About Sakeenah
The Sakeenah Living Learning Community originated as a student-led community and is a community designed to engage students around the Muslim-American experience, with an emphasis on communal, personal, spiritual, and individual growth at WashU. The Sakeenah name represents calmness, quietness, tranquility, and peace where you live in the Arabic language.
Sakeenah History
Sakeenah’s story begins in premodern Arabia, immersed in the oppressive heat of the Arabian Desert. The Bedouin nomads of this harsh and unforgiving environment survived on discovering rare oases, pockets of life in an otherwise uninhabitable domain. In these sanctuaries, they experienced a deep sense of contentment, security, and safety, which they described as “sakeenah”, denoting tranquility in their native Arabic.
In the Fall of 2016, amidst our arrival to WashU, we found Muslim students in a similar desert of Islamic spirituality. Students had come from diverse backgrounds seeking a home at WashU and in the city of St. Louis. However, there were struggles to find an Islamic community on campus or friends who shared similar values. Sakeenah, then informal, did its best to fill this spiritual void with daily communal prayers, casual get-togethers, and the like. But more was desired. To fulfill the desired requests and with the support of Professor Younassee, we decided to create a Living Learning Community centered around the Muslim-American experience, with an emphasis on communal, personal, spiritual, and individual growth. And thus, Sakeenah was formed as a LLC in Fall of 2019.
written by founders of Sakeenah LLC