Earlier this month, Zaytuna College, a private nonprofit located in Berkeley, California, became the first accredited Muslim college in America. The college, which has about 50 undergraduate enrollees, will now be able to offer federal financial aid, although the college says that most Zaytuna students receive private donations and grants.

In its catalog, the college makes clear that it wants to bring back the classic liberal arts and Great Books traditions: “Many great American scholars and thinkers have lamented the decline of the liberal arts in the West and committed themselves to a revival of liberal education. Their vision endures today in religious and secular institutions such as Thomas Aquinas College, St. John’s College, Columbia University, Shimer College, Williams College, and Bard College. Zaytuna is the first Muslim college to join the movement.”

Among other stringent academic requirements, students must take five years of Arabic, memorize the Koran, study formal logic, rhetoric, math, and science over multiple semesters, read literary classics, and become familiar with the U.S. Constitution and the Federalist Papers.

The catalog states, “As a Muslim liberal arts college in the West, Zaytuna aims to provide its students a foundation in the intellectual heritage of not one but two major world civilizations: the Western and the Islamic. These civilizations share not only common roots but also common aims: to think deeply and systematically about the world (creation), to ponder its ultimate cause and purpose (creator), and to live ethically in the course of our individual and collective lives (spirituality and politics).”

“The preservation of religion, life, intellect, family, private property, and human dignity,” according to the college, are the core objectives of its educational mission.