Two traditions
The Islamic and European intellectual traditions studied with confidence, care and a clear centre of gravity.
About CAIS · Birmingham
An old vision of knowledge.
A new Muslim college.
The College of Arabic and Islamic Studies revives the liberal arts within an education centred on Arabic, the Islamic sciences and the defining questions of contemporary life.
Our mission
Knowledge, character and the arts of judgement.
CAIS exists to recover an integrated Muslim liberal education: Arabic and the Islamic scholarly tradition at its centre, the seven liberal arts as its instruments, and the formation of students ready to understand and serve the world in which they live.
Read deeply.
Think carefully.
Think carefully.
The liberal arts at CAIS
A centre strong enough
to open outwards.
Arabic and the Islamic sciences form the centre of a CAIS education. The trivium—grammar, logic and rhetoric—forms the arts of language and thought. The quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, harmonics and astronomy—opens the student to number, proportion and the order of the cosmos.
Through primary texts and their great commentaries, students encounter the Islamic and European traditions as living conversations. They learn not simply what influential thinkers concluded, but how an argument is built, tested and answered.
What distinguishes CAIS
An education of
the whole person.
The arts of learning
Grammar, logic, rhetoric and the mathematical arts form habits of close reading, lucid expression and sound judgement.
Adab
Learning ordered by reverence, humility, responsibility and service to others.
Our home
A Muslim college
in Birmingham.
Birmingham is home to one of Britain’s largest and most varied Muslim communities. Generations have built mosques, madrasas, charities and institutions of service across the city.
CAIS builds upon that inheritance while addressing a new educational need: a college in which students can deepen their religious knowledge, encounter the intellectual currents of wider society and bring the two into a coherent life.