About the Press

The Foundations Press builds the curriculum Muslim schools were missing

We publish FISLI, the Foundations of Sacred Islamic Literacy Initiative: a classical Islamic curriculum for North American schools, mosque programs and homes, built so that each year rests on the one before it and every claim can be traced to its source.

What we make

Most Islamic education in North America starts with rules, lists and memorization, and never arrives at the foundation those things rest on. FISLI starts there instead. Five disciplines are taught in a deliberate order: Prophetic Sīrah, ʿAqīdah (belief), ʿUlūm al-Qurʾān (Qurʾānic sciences), Ḥadīth sciences, and Manṭiq (classical logic). A student who finishes the sequence knows what Sunni theology claims, how we know what we know, and how to think inside the tradition when it is challenged.

The organizing idea is taʾdīb, the formation of persons of adab, rather than tarbiyah, mere nurturing. We explain the difference here.

How the work is governed

Every unit passes a four-gate review before it can be released: voice and register, source authentication, theological review, and the render and release gate. The rules are public as the FISLI Standard, versioned and licensed CC BY, with an errata page. The Press does not name living scholars in its public documents; governance is shown structurally, through the published standard and the release register, and licensing institutions receive the review status of every unit they adopt. The texts behind each discipline are listed on the Scholarly Sources page, and the rules for assistive tools in the AI Governance Framework.

The four-gate audit: voice and register, source authentication, theological review, render and release. A unit that fails a gate is rebuilt before it moves on.GATE 1Voice andregisterGATE 2SourceauthenticationGATE 3TheologicalreviewGATE 4Render andreleaseA unit that fails any gate goes back to the start. Nothing is released on the strength of a later gate.

The Press teaches the classical Sunni tradition through its own books and honours all four schools of law equally. Where positions differ, the curriculum says so and names the sources.

The founder

Abdulahi M. Gesey, Founder and Curriculum Director. Three years ago I made a decision that restructured everything. I had a degree in Economics from George Mason University, two technology certifications, and eight years of enterprise systems work in the DC metro area. I left all of it to study the classical Islamic sciences full-time: four months in Medina, then Cairo, under qualified Azharī scholars.

The reason was epistemological: I had read enough of the tradition to know I did not understand it. Not really. I understood about it. That is different.

Three years later, the work is producing something specific: a curriculum built simultaneously from inside the classical scholarly tradition and with professional-grade institutional design. The governance architecture, the quality gates, the tiered certification framework, the licensing model: these are the same systems thinking I applied to cloud architecture and institutional IT for eight years. Scholars build the tradition. Systems thinkers build the infrastructure that carries it. I am building The Foundations Press from Cairo, where the study continues, toward North America, where the community needs it.

Organization

Page reviewed 20 October 2026.

See the standard for yourself. The free Manṭiq unit is one complete lesson sequence from the curriculum, with its sources on the page.

Get the free unit