btw do Islamic student loans exist?

I agree with Abdel-Rahman that developing these type of funds for scholarships or no-interest loans should be a top priority of Muslim organizations. This issue has been known to be very important for some time and in the meantime countless Muslims have engaged in the serious sin of riba. Among these are many who really did not wish to do so, but so no “practical” way out. On the individual level, we should strive to have more taqwa, but as a community we have to make it easier for people to do the right thing especially when they would do so if you showed them the way.

As to Mohammad’s point about lawyers, this leads to the fact that in certain key areas, we have to go far beyond just the scholarships issue to address many other serious long term planning issues. One can say that we need a lot more Muslim lawyers, but the fact is that as we speak there are many Muslim lawyers in the United States, and most of them in their professional lives are not dealing with so-called “Muslim issues” which are the ones that we think we need all the lawyers for. A large percentage of the Muslims who need legal assistance cannot pay for it themselves. If we want Muslim lawyers to service the community, we need to fund organizations that can hire them to do legal work that is needed by the community and if we want to attract the best talent we have to pay those lawyers competitively with what they could get in other legal jobs. We also have to provide opportunities for Muslim lawyers who want to work in these areas to train and develop experitise in those areas.

If you look at high profile Muslim legal cases, you will most often find non-Muslim lawyers representing our brothers and sisters. There are many reasons for this, but it is not accidental nor is it because there are no Muslim lawyers. It is for more complex reasons which require well thought out plans and strategies to address them.

MaShaAllah there are many many Muslim lawyers just like there are in many other fields who do some work for free or who take less money to work for causes they believe in, this is sadaqah on their part as individuals but it is not a good plan for sustainable high functioning communities.

Allaah knows best.

Faisal , your bro

In this case it is not possible for the community to choose just 2 or 3 individuals to pursue the degree as we need hundreds or even thousands of muslim lawyers. Would this be considered necessary?

I think that the logistics of the “community scholarships” idea could be worked out more, allowing more than 2 or 3 people to pursue their degrees; it is, however, a great idea, and it’s exciting to see that it’s legitimately being discussed on the scholarly level. Perhaps at the major Islamic conferences (ISNA, MAS/ICNA, TDC) this can be a topic of discussion, and within the next few years we will see a Muslim Scholarship Fund for undergraduate and graduate studies. As someone who’s in school right now, I definitely would appreciate it.