Muslim Educators Gather in A Land Faraway
Blog post by Professor Seema Imam, reflection and recap of the GAIS Annual Retreat 2025
A Global Gathering of Islamic School Leaders
It was an honor and a pleasure to be part of the fourth annual Global Association of Islamic Schools (GAIS) Annual Retreat, both as an individual and as an ISLA board member, and to travel across the world to Sri Lanka, a land far away. When you travel to faraway places, you realize how vast the ummah is and how young the American Muslim education community is. It was held from October 6-8, 2025 and was blessed to welcome 350 educators from 27 countries. The gathering was filled with young and old, new and retiring professionals who all came for the professional knowledge, to be challenged to think outside the box, to be away from the daily hubbub of routine school life, and to concentrate on what is next, personally, professionally, and for our school programs in the education of the Muslim community worldwide.
ISLA Board Member – Dr. Seema Imam presenting at GAIS Retreat 2025
Building Bonds and Sharing Innovations
As these Muslim educators gathered together in workshops and keynotes, they were eager to meet old friends and make new ones. It was amazing to walk in the hall of the displays where vendors were sharing new and old educational products. The impressive new items are the Quran apps, the digital books, educational programs for teachers, and new curricula endeavors. I saw a resurgence of the use of the Arabic language, and you realize there is quite a lot of amazing work happening. Schools shared their visions, researchers shared their findings, and scholars made some of the most relevant presentations I have ever heard.
ISLA Chair Dr. Nadeem Memon presenting at GAIS Annual Retreat 2025 – How Islamic is your school?
Exploring the Meaning of Tajdid
The theme of the retreat was Tajdid, Inspirations to Impact. The keynotes got us started from early on Monday morning to think about and realize that it is not just simple definitions but indeed definitions with an Islamic context that are required in our schools and in Islamic education itself. “Think about that,” we were told. So, I asked myself, how is it that we define something like ‘excellence’ with a perspective where the backdrop is entertainment and a very indulgent lifestyle? We were sorting out the Western context and the Islamic context.
Voices of Renewal: Keynotes that Inspired
The Keynote speakers prepared the participants with a foundation for their own growth and transformation in the retreat, so that we could go back to our communities and work on the renewal and development of Islamic schools. Professor Mohamad Abdalla, Founding Director of the Center for Islamic Thought and Education, from Australia, spoke about renewal, tajdid in Islamic schooling in the West, and he proposed guiding principles for Western Islamic schooling, urging leaders and educators to reimagine Islamic education as a proactive, intellectually rigorous, and spiritually anchored project of renewal. Professor Abdullah Sahin, a member of the Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit, is from the United Kingdom. He described the need for tajdid and critically discussed how it needs to be understood within the context of modern Islamic Education as well as the Islamic pedagogical heritage.
ISLA’s Impactful Presence at GAIS 2025
We were all amazed, rushing from workshop to workshop, how tied together, just how woven into the theme, we found the presentations. We enjoyed thinking with ISLA presenters, Dr. Nadeem Memon and Rasha El-Haggan, about such topics as, How Islamic is your Islamic School, to the concept of schools using a shura format for decision making. There were presentations on Prophetic frameworks, dismantling the systems of silence in education, and the response to Gaza. We heard several presentations on Quran and Arabic education in our schools, teaching from the heart, contemporary science, assessment, God-centered mental health, values-based responses to behavior issues, teacher education programs, and integration. We were encouraged and challenged to take away from the retreat the means to make personal individual change and to change the landscape where we are doing our Islamic education work.
Reflecting and Planning for the Future
We closed the retreat officially with a session on reflection, led by me, Dr. Seema Imam, and Dylan Chown. We used a Padlet to capture the takeaways and action plans of the participants, producing a 45-page PDF from the Padlet of those ideas, thoughts, and plans.
A Call to Lifelong Learning
If you have not recently gone to a retreat simply for your own professional development, I encourage you to do so. As I see it, the weight of being responsible for raising the coming generations is a heavy one. It cannot be simplified in perhaps the way our schools started. There is so much more to an Islamic education and an Islamic school than we may have been embracing. I know we can do more; our numbers are growing, and our educational base has been broadened. Let us take Arabic as the language of Islam and apply that to our own goal of learning from the cradle to the grave and to the vision and mission of our schools. I look forward to seeing more of you in all of the educational events, both stateside and worldwide. We never stop learning. May Allah (S) continue to bless you all in all you do.
Join ISLA events, and stay connected to a network of Islamic school educators: theisla.org/all-events/
