By Ribāṭ Communications
Somewhere inside you, there may be a story. An idea that keeps returning. Something you have wanted to say for years, maybe decades, about your faith, your family, your community, or the world as you have lived it. And maybe what has stopped you is not the absence of something to say, but the absence of the tools to say it well.
That is exactly where Ribāṭ University’s Bachelor of Arts in Literature, Writing, and Publishing begins.
Why This Degree, and Why Now?
President Dr. Tamara Gray has a conviction she returns to often: in the years ahead, real power will belong to people who can read, write, and speak with clarity and depth. It is a skill the world is losing, and one our community cannot afford to lose with it.
The degree grew from a specific and urgent concern. Ribāṭ has a publishing press, Daybreak Press, committed to putting beautiful, meaningful books written by Muslims into the world. But beautiful books require writers, and writers require formation. “We don’t want our great-granddaughters to ask why women didn’t write,” Dr. Gray reflects. This degree is part of the answer to that question, built before it even needs to be asked.
Curriculum consultant Aysha Fazil, who holds degrees from St. Andrews in Scotland and brings both a formation in the British literary tradition and years of study in the Islamic sciences, shaped the degree with a particular insight: that Muslim women in the West often carry a kind of double belonging, one foot in each world, and that an education which keeps those worlds artificially separate is an education that fails them. “We wanted to design a curriculum where there was a seamless binding of western philosophy with our Islamic heritage,” she explains, “because they complement each other. There isn’t a contradiction in the two.”
That seamlessness is the degree’s defining quality.
What Makes This Program Different
At the heart of this degree is what the team calls exposure theory: students read widely and produce constantly. Every course is built around both. You will not spend a semester absorbing theory and then eventually try your hand at writing. You will be reading and writing from the beginning, building fluency the way fluency has always been built, through practice and immersion.
Among the courses you will encounter:
- The Mirror and the Mirage: Islam in Western Literature takes students into the English canon to examine how Muslims and Islam have been represented, often in deeply distorted ways, and what it means to understand that history. It is the kind of course that changes how you read everything else.
- Writing for Change: Revolution, Culture, and Society is for the writer who wants her words to do something in the world. It studies how real change has happened through writing, and then teaches you how to write for it.
- From Manuscript to Market and The History and Artistry of the Book bring students into the business of publishing, because a beautiful book is also a made thing, and the making of it is worth understanding from the inside.
Beyond these, the degree spans the full range of what writing can be: children’s literature, young adult fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction. Students will also encounter rhetoric, which Aisha describes with some delight as “top secret” but worth looking forward to. The goal throughout is not just to teach writing conventions, but to help each student discover and develop her own voice within them.
This Degree Is Also for You If You Don’t Feel Like a Writer
One of the most important things to say about this degree is this: you do not have to already be a confident writer to belong here. In fact, this degree was built with you specifically in mind.
What Dr. Gray has observed, through years of working with Daybreak Press, is that many women have something real and valuable to contribute. They have stories, ideas, and perspectives that deserve to be in print. What stops them is not the absence of something worth saying, but a lack of confidence or craft. This degree addresses both. By the time you finish, you will be a faster reader, a deeper reader, a stronger writer, a more confident writer, and, inshallah, a published one.
A Degree That Ends with a Manuscript
Every bachelor’s degree at Ribāṭ University culminates in a capstone, and the Literature, Writing, and Publishing capstone is one of the most exciting. If you are motivated, you could finish this degree with a manuscript ready for publication. There are also other pathways, including internship options, and students choose the capstone direction that suits their goals. But the possibility is real: four years of reading, writing, and formation, and a book to show for it.
The program is offered online, affordably, and with the flexibility that Muslim women’s lives actually require. Options include the full Bachelor of Arts, a double major, and elective courses available across degree programs for those who want meaningful exposure to literature and writing without committing to a full specialization.
The Words Our Community Needs
There is no shortage of things being published in the world. What is in shorter supply is writing that is genuinely good, grounded in Islamic knowledge, and produced by women who have something true to say.
Ribāṭ University is committed to changing that. The BA in Literature, Writing, and Publishing is not just training writers. It is forming women who will leave a literary legacy, in fiction and non-fiction, in poetry and prose, in children’s books and scholarly essays, in every form that language takes when it is used with intention and care.
The story you are carrying deserves to be written. This degree will help you write it.
If you are ready, explore the Bachelor of Arts in Literature, Writing, and Publishing at Ribāṭ University. Applications reopen in November 2026.