Three years ago I left for Cairo with a question. The question was whether the classical Islamic sciences — mantiܑ, usul, aqida, tafsir — could still be transmitted in a form that a North American Muslim school could use on a Monday morning.

The answer arrived slowly. It arrived through teachers who corrected me, through books I had to read twice, through the rhythm of a city where the tradition has been continuous since 975 CE.

The answer is FISLI — the Foundations of Sacred Islamic Literacy Initiative. A full classical curriculum, written from inside the tradition, with AI as a production tool and scholars as the governance. Seven Letters to Islamic Schools laid out the argument. The Workshop teaches the method. FISLI itself is the deliverable.

The paid tier is what makes the rest of it possible.

WHAT PAID MEMBERS RECEIVE

Founding Member — $7/month or $70/year. The monthly Cairo Notebook, exclusive to paid members. The full archive. Comment access. The first look at every new Letter.

Annual Founding Supporter — $70/year. Everything above. Plus a Founding Cohort discount on the Workshop ($297 → $197) and first access to FISLI unit drops.

Lifetime Founding Patron — $250 one-time. Everything above forever. Plus your name in the FISLI acknowledgments when the first unit ships. Plus a 30-minute Cairo call — voice or video — once you join.

WHY $7

Because the work has to be sustained from somewhere. Three years of study, a domain, an LLC, a curriculum that has to pass a four-gate theological audit before a single line ships — none of this runs on intention alone. Paid members are the reason it continues.

WHY NOW

The Workshop is open. The Letters are public. FISLI’s first unit is in active production. The next 30 days are the founding window — after that the Lifetime tier closes and the monthly price moves to $9.

If the seven Letters helped you see something about Islamic education you had not seen before, this is how you keep that work alive.

WITH WHAT I HAVE

I am writing this from Cairo. The minarets are visible from the window. The teachers I sit with do not know about Substack tiers — they only know that the work has to continue and that the umma in the West needs a curriculum that does not bend.

If you can carry a part of that, carry it. If you cannot, the free Letters remain free. Both are sadaqah jariya in different keys.

وصلى الله على سيدنا محمد وعلى آله وصحبه وسلم

Abdulahi M. Gesey

Founder, The Foundations Press

Writing from Cairoetter is for you.

The paid tier is now open.

I want to be direct about what it is and what it is not.

It is not a content farm. I will not produce more just because you are paying. The register will not change. The pace will not change. What changes is access.

Paid subscribers receive every essay two weeks before it goes to Medium and the public archive. You read it first, in the quiet window before the algorithm touches it. You also receive a monthly letter written from Cairo — not an essay, but a letter. Closer in. About the books I am working through, the questions that will not settle, the particular texture of studying classical texts in this city.

Founding members ($250/year) receive all of the above, plus their name in the acknowledgments of any book that comes from this work, and a quarterly open session — you can bring any question about the texts, the tradition, or the craft.

The price for paid is $10 per month.

If this work has meant something to you, the most direct way to support it is to become a paid subscriber. You can do that here:

https://abdulahigesey.substack.com/subscribe

And if you have been sharing these essays with others — thank you. There is now a referral program: refer three paid subscribers and receive one free month. Substack tracks this automatically.

Jazakum Allahu khayran for reading.

Abdulahi

Three years ago, I walked into Dar al-Ulum in Cairo with a notebook and a question: what does it mean to transmit sacred knowledge in an age of artificial intelligence?

What I have built since then — the Foundations of Sacred Islamic Literacy Initiative (FISLI) — is the answer I arrived at. A full Islamic studies curriculum for North American Muslim schools, written from inside the living tradition, with AI as a production tool and classical scholars as the governance.

This workshop is the first time I am teaching what I built. Not the curriculum itself — the method behind it.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

A 4-hour live session, taught from Cairo, designed for one purpose: to teach Islamic educators how to build classically grounded curriculum using Claude AI as a production tool — without losing the tradition in the process.

We will cover:

— The four-gate theological audit. How to use AI to draft curriculum and never publish a single line without classical scholarly review.

— The Salmān al-Fārisī Formation Track. The pedagogical spine I built for FISLI, and how to adapt it for your own school.

— Manṭiq as the missing science. Why classical Islamic logic is the discipline North American Muslim schools dropped — and how AI use makes it suddenly urgent again.

— Prompting Claude from inside the tradition. The specific prompt patterns that produce output your scholarly board will actually approve.

— Licensing vs. building. When to license FISLI for your school and when to build something of your own.

WHO THIS IS FOR

Islamic school principals. Curriculum directors. Mosque education coordinators. Homeschool networks. Independent Muslim teachers who are building something serious and want to do it with the tradition, not around it.

If you have ever opened Claude or ChatGPT, drafted an Islamic lesson, and felt something was off about the output — this workshop is for you.

FORMAT

Live over Zoom. 4 hours. Taught from Cairo. Recording provided to all 25 seats.

Included:

— The FISLI Four-Gate Audit Worksheet (PDF)

— The Foundations Press Prompt Library (15 vetted prompts for Islamic curriculum work)

— 30-day post-workshop email access for follow-up questions

— Founding cohort discount on the FISLI Licensing Agreement (for schools)

PRICE

$297. 25 seats. Founding cohort price.

This is the only time the workshop will be offered at this price. Future cohorts will be $497.

HOW TO REGISTER

Reply to this email or write to abdulahi@thefoundationspress.com with the subject line WORKSHOP. I will send a registration link and a Calendly slot for a 10-minute pre-call.

Why a pre-call? Because 25 seats means I want each one occupied by someone the workshop will actually serve.

A NOTE ON WHY NOW

The last seven Letters to Islamic Schools made an argument: that North American Muslim schools have inherited an incomplete map, and that the classical sciences they dropped are the ones the next generation most needs.

This workshop is the first place that argument turns into a method you can use on Monday morning.

The tradition is still alive. It is still being transmitted. I have been receiving it for three years. This is one of the ways I am giving it back.

وصلى الله على سيدنا محمد وعلى آله وصحبه وسلم

Abdulahi M. Gesey

Founder, The Foundations Press

Writing from Cairo

This is the seventh letter.

Over the last seven weeks, I have written to you about the problem, the insight behind the solution, the curriculum framework, the teacher, the schools, the funders, and the principals. Today I want to close the series by telling you what we are actually building — not just for this year, but for the next twenty.

—

We are not building a curriculum.

A curriculum is a deliverable. You write it, you distribute it, and if you are fortunate, it gets used for a few years before it is replaced by something newer.

What we are building is an institution.

Institutions do not deliver. They form. They persist across generations. They carry a tradition forward not because they are mandated to but because they are structured to. An institution has standards that outlast any individual, relationships that survive turnover, and a theory of formation that does not depend on which teacher walks through the door on any given morning.

FISLI is designed to be that institution for Islamic education in North America.

—

What the first five years look like.

Year 1 — 2026-27: Six Founding Schools in six states. Teacher certification program launched with the first nine-month cohort. Curriculum framework K-12 completed across all five disciplines. Longitudinal outcomes study begins.

Year 2 — 2027-28: Founding Schools complete their first full academic year on the framework. Data from Year 1 informs curriculum refinements. Second cohort of teacher certification. First renewal agreements signed.

Year 3 — 2028-29: Expansion cohort of 10-15 schools. First FISLI-certified teachers begin training other teachers. Academic paper published. Conversations begin with UK and Australian Muslim school communities.

Year 4 — 2029-30: 25+ licensed schools across North America. Teacher certification becomes a recognized credential in the Islamic school community. First waqf-backed endowment conversations begin.

Year 5 — 2030-31: 50+ licensed schools. FISLI is the reference framework for classical Islamic curriculum design in the English-speaking world. The institution is self-sustaining.

—

What this requires.

It requires schools that are willing to make a genuine commitment — not to a vendor, but to a vision. It requires funders who understand that formation takes a generation and invest accordingly. It requires teachers who want to be part of building something that will outlast them.

And it requires time — not urgency, not virality, not an overnight transformation. Just consistent, principled, unglamorous work done the way that all lasting things are built: slowly, carefully, and with gratitude to Allah in every step.

—

I am writing this from inside the work.

I am a 26-year-old founder with a registered LLC, an EIN, and a curriculum framework that I have spent three years building alongside the Islamic scholarly tradition. I have no institutional backing yet. I have no team yet. I have a vision, a framework, and the clarity that comes from knowing why this is necessary.

If you have read all seven letters, you know the argument. You know what FISLI is and what it is not. You know who it is for and what it will ask of the schools that join.

If it is right for your school, your foundation, or your community — I would welcome the conversation.

Email: abdulahi@thefoundationspress.com

Website: thefoundationspress.com

With gratitude to Allah and du’a for this community,

Abdulahi M. Gesey

Founder, The Foundations Press LLC | FISLI

EIN: 42-2616409 | Virginia SCC: 12003083

I want to speak to you directly.

Not to a board, not to a funder, not to a researcher. To you — the principal who woke up this morning already thinking about next year’s curriculum. The one who sits through Islamic studies class observations and feels the quiet discomfort that comes from watching something important being done poorly.

You know what I’m talking about. The teacher who means well but has no framework. The students who can recite but cannot reflect. The curriculum that covers topics but does not form people.

You have known this for years. Most of you have tried to fix it — by hiring differently, by adding supplementary materials, by sending teachers to workshops. Some of it has helped. None of it has been enough.

This letter is addressed differently.

For the last four weeks, I have been writing to principals — the people running Islamic schools across North America. This week, I want to speak directly to funders: the foundations, philanthropists, and institutional partners who are looking for a model worth investing in at the intersection of Islamic education and American Muslim civil society.

—

The problem is documented.

More than 300 full-time Islamic schools operate in the United States. The vast majority share a common structural weakness: Islamic studies programs that are fragmented, under-resourced, and taught by teachers without classroom training. The result is a generation of Muslim students who graduate without sufficient grounding in their own tradition.

This is not anecdotal. It is the consistent finding of everyone who works in this space.

—

FISLI is the structured response.

The Foundations of Sacred Islamic Literacy Initiative is registered in Virginia (EIN: 42-2616409). The framework centers five disciplines — aqidah, Arabic, Quran, Seerah, and Fiqh — taught in a coherent sequence, by certified teachers, within schools that license the curriculum.

The licensing model creates sustainability. Schools pay an annual curriculum fee. Teachers complete a nine-month certification. Revenue funds ongoing development, the certification program, and outcome research.

—

Why this is the moment.

The American Muslim community is at an inflection point. The first generation of families who built these Islamic schools are now sending grandchildren through them. The institutions exist. The infrastructure is in place. What has been missing is a curriculum framework rigorous enough to carry the weight those institutions were built to carry.

FISLI fills that gap.

We are currently building our Founding School Cohort — six schools across six states — and submitting to Templeton World Charity Foundation’s Open Funding Initiative (deadline: July 2026). We are also in early conversations with the Henry Luce Foundation.

For foundations and philanthropists in this space, the opportunity is to be part of building the evidence base before it becomes conventional wisdom.

—

What an investment makes possible.

A three-year grant of $500,000 would fund: the full K-12 curriculum development across all five disciplines; the first cohort of FISLI-certified teachers; a longitudinal study of student outcomes; and the infrastructure to reach 100+ schools within five years.

A smaller investment of $50,000-$100,000 would fund the first year of the Founding School Cohort and create the proof of concept for larger grants.

—

If you are a funder working in Islamic education, religious literacy, or educational reform, I would welcome a conversation.

Email: abdulahi@thefoundationspress.com

EIN: 42-2616409

With gratitude,

Abdulahi M. Gesey

Founder, The Foundations Press LLC | FISLI

Across the last three letters, I have laid out the argument: Islamic education in North America has a sequencing problem, a teacher problem, and a vision problem. The five disciplines must be taught in a coherent order, by qualified teachers, within a school that understands why it exists.

The Founding School Cohort is where that argument becomes practice.

—

I want to be clear about what the Founding School Cohort is not.

It is not a conference. It is not a webinar series. It is not a certification you hang on a wall.

It is a licensing relationship. Your school adopts the FISLI framework — the five disciplines, the sequence, the pedagogy — and implements it with fidelity. In exchange, you receive the curriculum materials, teacher training, ongoing support, and the designation as a Founding School.

Founding Schools are not anonymous. They are visible. They are the proof that this model works.

—

Here is why the designation matters.

When FISLI approaches funders, when we speak to Islamic school networks, when we present to education researchers, the first question is always: does this actually work in a real school with real children?

Founding Schools are the answer. Every school that implements this framework with fidelity becomes part of the evidence base — that Islamic education, done right, produces demonstrably better outcomes. Students who can reason, not just recite. Students who are formed, not just filled.

That evidence base is what makes the Templeton application credible. What makes the Luce Foundation take notice. What eventually makes the case for adoption at scale.

—

The Founding School Cohort is deliberately small — six schools across six states. We are in conversations with schools in Virginia, Texas, California, Illinois, Michigan, and New York.

Each school in the cohort receives the full licensing package at the Founding School rate: $2,400 per year for up to 100 students. That is less than the cost of a single textbook series.

—

For principals who have been reading this series: if you recognize your school — if you know your Islamic studies program is fragmented, your teachers undertrained, your students graduating without the foundation they need — I want to speak to you directly.

You do not need to wait for a perfect moment. The moment is now.

Email me at abdulahi@thefoundationspress.com with the subject line “Founding School.” Tell me about your school, your current program, and what you want it to become.

We will take it from there.

Until next week,

Abdulahi M. Gesey

Founder, The Foundations Press LLC | FISLI

I want to begin this letter with a question that most Islamic school principals have never been asked:

Why do you teach what you teach in the order that you teach it?

If you pause on that — really pause — you will notice something uncomfortable. Most schools cannot answer it. They teach what they have always taught in the order that feels familiar. The curriculum was inherited, not designed. The sequence was assumed, not argued.

This letter is about why the sequence matters more than almost anything else in Islamic education.

—

The FISLI framework is built on five disciplines: aqidah, Arabic, Quran, Seerah, and Fiqh. These are not five separate subjects. They are one integrated argument about how a human being comes to know and live their deen.

The sequence: aqidah first, then Arabic, then Quran, then Seerah, then Fiqh. Each discipline builds on and unlocks the one before it.

Aqidah is the anchor. Before a child learns a single rule of Arabic grammar or a single surah, they need to know who Allah is, why He created them, and what it means to live in conscious relationship with Him. Aqidah is the frame that makes everything else meaningful. Without it, Arabic is just a language. Quran is just a text. Fiqh is just rules.

Arabic is the tool. The entire revealed tradition — Quran, Hadith, the books of fiqh, the commentaries of scholars — exists in Arabic. A student who cannot read and comprehend classical Arabic is permanently dependent on translators. Arabic in FISLI is not optional. It is structural — the means by which the student eventually accesses everything else directly.

Quran is the practice. Once the student has aqidah as their frame and Arabic as their tool, the Quran comes alive. They are not memorizing sounds. They are reading, comprehending, and reciting in the language of revelation. Quran study at this stage is connected to everything the student has already built.

Seerah is the narrative. The Prophet, peace be upon him, is the living embodiment of the entire framework: the purest aqidah in action, the most beautiful Arabic in speech, the Quran walking among people. Seerah taught after the other three is not a biography class. It is the student watching the entire argument come alive in a human being.

Fiqh is the application. Rules of action — prayer, fasting, dealings, character — are the final layer. They only make full sense when the student understands who they are worshipping (aqidah), can access the primary texts (Arabic), has internalized the book of Allah (Quran), and has seen the model (Seerah). Fiqh without these foundations produces Muslims who know what to do but not why they are doing it.

—

This is why sequence is the argument.

Every curriculum is making an implicit claim about what matters and what order things should be learned. Most Islamic school curricula, if you look honestly, are making incoherent arguments. They teach fiqh before Arabic. They memorize Quran before teaching aqidah. They cover Seerah as a history lesson disconnected from every other discipline.

The result: students who have fragments. Rules without reasons. Stories without context. Memorization without comprehension.

The FISLI curriculum is a coherent argument from beginning to end. The sequence is not a preference. It is a claim about the nature of Islamic knowledge and how it was meant to be received.

—

For principals thinking about curriculum reform: the question to ask is not “what are we teaching?” It is “what are we arguing for, and does our curriculum actually make that argument?”

If you cannot answer that, the curriculum is not a curriculum. It is a collection of activities.

In our next letter, we will discuss what it looks like to implement this sequence at scale — K through 12 — and what needs to change in most schools to make it possible.

Until next week,

Abdulahi M. Gesey

Founder, The Foundations Press LLC | FISLI

Last month I wrote about the map — the five disciplines that form the spine of classical Islamic literacy: aqidah, Arabic, Quran, seerah, and fiqh. Several principals wrote back. Most of them said the same thing:

“We know what needs to be taught. We just don’t have teachers who can teach it.”

This letter is about that problem.

—

The teacher is not a variable in Islamic education. The teacher is the equation.

In our tradition, knowledge was never primarily transmitted through books. It was transmitted through chests — through scholars who had themselves sat at the feet of scholars, who had sat at the feet of scholars before them. The isnad was not a formality. It was the architecture of trust. The chain of transmission was the proof of authenticity.

When we reduced Islamic studies to a subject slot in a weekly schedule — something to be covered by whoever was available — we didn’t just lower the quality of instruction. We severed the chain. We handed our children a curriculum without a teacher, a map without a guide.

The result is what principals are telling me every week: students who can recite but cannot reason, who have memorized rules but do not understand their sources, who know what is halal and haram but cannot explain why.

That is not education. That is filing.

—

So what does a qualified Islamic studies teacher actually look like?

In the FISLI framework, we think about teachers in three categories.

Type A is what we are aiming for: a teacher who has studied the five disciplines with qualified scholars, can teach them in sequence, understands how they reinforce each other, and can connect what a child learns to how that child should live. This teacher has been formed, not just trained.

Type B is where most Islamic schools are right now: a teacher who has deep knowledge in one or two disciplines — perhaps a hafiz who can teach Quran beautifully but has not studied fiqh, or a fiqh graduate who does not have the Arabic to bring classical texts to life. Type B teachers are valuable. They are not sufficient on their own.

Type C is the gap we cannot afford to keep filling: a teacher hired because they are pious and available, with no formal training in any of the five disciplines, doing their best with what they have. Many of these individuals are remarkable human beings. But sincerity does not substitute for preparation.

The honest assessment of most Islamic schools in North America: they are running on Type B and Type C teachers and calling it Islamic education.

—

This is not a criticism. It is a diagnosis.

The pipeline doesn’t exist. There is no standard pathway by which a motivated Muslim becomes a certified Islamic studies teacher. Seminaries produce scholars. Universities produce academics. Neither produces classroom-ready teachers who understand pedagogy, child development, and classical Islamic curriculum design simultaneously.

That is the gap FISLI was built to fill.

Our nine-month Teacher Certification Track is designed to take an individual who has foundational Islamic knowledge and produce someone who can walk into an Islamic school classroom and teach all five disciplines with coherence, depth, and pedagogical skill. The curriculum moves from aqidah as the anchor, through Arabic as the tool, through Quran as the practice, through seerah as the narrative, and into fiqh as the application.

We do not just teach content. We teach how to teach the content. How to sequence a lesson. How to respond to the child who asks a question that unsettles the room. How to connect abstract theology to lived experience in ways that are appropriate to every age.

—

I want to say something to every principal reading this:

The single highest-leverage investment your school can make right now is not a new building, not a new textbook series, not a new administrative system.

It is a certified teacher.

One Type A teacher in your school changes the culture of the classroom. Students feel the difference between a teacher who knows and a teacher who was given something to read. They lean in. They ask more questions. They start connecting what they learned on Monday to what they are experiencing on Friday.

That is what education looks like when the teacher is at the center.

—

In our next letter, we will go deep on the curriculum itself — how we sequence the five disciplines across K-12 and why the order is not arbitrary.

But this week, I want to leave you with a single question:

If you looked honestly at every teacher currently delivering Islamic studies in your school — which category would each one fall into?

Not to shame anyone. Not to fire anyone. Just to know where you actually are.

Because you cannot build from a map you have not read.

Until next week,

Abdulahi M. Gesey

Founder, The Foundations Press LLC | FISLI

Not the theological answer — the revealed speech of God, preserved perfectly, transmitted across generations. That I knew. What I had not been taught was the historical architecture behind that preservation: who the huffāz were, how they were organized, why the early community treated the written mushaf with such careful suspicion before gradually allowing it to anchor the oral tradition. Why the Qur'ān entered history the way it did — and what that entry tells us about the nature of divine knowledge when it meets human civilization.

This essay is my attempt to transmit what I learned. It is the third in a series on Islamic intellectual formation, and I believe it contains some of the most clarifying material I have written.

Read the full essay here: https://abdulahi-gesey.medium.com/the-measured-descent-of-revelation-34d34237c784

Next week I will be publishing a piece on the ethics of silence in the Islamic tradition — how the classical scholars understood quiet not as absence but as discipline, as art, and as law. It is one of the essays I am most proud of.

It is a question that seems strange only if you think of revelation as information transfer. But the classical scholars understood revelation as something else entirely: an act of mercy calibrated to human capacity, each verse descended at the precise moment the community was ready to receive it.

This essay explores what the scholars called tajdid al-nuzul, the wisdom of gradual revelation. I draw on Azhari sources and the tradition of Quranic sciences as I have encountered them in three years of study in Cairo.

The title comes from a phrase that stopped me cold when I first heard it in a lesson on Surat al-Baqarah: that every verse was a mercy measured to the moment. Not given all at once, because mercy does not overwhelm - it meets.

Read the full essay here: https://abdulahi-gesey.medium.com/the-measured-descent-of-mercy-d15faf66ce8a

Next in this series: the ethics of silence in the Islamic tradition.

In law, silence in certain contexts constitutes consent. The jurists debated this with the precision they brought to everything: when does not-speaking become a form of speech? When does quiet carry legal weight?

In art, the poets and rhetoricians treated silence as the highest form of eloquence. Not the absence of words, but their deliberate withholding. The pause that makes the poem.

In the science of the self, the scholars of tazkiyah understood silence as the foundational discipline of the spiritual path. Before you can hear, you must stop speaking. Before the heart can receive, it must first become still.

This essay is an attempt to map the architecture of quiet across these three domains. It is one of the essays I am most proud of, and it comes from three years of reading and listening in Cairo.

Read the full essay here: https://abdulahi-gesey.medium.com/silence-as-law-art-and-mind-the-architecture-of-quiet-b006072a5a02

Next: a letter from Cairo on what it means to study knowledge in a city that has never stopped teaching.

What I am actually building is different.

FISLI — the Foundations of Sacred Islamic Literacy Initiative — is the first classical Islamic curriculum designed for North American Islamic schools and mosque education programs. Five disciplines. A four-gate scholarly audit. Board governance by Princeton-trained and al-Azhar-trained scholars. Every unit traceable to named primary sources.

The Problem FISLI Is Solving

Most Islamic education in North America starts in the wrong place. It starts with behavior: rules of prayer, categories of halal and haram, biographical facts about prophets. These are important. They are not a foundation.

The classical scholars built differently. They began with what they called taadib: the correct placement of a human being in relation to what is real. Before a student learns what to do, they learn what they are, what they stand before, and why any of it matters. Before fiqh, there is aqidah. Before aqidah, there is Arabic. Before Arabic, there is the formation of the self that will receive the knowledge.

FISLI recovers that sequence.

The Five Disciplines

The curriculum is organized around five disciplines, each anchored to Quranic evidence. Aqidah: Islamic theology and creed, anchored in Surah al-Ikhlas. Arabic Language: the grammatical and morphological foundation of all Islamic textual study. Quranic Studies: recitation, memorization, and the disciplines of tafsir and tajweed. Fiqh: Islamic jurisprudence, taught in sequence after the preceding three. Tazkiyah: the purification of character, anchored in Surah al-Shams.

Each discipline has its own scope and sequence. Each unit is anchored to named primary sources from the tradition: Ibn Hisham on Arabic, Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani on fiqh, al-Tahawi on creed, Ibn Ajiba on tazkiyah.

The Four-Gate Scholarly Audit

Every unit that enters the FISLI curriculum passes through four gates of scholarly review.

Gate 1: Is this reductive? Classical Islamic knowledge cannot be compressed into short summaries without distorting its structure. A gate reviewer checks every unit for compression that loses the actual argument.

Gate 2: Is the sourcing accurate? Every claim must trace to a named scholar and a named text. Gate reviewers verify the citation chain.

Gate 3: Is the sequence correct? Classical Islamic education is sequential. A unit on fiqh must not be placed before the student has the aqidah and Arabic foundations that make fiqh intelligible.

Gate 4: Is the method sound? This gate asks whether the pedagogical approach is consistent with the methods the classical scholars used.

Where AI Enters

I have been using Claude, Anthropic’s AI, as a research and drafting partner throughout this process.

What AI can do: hold large bodies of classical scholarship in view simultaneously, identify patterns across texts, draft initial versions of scope-and-sequence documents, flag where citations need to be verified.

What AI cannot do: replace the scholarly audit. Every unit that Claude produces is a draft that must pass through all four gates. The scholars do not review Claude’s output and approve it. They review the argument, check the sources, and correct what is wrong.

The AI produces the first draft. The scholars produce the curriculum.

The Partnership Question

I am sitting with this question: Is this a use case AI companies should invest in?

3.5 million Muslims in North America. Hundreds of Islamic schools and mosque education programs. Deep educational needs. Almost no institutional curriculum infrastructure.

FISLI addresses this gap. And the method transfers. Every major religious tradition faces the same problem: modern religious education has lost the classical sequence that made it produce formed human beings rather than informed ones.

Read the full version of this essay on Medium, where I go deeper into the scholarly audit process and the AI workflow: https://abdulahi-gesey.medium.com/we-are-building-the-first-ai-assisted-classical-islamic-curriculum-ac8769c6c917

If this work matters to you, consider becoming a founding member of Sacred Knowledge. Ten founding member spots remain open this week

.

For the first time in three years, I announced that paid subscriptions to Sacred Knowledge are open. Ten Founding Member spots at $250/year.

The window closes in 6 days — May 24, 2026.

I want to say something directly to everyone reading this, whether or not you become a Founding Member.

The free essays continue. Every piece on Islamic intellectual formation, every letter from Cairo, every translation note and curriculum reflection — these exist because this community has made them possible. The GoFundMe campaign that is now at 79% of its goal, the emails that arrive from people studying in their homes and teaching in their schools, the DMs asking for recommendations — these are the reason the work has continued at this depth.

What Founding Membership makes possible is different. It funds the curriculum infrastructure: the governance documentation, the teacher certification architecture, the scholar review process, the institutional design that carries the tradition intact from Cairo to North America.

If that is meaningful to you, the link is in yesterday’s email and on the Substack page.

Either way — the work continues. The next essay is already in draft. Episode 2 of the Sacred Knowledge podcast is already in outline.

Jazakum Allahu khayran.

Abdulahi

For three years I have been building this work from Cairo — writing essays, building curriculum, recording lectures, and now launching a podcast. Most of it has been funded through your GoFundMe generosity, now at $31,527 — 79% of the way to the goal. For that I am genuinely grateful.

Today I am opening something different.

Sacred Knowledge on Substack has paid subscription tiers that have been live for months and have never been promoted. I did not promote them because I was not sure the work was ready. After three years and what I see happening with this community, I believe it is ready.

I am opening 10 Founding Member spots at $250/year. These close in 7 days.

Here is what Founding Membership includes:

— Every essay published on this Substack, all of them, free access forever

— Monthly letter from Cairo, a personal account of the study, the city, the work in progress

— Early access to new essays before they go to general subscribers

— Exclusive commentaries on classical texts as they are being read and taught

— Personal correspondence with me, direct email access for questions about the tradition, the curriculum, or your own formation

— Your name in the acknowledgments of the FISLI curriculum when it is completed

The Founding Member tier exists because some of this work — the curriculum architecture, the scholarly board governance, the teacher certification framework — cannot be built through essays alone. It requires sustained support from people who understand what is being built and why it matters.

I am not asking everyone to do this. The free essays will continue regardless. I am asking the ten people for whom this work has been most meaningful to make it permanent with a single decision.

If that is you, the link to become a Founding Member is below. The 7-day window closes on May 24, 2026.

Jazakum Allahu khayran for three years of reading, sharing, and supporting this work.

Abdulahi M. Gesey

Cairo, Egypt

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

How to prompt Claude for classical Islamic source integration

How to maintain theological accuracy in AI-generated content

The governance workflow that ensures scholarly compliance

Prompt templates for lessons, teacher guides, and assessments

The complete FISLI production workflow you can adapt for your institution

WHO THIS IS FOR

Islamic school curriculum coordinators

Mosque education directors

Full-time Islamic studies teachers

Anyone building Islamic educational content who wants to use AI correctly

FORMAT

Live Zoom, 4 hours, recorded for replay

Price: $297

Capacity: 25 participants

Date: First cohort launching in 30 days

TO REGISTER YOUR INTEREST

Email abdulahi@thefoundationspress.com with subject line: Workshop Interest

السّلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته

I want to tell you what I have been sitting with this month.

The text in front of me is Ibn ʿAjība’s Al-Baḥr al-Madīd — the same commentary I drew from in the last essay. But working through it slowly in Arabic, with a teacher, is a different experience from writing about it in English. In Arabic the …

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The classical Islamic tradition named this condition precisely. A self organized entirely around its categories has confused the accident for the essence.

The tradition had a word for a contingent property: ʿaraḍ. And a word for the essential mark: faṣl.

The Qurʾān defined the human being before any category was applied: I am placing a khalīfah upon the earth.

Not a nation. Not a tribe. A khalīfah. A steward of something that precedes and exceeds every label that will later be applied to him.

This essay follows that definition to its consequence — what happens at a bus stop in contested geography when one person has been formed in adab, and what that moment reveals about what Islamic education is actually trying to produce.

Read the full essay here: https://medium.com/p/26d955ca8726

Not what it produces on paper. Not the certificates or the memorization metrics. What is it doing to the human being who goes through it?

The classical tradition had a precise answer. Before a student engaged with fiqh, before kalam, before tafsir — they were taught mantiq. The discipline of the mind. The science of distinguishing the essential from the contingent, the valid argument from the persuasive one, the real from the apparent.

Allah commands ta’qilun — will you not reason — forty-nine times in His Book. The tradition built an entire science around that command. Somewhere along the way, Muslim education quietly dropped it.

This essay names what was lost and what recovery requires.

Read the full essay here: https://abdulahi-gesey.medium.com/we-memorized-the-qur%C4%81n-and-forgot-how-to-think-dabe2bd4255f

The next issue examines what adab actually does to a human being — drawn from Shaykh Ahmad Ibn Ajiba’s commentary on the opening five verses of Surah al-Kahf.

In his reading of the opening five verses of Surah al-Kahf — before the cave, before Khidr, before any of the famous stories — he traces a complete account of what the Book does to the person who receives it correctly.

The Book that has no crookedness produces a person with no crookedness. The slave who abandons his pursuits upholds the Divine Rights. The inward and the outward become coherent. Allah takes the affair. And from that, if He wills, comes the permission to speak.

Five verses. The entire science of formation already complete.

Read the full essay here: https://medium.com/p/26d955ca8726

The next issue examines what adab does to human identity at the level of the essential — drawn from classical logic and the Quranic definition of the human being as khalifah.