[clarification needed] Based in Hayward, the institute's mandate was to teach courses on Arabic and Islamic Studies as well as to engage in community service and outreach.
The successful completion of the pilot program and a summer Arabic intensive course led to the inaugural undergraduate degree cohort in 2010, consisting of eight female and seven male students.
[11] Upon its move to Berkeley, Zaytuna College rented space from the American Baptist Seminary of the West (ABSW).
In July 2012, Zaytuna acquired its own campus on Berkeley's "Holy Hill", a location so named because it is host to a number of theological colleges and seminaries.
The undergraduate degree is built on the classical model of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic), common to education in medieval Christendom and Islam, including staple ancient texts like the Isagoge of Porphyry.
[16] With this text-based approach, students in the MA program follow the traditional Muslim system of learning directly from a teacher who has studied the text, in a chain going back to the author.
[3] Zaytuna College is built on a classical liberal arts curriculum, influenced by the traditional Muslim and Scholastic systems as well as the Great Books course pioneered in the 20th century United States by John Erskine, Mortimer Adler, and Charles van Doren.