Converts represent a significant and consistently underserved population in every institutional context where Muslim chaplains work. This seminar builds the concrete knowledge and pastoral competency to serve them well — and honestly.

Saturday One: Who Converts Are and What They Carry

Morning — The Convert Experience: What the Data and the People Say

Chaplains who work from assumptions rather than knowledge will misserve this population. Build the actual picture first.

• Who converts to Islam in America — demographic reality, not stereotype. African American converts as the largest and oldest convert community; the specific weight of that history. Latino, white, and other convert communities and their distinct experiences.
• The convert timeline: the first year, the first five years, the long middle. Where people thrive and where they disappear — and why.
• Family rupture as the most common convert crisis: estrangement, pressure, the holidays that become annual grief events, the death of a non-Muslim parent the community doesn't know how to hold.
• The marriage problem: converts under pressure to marry quickly, within communities that may not accept them fully, without the family infrastructure that born Muslims take for granted.
• Religious identity instability: the convert who came in through one school or movement and is now somewhere different — Salafi to traditional Sunni, Sufi to skeptic. How chaplains accompany someone whose Islam is still becoming.

Late Morning — What the Tradition Says About the New Muslim

• The Prophet ﷺ's specific care for converts: Bilal, Suhayb, Salman — each with a distinct story of integration and what the community owed them. These are not inspirational footnotes; they are pastoral models.
• The fiqh of the new Muslim: what is actually obligatory in the first days, weeks, months? What does the tradition give people time to learn? Chaplains who make the religion feel impossible to new Muslims are not serving them.
• The concept of takhfif (legal lightening) and its pastoral application: how does the tradition make space for the person still finding their footing?
• Shahada in institutional contexts — hospital conversions, prison conversions, deathbed conversions. What are the chaplain's responsibilities? What are the fiqh implications? What does the family have a right to know?

Saturday Two: Hard Cases and Honest Responses

Morning — Field Scenarios

Case-based, with no easy answers prepared in advance.

• A woman converts in a hospital after a terminal diagnosis. Her non-Muslim family is present and hostile. She asks for an Islamic burial. She dies three days later. What do you do?
• An incarcerated man takes shahada. His imam endorser doubts the sincerity of prison conversions. You are his chaplain. How do you advocate for him without lying?
• A convert on a college campus is being pulled between competing Muslim factions, each claiming they represent real Islam. He is exhausted and considering leaving. What does he need from you?
• A Latina convert is being told by her community that she must give up quinceañera attendance, tamales at Christmas, and her mother's rosary — or she is not really Muslim. She comes to you in tears. What is the actual fiqh here, and what is cultural imposition?
• A white male convert has become increasingly radicalized online. He is in your institutional care. How do you engage him pastorally without becoming complicit or without alienating him entirely?

Late Morning — The Community's Responsibility and the Chaplain's Role

• Convert retention: the research is damning. High numbers leave within the first few years. What is the Muslim community's structural failure here — and what can a chaplain do about it from inside an institution?
• Cultural Islam vs. practiced Islam: the convert who is more observant than the born Muslim family they marry into — a real and recurring dynamic with specific pastoral demands.
• The chaplain as bridge: when the convert's institutional community (prison, hospital, military) is healthier for their Islam than the outside Muslim community they will return to. How do you prepare someone for that?
• Building a convert referral network: who in your city is actually doing this well? What organizations, imams, and communities are converts safe with?

Unity is not the erasure of difference — it is the honest acknowledgment of it, held within a shared love of the Prophet ﷺ. This seminar equips chaplains to serve across one of the most significant theological divides in the Muslim world.

Saturday One: History, Theology, and the Honest Map

Morning — The Wound and Its History

The Sunni–Shia divide is theological, cosmological, and emotional — not merely political. Chaplains who understand this history can move within it with care.

• What happened at Saqifa and Karbala — as history that formed two distinct communities of grief and meaning, held without polemic or apologetics
• The theological divergences that carry pastoral weight: Imamah as a question of religious authority, not just succession; 'Isma; Taqiyya and the pastoral damage of its misreading; the role of Ahl al-Bayt in salvation
• Where the fiqh overlaps and where it genuinely differs — salah, marriage law, halal
• The political weaponization of Sunni–Shia division in the American Muslim context, and what it does to communities

Late Morning — Encounter, Not Theory

A Shia scholar or community leader in witnessed conversation with Imam Webb — not debate but honest exchange about what genuine unity requires. Students are present in the discomfort. This is itself pastoral training.

Saturday Two: The Chaplain in the Middle

Morning — Field Scenarios

• A dying Shia man asks for the Ziyarat 'Ashura. You don't know it. His family is present.
• A Sunni family asks that a Shia chaplain not return to their father's room. You are the Sunni chaplain.
• A convert who came to Islam through a Shia community is now in a Sunni prison population facing pressure to renounce.
• A campus Muslim community fractures along Sunni–Shia lines after events overseas. You are the Muslim chaplain for the whole community.

Late Morning — What Unity Actually Asks of Us

Is unity always the right goal, or is justice sometimes the prior claim? What does the Sunni tradition's own love of Ahl al-Bayt demand of a Sunni chaplain serving Shia patients? Imam Webb's own position here is formative. He does not obscure it.

Closing: A shared recitation of Salawat. Not as theological compromise — as acknowledgment of what we hold in common.

Anti-Blackness is not a peripheral issue in Muslim chaplaincy. It is present in the communities chaplains come from, the institutions they serve in, and sometimes in the chaplains themselves. This seminar names it, traces it, and builds the tools to confront it pastorally and institutionally.

Saturday One: Anti-Blackness in the Muslim Community

Morning — Naming What Is Present

The Muslim community is not immune to anti-Blackness. Pretending otherwise is itself a form of harm. This session names the phenomenon with precision.

• The specific history: Arab, South Asian, and immigrant Muslim communities arriving in America and inheriting or importing anti-Black racism — while building mosques in Black neighborhoods, sometimes on the labor of Black Muslims.
• The theology that enables it: how color hierarchy gets laundered through culture and passed off as Islamic normativity. Arab linguistic supremacy in Islamic education. The treatment of African Islamic scholarship as peripheral. The erasure of West African, East African, and African American Islamic intellectual traditions.
• Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam as theological and political challenge to immigrant Muslim respectability — and the ways immigrant communities distanced themselves from that legacy while benefiting from the civil rights it helped build.
• Colorism in marriage: the documented patterns in Muslim matrimonial culture, the fiqh that explicitly prohibits racial discrimination in marriage, and the gap between the two.
• Anti-Blackness in Islamic institutions: who leads, who is hired, who is invited to speak, who sets curriculum — and what the data shows when you look honestly.

Late Morning — The Tradition's Own Resources Against It

• The Prophet ﷺ's explicit condemnation of racial tribalism as jahiliyya — not a social nicety but a theological category. 'Asabiyya as spiritual disease.
• Bilal ibn Rabah not as inspirational object but as theological argument: what does the community owe the person it once enslaved and now claims to honor?
• The African Islamic scholarly tradition — Mansa Musa, Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti, Usman dan Fodio — as intellectual inheritance that belongs to every Muslim, not a specialty track.
• Sherman Jackson, Umar Lee, and contemporary Muslim thinkers on Black Islam and immigrant Islam in America: the necessary reading list every Muslim chaplain should have completed.

Saturday Two: Anti-Blackness in American Institutions — Where Chaplains Actually Work

Morning — The Institutional Landscape

Every institution where Muslim chaplains serve is shaped by anti-Blackness. Naming this is not politics — it is professional competency.

• The criminal justice system: Black Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of white Americans. The Muslim prison population skews heavily Black. What does it mean to serve this population while employed by the system that imprisons them?
• Hospitals and the racial health gap: Black patients receive measurably different pain management, diagnostic attention, and end-of-life care. The Muslim chaplain in a hospital is not outside this — they are inside it, and they need to know what their patients are navigating.
• Military chaplaincy and the Black soldier: a specific and underexamined context with its own history of anti-Black discrimination and its own Muslim presence.
• Campus chaplaincy and the Black Muslim student: often navigating both anti-Blackness from non-Black Muslim students and Islamophobia from non-Muslim Black peers simultaneously. What does the chaplain offer this person?

Late Morning — Pastoral Practice and Prophetic Witness

• What does a Black Muslim patient or client need from a non-Black Muslim chaplain? This is a direct question that deserves a direct answer — built through listening, not assumption.
• When the chaplain is Black and the institution is anti-Black: the specific burden, the specific authority, and the specific pastoral demands of serving in a system that diminishes you.
• Bystander intervention for chaplains: what do you do when you witness anti-Black treatment of a patient or client in an institutional setting where you have some standing?
• The reparative dimension: what does the Muslim community owe Black Muslims specifically — not as charity but as justice? How does a chaplain embody that obligation in their daily work?

Imam Webb on his own formation in this area — including the moments he got it wrong and what it cost. Chaplain Lauren on anti-Blackness as a gendered experience in Muslim institutional life.

The DSM is not the chaplain's primary text — but it is not the enemy either. This seminar equips chaplains to hold the Islamic understanding of the human person in generous, non-reductive dialogue with clinical frameworks.

Saturday One: The Islamic Anthropology of the Interior

Morning — The Human Person in Islamic Thought

• The Quranic account of nafs: ammara, lawwama, mutma'inna — not as stages to be achieved but as simultaneous realities present in every person
• Qalb as the seat of cognition and moral perception — Ibn al-Qayyim's Ighathat al-Lahfan as a guide to the diseases of the heart and their remedies
• Waswas in classical fiqh: the tradition has been addressing OCD-adjacent experience for centuries, and this wisdom belongs in the chaplain's toolkit
• Jinn, sihr, and 'ayn: a theologically serious account of what the tradition says — and a practical framework for chaplains navigating families who present within these frames

Late Morning — Where Islamic Frameworks Meet Clinical Ones

Grief and depression. Spiritual emergency and psychosis. Tawbah compulsion and scrupulosity. Trauma and the interruption of salah. Suicide in Islamic law and pastoral response — the tradition's position and the pastoral obligation to the person present. A Muslim mental health clinician joins the session to model holding both frameworks without collapsing either.

Saturday Two: The Chaplain's Response in Crisis

Morning — Specific Populations, Specific Challenges

• Depression and salah: the fiqh and pastoral care of the person who cannot rise for Fajr, who feels nothing in prayer, who has stepped back from practice not from disbelief but from exhaustion and despair
• Psychosis and religious content: how to assess without reductionism, and how to remain a grounding presence
• The family requesting ruqya when the patient needs a psychiatrist — holding both without dismissing either
• Suicide attempt in a Muslim patient: what does the tradition offer, what does the person need, and how does the chaplain hold both at once?

Late Morning — Building the Pastoral Response

Students develop a personal protocol for mental health encounters: Islamic resources to offer, clinical referrals to make, language that honors the whole person. Role-play with debrief by Imam Webb and Chaplain Lauren.

The Islamic tradition engages marriage and sexuality with remarkable depth and candor. Chaplains who are formed in this tradition can offer genuine theological grounding to people navigating some of the most intimate dimensions of human life.

Saturday One: The Islamic Theology of Marriage and the Body

Morning — Nikah as Covenant

• The Quranic language of mithaq ghaliz — the same phrase used for the covenant with the Prophets — and what this asks of how chaplains hold marriage in pastoral work
• The maqasid of nikah and the Islamic theology of sukun, mawadda, and rahma in Surah al-Rum: a pastoral anthropology of intimacy, not merely a legal contract
• Talaq, khul', and faskh: chaplains who know these mechanisms can give people an accurate map of what the tradition permits and how it protects. Knowledge here is pastoral care.

Late Morning — Sexuality in the Islamic Tradition

The tradition addresses human sexuality with frankness and wisdom. Chaplains who are formed in it can serve people with genuine Islamic grounding rather than deflection or prohibition-listing.

• The classical fiqh of intimacy: rights, obligations, permissions — including pleasure as religiously legitimate and spiritually significant
• Sexual dysfunction and its fiqh implications for marriage validity
• Marital coercion: what the tradition says, and where honest engagement with the tradition requires honest critique
• Temporary marriage (mut'a): Shia practice, Sunni prohibition, and how chaplains respond when clients present within this context
• Pre-marital and extra-marital situations: pastoral framework rather than fatwa delivery

Saturday Two: Sexuality at the Edges

Morning — LGBTQ+ Muslims: Pastoral Responsibility

Muslim chaplains serve LGBTQ+ Muslims across every institutional context. This seminar prepares them to do so with both theological integrity and genuine pastoral care.

• The classical position, engaged honestly and without caricature
• Emerging scholarship that reads the tradition differently — Kecia Ali, Scott Kugle, and others. Exposure and engagement, not endorsement.
• The pastoral distinction between theological conviction and what the person in front of you needs in this moment
• Concrete scenarios: a transgender patient requesting help with salah; a gay Muslim teenager who is suicidal after family rejection

Imam Webb shares his own pastoral practice and theological position with full transparency. Chaplain Lauren's voice and experience are integral to this session.

Late Morning — Domestic Violence, Sexual Trauma, and the Chaplain's Response

• The misuse of qiwama and the ayah of darb — not only the scholarly debates but the pastoral damage done by weaponized readings, and how chaplains respond
• Trauma-informed care from an Islamic frame: du'a, community, legal protection, and the spiritual dignity the tradition offers survivors
• Mandatory reporting: legal obligations and the religious frame held together
• Building a referral network: Muslim DV organizations, clinicians, legal advocates

Beneath every addiction is a thirst — for relief, for meaning, for connection, for God — that has found a destructive vessel. The chaplain's work is to accompany the person, name the thirst, and draw from the tradition's deep well of mercy.

Saturday One: Understanding Addiction Through Islamic and Clinical Lenses

Morning — The Islamic Account of 'Aql and Its Diminishment

• The 'aql as the faculty of moral and spiritual perception — and why khamr's prohibition is grounded in a profound account of human dignity
• The progressive Quranic revelation on khamr as itself a model of pastoral wisdom: God met the community where it was and walked it forward incrementally
• The five maqasid and addiction — hifz al-'aql, hifz al-nafs, hifz al-mal, hifz al-nasl: addiction reaches into all five simultaneously, and the chaplain who sees this has a comprehensive Islamic lens for the damage
• Israr and tawbah in the context of relapse: Ibn al-Qayyim on the mercy that receives the returning soul — not as sentimentality but as theological precision

Late Morning — Clinical Frameworks the Chaplain Needs

• The disease model of addiction: what it illuminates, what it misses, and where Islamic anthropology of nafs and 'aql both resonates and adds
• The neuroscience of addiction in plain language — essential for collaborating with clinical teams and for pastoral honesty with clients
• Trauma and addiction: the ACE research and its significance. Many people in addiction are survivors first. Missing this is a pastoral failure.
• Specific substances and their pastoral contexts: alcohol, opioids, marijuana (with its genuine fiqh complexity), prescription misuse
• The Muslim in a 12-step room — what the chaplain who has thought theologically about "Higher Power" can offer this person

Saturday Two: The Chaplain in Recovery Spaces

Morning — Pastoral Accompaniment

• The Muslim carrying addiction in secret from family and community: shame, tawbah, and the pastoral art of holding a confidence that is also a crisis
• The incarcerated person in recovery: what does recovery mean when you will return to the same neighborhood, the same pressures, the same poverty?
• The family of the person in addiction: the limits of enablement, the obligations of care, the permissibility of limits — grounded in fiqh and akhlaq rather than self-help frameworks
• Relapse as pastoral encounter: what the chaplain offers the person who has just used after months of sobriety
• Death by overdose: janaza, family grief, community silence, and the chaplain's responsibility to the full humanity of the deceased

Late Morning — Building Islamic Recovery Infrastructure

• Muslim-specific recovery communities: Millati Islami, Muslims in Recovery — their resources and how to connect clients
• The mosque as recovery community — what would it take, and what is the chaplain's role in helping build it?
• Spirituality as a protective factor in recovery: substantial research exists here, and the chaplain who can draw on it without weaponizing it serves people well
• Students draft a chaplain's early recovery guide: first conversation, spiritual resources, clinical referrals, follow-up structure