The Project
A two-year curriculum for students aged 16 to 18, taking seriously both the Islamic tradition and your own intelligence.
Taught how to think
about faith
The Madrasa Project is the Islamic Studies and Personal Development programme at Al-Mahdi Institute. Year One runs across eighteen Saturday sessions, covering five strands: Identity, Faith, Ethics, Relationships and Contemporary Issues.
It does not offer easy answers or pretend that hard questions have simple resolutions. It asks you to think, to read, to discuss and to reflect, and it expects you to bring your genuine self to each session.
What this is
- A space for honest inquiry into the questions that matter most.
- An introduction to the intellectual and spiritual depth of the Islamic tradition from its classical sources.
- A framework for personal development grounded in both Islamic thought and contemporary psychology.
- A community of peers engaging with the same questions at the same time.
What this is not
- A replacement for formal religious education or hawza study.
- A set of answers you are expected to memorise and repeat.
- A programme that will tell you what to think. It will equip you to think better.
At a glance
Ages
16 to 18
Length
October 2026 to May 2027 —
eighteen Saturday sessions, plus a welcome day and an end-of-year lunch
Each session
Two hours
including breaks
Fee
£350 for the year,
covering tuition, all materials and the end-of-year lunch
Where
Al-Mahdi Institute,
60 Weoley Park Road, Birmingham B29 6RB
Places
Limited spaces available in cohort one
The shape of the year
How the year
is structured
The year follows a deliberate arc. You begin with the most fundamental questions — about yourself in T1 and about God in T2 — before anything else is introduced. Doubt and faith are addressed early in T3, because intellectual honesty is a precondition for everything else.
The arc then moves outward: from theology to ethics, from ethics to relationships, and from relationships to the contemporary world.
Each session is self-contained, though each one also builds on what came before.
T1 Yourself · T2 God · T3 Doubt · T4–T7 Faith in practice
T8–T11 Ethics · T12–T16 Relationships · T17–T18 The world
Yours,
and only yours
Not assessed, not graded, not read by anyone without permission. The portfolio works through artefacts — specific documents, templates and reflections produced during sessions and kept together in a binder. Over the year these form a picture of how a student’s thinking has developed.
Most of what is valuable here is not content memorised. It is thinking done. The portfolio is how that thinking becomes visible.
Year one artefacts
- Identity Map — a three-ring diagram, introduced in T1 and revisited four times across the year.
- My Life Vision — one page, introduced in T4.
- Personal Duʿāʾ Card — wallet-sized, introduced in T5 and carried through the faith strand.
Seven agreements
The only way this works is if every person in the room feels safe to think out loud. That requires a shared set of commitments from everyone — students and facilitators alike.
- What is said here, stays here. Personal disclosures shared in the room do not leave it. The only exception is a safeguarding concern.
- Questions are welcome. Mockery is not. There are no stupid questions. Thinking out loud is valued in this group.
- Disagree with the argument, not the person. “How did you arrive at that?” is more useful than “That’s wrong.”
- Be present. Phones away during discussion. Half-presence is not fair to the people around you.
- Take care of yourself. Some sessions touch on difficult things. You can step outside. There is no expectation to perform engagement you are not feeling.
- Speak for yourself. Say “I think” rather than “everyone knows” or “Muslims believe.”
- You can pass. If a question is too much in a given moment, you can pass. No one is put on the spot.
Cohort one
launches 17 October 2026
Limited spaces available. Applications close when they are filled.
Apply for a place