of adab: the joint discipline of body, soul and intellect. Al-Attas preferred, to the word taʿlīm (instruction) and the word tarbiya (rearing — a term, he notes, that applies equally to animals), the term taʾdīb: an education that inculcates adab, not merely knowledge.

It is this third way that the Riad takes. Neither memorisation alone, nor the accumulation of diplomas, but the formation of a malaka — a word that Ibn Khaldūn, in his Muqaddima (14th century), applies equally to crafts and to language, to faith and to art: a stable quality, acquired through the repetition of a gesture until its form takes root in the soul. Ibn Khaldūn does not distinguish the craft of the artisan from the virtue of the believer: both are acquired in the same way — through repeated practice, until it becomes second nature.

This is why Dar al-Hiraf teaches a craft with the hand, not only with the memory; why the five prayers structure the day instead of remaining a slot in a timetable; why the patio, the hammam, the shared table count as much as the study room. What the Riad forms is not merely an informed mind: it is a man whose character carries, in his very body, the mark of what he has learned.

Four pillars