Mallam Fasasi Omolaja Center for Arabic and Islamic Studies

Welcome to Mallam Fasasi Omolaja Center for Arabic and Islamic Studies

The CAIS at the British American University, Florida, runs undergraduate and postgraduate programs in Arabic and Islamic Studies programs. The Center encourages the teaching and learning of Arabic toward building proficiency, and focuses on providing instruction that is meaningful, communicative, and responsive to the learners’ needs.

Our teaching strategies to achieve Arabic proficiency to its most advanced levels have led us to develop a rationale for learning Arabic content, functions, and accuracy, all at the same time. Our students are expected to learn Arabic communicatively, and to utilize their knowledge and skills to cope with authentic texts and authentic situations. The BAU Center for Arabic and Islamic (CAIS) focuses on teaching Arabic in its wider, more authentic contexts and in the principles of discourse and meaning. Presently, the BAU-CAIS plays a leading role in teaching and learning of Arabic beyond grammatical analysis to a wider scope of teaching Arabic in the realms of both linguistic and cultural phenomena.

The humanistic approach of the Center leads to a curriculum designed to instruct Arabic to students in the most effective approaches of teaching, and to help them gain more positive knowledge about Arab and Islamic cultures through the language, for the purpose of evaluating Arab culture as a humanistic reality in academic and critical perspective. From this orientation and philosophy, the Undergraduate Program aims to teach Modern Standard Arabic as a fundamental prerequisite to gain realistic knowledge about Islam, Arab culture, and Arabic language and literature. We view Arabic, not only as a requirement to fill transcripts for obtaining degrees, but far more importantly, to produce graduates with advanced and superior Arabic language skills with the hope they will play an innovative role in making the relationship between American culture and the Muslim world more humanistic and positive rather than static, stereotyped, and therefore negative.

The BAU Center for Arabic and Islamic Studies offers Bachelor of Arts (BA), Master of Arts (MA) and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree programs in Arabic and Islamic Studies as well as Arabic and Islamic Neuro-Theology at the PhD level.

For more details, contact the Center or the Registrar of the University.