ISLA Leadership Retreat 2026: The Heart of the Leader

Theme Description

It is a week before school starts and you open an email telling you that the fourth grade teacher you hired in the summer can no longer fulfill her contract. A few days later a group of parents write to say they are unhappy with where their child’s classroom is located. Then the board chair calls and tells you to instruct your elementary principal to change how she is handling devices in classrooms. Your spouse calls. Your teenager’s report card came and he is failing math. On the weekend you will drive out to care for your mother, who has a degenerative disease.

You wake up the next morning and your heart feels heavy. You barely make fajr. And while you are standing in prayer, you are writing the faculty email in your head, the one that has to go out before back to school night.

This is the life of an Islamic school leader. We move from one thing to the next, and some days it feels like autopilot. Other days we are squeezed so hard that there is no energy left and no will to keep going. You took this position a few years ago knowing the work would be hard. You told yourself that this job is your 401K to Jannah. The path has turned out to be riddled with potholes and impossible mountains. You feel depleted and you do not know what to do. Some part of you wants to walk away from all of it. This has to be easier than this.

Islamic school leaders occupy increasingly complex positions. They are accountable for the academic program, the budget, enrollment, and the building. They are also accountable for the Islamic identity formation of children, the wellbeing of faculty, the condition of families, and the health of a community that frequently changes the goal post on what it needs schools to do. Few leaders are trained for that type of responsibility. Most learned it while on the job.

As leaders, we often respond to this unprecedented complexity with strategic plans, stronger systems, better governance training, more professional development, sharper operational discipline. All of it is necessary. None of it is sufficient.

The purpose of Islamic education is to nurture the love of Allah that our children are born already carrying. Everything else we build exists to protect that one thing.

It is hard to nurture that love in a child when our own days are spent in the urgent, moving from what is on fire to what is about to be.

We are asking our students to find Allah in the middle of their lives while many of us have stopped looking for Him in the middle of ours.

What determines how a leader meets any of these challenges is the interior condition of the leader themself. Leaders who do the hard heart work needed to meet these complexities see the fruit of that work in the fabric of their school. What a leader has examined in themselves becomes clarity, patience, and steadiness in the people who work alongside them.

This is the premise of this year’s retreat. The inner work of an Islamic school leader is not a personal matter set apart from the work of our Islamic schools. It is the most consequential instrument we lead with, an instrument we need to tend to intentionally, purposefully, and deliberately.

What Will We Explore?

Over two and a half days we will sit with four conditions that can sometimes plague the hearts of Islamic school leaders, usually without our noticing.

• The heart on autopilot. Much of our day is spent moving between whatever is on fire. A staffing gap, a parent in the front office, a teacher who needs us right now. What are we carrying that we have not slowed down long enough to name?
• The guarded heart. Protection is learned, and for good reason. After enough hard meetings, some of us start reading an email with growing dread, anticipating a problem. What would it take to recognize what keeps us guarded?
• The wounded heart. This work marks us. The parent who came in angry and made it personal. The child whose home situation we could not fix and thought about at night. Much of it goes unprocessed, because there is no item in the admin meeting agenda for that, so we carry it forward. What are we still carrying, and what would it take to set some of it down?
• The depleted heart. We give from the heart all day. We know something about recharging a body. Naming what recharges a heart is less familiar ground. Tazkiyah, muhasabah, and our connection to Allah are not extras we get to once the urgent things are handled. They are the charge. When do we plug in, and how do we do it on purpose?

The inner work we do as leaders to recognize and heal our hearts helps us move toward a healed heart, the qalb saleem. This is the real work of tazkiyah. The sound heart is an important instrument capable of protecting the hearts of those we lead.

We will do this work with Kareem Elsayed, whose method gives leaders a systematic way to understand their own inner wiring, recognize what it is producing in the people around them, and resolve what is standing in the way. Alongside him, a scholar will ground each of the four in the Qur’an and the Seerah.

This retreat connects the spiritual heart of the leader to the physical one. Our nafs is in constant contest over the territory of the heart, and that contest does not stay in the realm of the spirit. It shows up in the body, in what triggers us and in what we brace against before we know we are bracing. So we will work both sides of it. Tazkiyah through spiritual practice, and an honest understanding of our psychosomatic selves, where what we carry in the soul and what we carry in the body meet.

What Will We Leave With?

• Language for your inner emotions. Words for the emotions and patterns of behavior that shape how you lead, so you can name what is happening in you with precision rather than calling all of it stress.
• Tools you can use. Practical ways to work with those emotions in the moment they show up, in a board meeting, in a hard parent conversation, or on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.
• Suhba. A circle of Islamic school leaders carrying the same weight, who have been in the shoes you wear every day, and who you can call in February when it gets hard.

How can this benefit my school?

Why should my school pay for this?

A leader’s capacity is the ceiling of the organization. Whatever they are able to hold, notice, absorb, and give back is the outer limit of what the school can become, and no strategic plan raises that limit. Investing in the leader raises the ceiling itself.

The effect is a ripple. The leader you send touches every other part of the institution. They set the temperature of a faculty meeting. They determine how a hard conversation goes and whether a strong teacher decides to stay another year. They shape what a family feels walking through the front door. A leader who has done this work brings clarity and steadiness back to all of it.

They also come back with a suhba, a circle of leaders from schools across the country who carry the same weight and who they can call when something breaks. And they come back with knowledge built alongside peers rather than alone.

When a school invests in the heart and mind of its leader,

it is investing in every teacher and every child that leader reaches.

Schedule Overview

Friday, Dec 5
10:30 am – Optional School Visit – Lunch offered for school visitors
12:30 pm Jummah at Diyanet
1:45-3:00 pm – Registration
3:30 pm – Program Workshops

Saturday, Dec 6
8:00-9:00 pm – Program activities

Sunday, Dec 7
8:00 am – 1:00 pm – Program activities
1:00 pm – Retreat concludes/ Departure

Retreat Registration

Included in retreat registration:

1. School Visit Friday morning (includes Lunch)
2. Meals: Friday Dinner – Sunday Lunch
3. Workshops: Friday afternoon – Sunday afternoon
4. Retreat Activities- Bonfire, art, physical activities, networking activities

Retreat activities include networking opportunities, interactive workshops, panel discussions, art and physical activities, bonfire, meals, and prayer all taking place in the beautiful Ottoman-style campus of the Diyanet Center of America.

Onsite Lodging

ISLA has reserved lodging for Friday & Saturday night onsite at Diyanet Center of America. Lodging must be purchased separate from retreat registration, and lodging is reserved only for registrants (i.e. not for spouses or families). Furthermore, lodging is available on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Two types of lodging are available. Private and semi-private rooms (known as ‘guest houses’ by Diyanet) are extremely limited and available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Below is a video of what the private/semi-private rooms look like:

The second option is Shared Lodging in gender-segregated housing lots that are a walkable distance to the cafeteria, multipurpose center where our workshops will be held, and the masjid. You can preview what the houses look like here:

If you wish to stay in a hotel, please make your own arrangements.

Location