In their own words.

★★★★★

As-salamu alaykum. I reverted just over four years ago, and honestly, the hardest part of becoming Muslim wasn't accepting Islam. It was knowing where to learn afterwards. Everyone tells you to seek knowledge. Nobody tells you where.

For two years I pieced it together. Lectures online, books sisters recommended, the occasional class at the masjid. I'd hear Arabic terms everyone else seemed to know and quietly write them down to Google later. I always felt like I was catching up. I come from a family that lives and breathes education, my father is a university professor and my mother teaches English literature, so I could never sit comfortably with not knowing my religion right down to its nuances.

★★★★★

I almost didn't enrol because I didn't think I'd be able to keep up. I remember telling my husband that I love academia, but every Islamic course I'd tried had left me overwhelmed, there was never any structure. Then I spoke to the team and they walked me through the whole system in a way that finally made me feel ready to start. Subhanallah, I almost get scared thinking about how close I came to not starting. This is by far the best decision I've made in all my years of Islamic study.

A few weeks ago I found the notebook from my first month and laughed at how little I knew then, and that was under a year ago. The teachers always stressed that the point of this course isn't how knowledgeable you become, it's the humility and awe of the deen you carry. But I can honestly say it's made me so much more knowledgeable that I now feel genuinely confident to teach.

★★★★★

If you'd asked me before enrolling whether I could learn Arabic, I'd have said no without even thinking. Not because I didn't want to, I desperately did. I just believed I wasn't someone who could learn languages. I'd tried before, more than once. I still have the half-finished notebooks in a drawer. After a while I stopped blaming the courses and started blaming myself. I genuinely thought I had a learning difficulty. And I don't want to sound negative, but my experience of the talab al-ilm space was that there was a stigma around asking questions, like you were meant to just get it, and asking about small things made you feel silly.

If you'd gone back a year and asked me whether I could learn Arabic, Qur'an and twenty sciences all in one year, I'd have called myself crazy for even thinking it.

★★★★★

I came to Muallimah with zero intention of teaching. None. If someone had mentioned it on day one I'd have smiled politely and said it definitely wasn't for me. I enrolled for one reason: to understand my religion better, and in shaa Allah be a better mother one day.

Near the end of the year a friend asked if I'd teach a small weekly class at the masjid, since they knew I was about to graduate. My first words were literally “yeah, sure”, and then I laughed, because I realised I'd never have said that a year ago. Alhamdulillah, it went well, and I now give weekly lessons at my local masjid.

★★★★★

I already owned a madrasah, alhamdulillah, for eight years. I understood everything about running one full-time. But something I quietly disliked about my own work all those years was that I was always hiring teachers to teach, because I couldn't. It was my husband who examined the curriculum, fixed things, made the changes that actually improved the students. I ran everything else, and yet I felt the most important, most rewarding part of the work was being done by someone other than me.

I regret not doing something like Muallimah eight years ago. Because now my whole team says it's like I'm a different person. For the first time I could actually see how many problems our curriculum had, and fix the mistakes in the pedagogy myself.

★★★★★

I'm a mother of four, and I only say that so other mothers reading this know I understand exactly what it's like. Some evenings I'd fully intend to study, and then it's homework, someone's ill, dinner's late, and by the time the house is finally quiet I just want to sleep. I'd look at my laptop and think, I don't have the energy for this.

Before I started, I wanted something accredited. If I was going to give a year of my life to this, I wanted it to be somewhere that took scholarship seriously.

May Allah reward every teacher at Muallimah Institute with the very best in this life and the next. May He place immense barakah in their knowledge, accept every hour they spent teaching us, forgive their shortcomings, and increase them in sincerity and beneficial knowledge. May He make every student who benefits from them a source of continuous reward until the Day of Judgement.

A special du'a for Ustadha Rahma, whose patience, kindness and dedication have left an impact on so many of us. May Allah preserve her, elevate her rank, grant her and the whole teaching team the highest ranks of Jannah, and let them keep guiding women to knowledge for many years to come. Ameen.