One-on-One with Zaytuna’s Dawood Yasin

Dawood Yasin sits down for an insightful What-A-Relief podcast about the spiritual value of serving humanity

There are many valuable things people learn while seeking a higher education. In the halls of universities across the world, most students are seeking opportunities to better their future, obtain meaningful careers, and build lifelong bonds. Naeem Muhammad interviewed our guest Imam Dawood Yasin of our latest podcast about where his passion for exploration has brought him and how he now teaches students to do the same and serve.

At Zaytuna College, in Berkeley California, Yasin is an administrator that believes deeply in exploring the true meaning of education. He also provides a pathway toward seeing the spiritual value of service while also earning a degree. He is the Director of student life at Zaytuna and his efforts towards service learning engagements were born out of a fight against stagnation.

“I think that complacency is a dangerous thing I feel like. And the more that I think about that and kind of where that brings me, I think about my personal life, just dealing with my body as we’re getting older now…  I think that it challenges us because we know the reality of it. We know the impact of it. But yet we don’t engage it in the way we should” Yasin said when asked about the need for more institutions to become service based.

Yasin has personally committed himself to exposing Zaytuna students to initiatives that give back to vulnerable communities. It’s placed them face-to-face with the reality of migrant workers’ suffering, and even alongside disaster recovery teams led by IRUSA in the south. Every student has to complete a minimum of 50 hours supervised service.

What Yasin is most concerned about is connecting the spiritual dimension to everything they do. He says, “One of the things we talk about in our classes in regards to spirituality vis-a-vis our tradition and what we’re giving to the community. Are we producers of goodness? Or are we just seen as consumers to take from community?”