Enter Here to Grow in Wisdom
Announcements
Registration for Fall courses is now closed. Check back later for Spring 2026 course announcements and registration, in shāʿ Allāh.
The Ḥikmah Center WhatsApp Community now offers an online community for goal-setting and reflection, reading recommendations, and fun community activities. Join here!
The Ḥikmah Center also offers online private tutoring. See the Private Tutoring tab for more details.
Watch the recording of the Inaugural Lecture below to learn about the purpose and offerings of the Ḥikmah Center.
Welcome to the Ḥikmah Center for Reading, Dialectic, and Philosophy, an intellectual community of brothers in Dallas, TX, dedicated to the cultivation of thoughtful and compassionate individuals who read widely, think deeply, listen earnestly, and speak articulately.
Do you love reading? Or do you wish you loved reading? The Ḥikmah Center can introduce you to the works of Plato, Aristotle, Ghazālī, and Ibn Khaldūn. Our dialectic pedagogy, which focuses on participation and discussion, invites students to voice their own thoughts on the great ideas they read about. Through reading and discussion, the Ḥikmah Center enables students to be lifelong learners and lovers of wisdom, that is, philosophers.
Welcome
About
The Ḥikmah Center
The Ḥikmah Center is an intellectual community built upon the three pillars of reading, dialectic, and philosophy. Each pillar has a definition particular to the Ḥikmah Center and contributes to the Center’s overarching vision to educate and produce thoughtful and compassionate individuals who read widely, think deeply, listen earnestly, and speak articulately.
Reading
The first pillar of the Ḥikmah Center, reading, is the easiest to understand. Reading is our window into the minds of those luminaries who have sought to capture their ideas in words from the beginning of recorded history. The Ḥikmah Center is specifically interested in reading the great books, the books that are worth reading twice (or thrice or more) and that have charted the course of subsequent thought and writing. To be committed to reading these books means to believe that they remain respectable and relevant to our lives. Beyond reading, however, the Ḥikmah Center seeks to bring people back into the presence of the ideas of these books through conversation and dialectic.
Dialectic
Dialectic refers to the conversational component of the Ḥikmah Center, and it is best understood in relation to its opposites. The first opposite of dialectic is rhetoric. While rhetoric involves a unidirectional display of the speaker’s oratory talents, dialectic involves a constant back-and-forth between discussants who try to ensure that they have understood one another. The second opposite of dialectic is eristic. While eristic stakes out a position on the issue and battles its opponent at all costs, dialectic prompts us to link arms and cooperatively seek the truth. The last opposite of dialectic is didacticism. The didact talks, tells, and teaches; the dialectician asks, listens, and inquires. The student of the didact can sit back and listen like a spectator at a sports game, but the student of the dialectician must think and communicate like one of the players.
Not every opposite is unwelcome at the Ḥikmah Center. Eristic is to be avoided, but rhetoric and didacticism have a limited place. Didacticism, teaching, is particularly important in conveying information to students, but it is always directed toward the eventual engagement of the student through dialectic.
Philosophy
Philosophy, in the context of the Ḥikmah Center, is nothing other than the love of wisdom. It does not refer to any particular doctrine nor to the tendency to destructively critique ideas until everything is doubtful and relative. Rather, philosophy is a disposition that yearns to search, to discover, and to know, especially when it comes to big questions about life, humanity, and the world. Philosophy is the twinkle in the eye of every curious and bright-eyed child who loves to ask “why” and whose spark of wonder has yet to be extinguished by his society. Despite being an innate and, in some ways, childlike curiosity, philosophy also requires a mature commitment to living the consequences of what one believes. The one who knows, and who loves knowing, must also love acting according to what he knows. Otherwise, he is not a true lover of wisdom. In sum, philosophy is both the childlike curiosity that prompts us to begin the journey of reading and dialectic, and the mature completion of our intellects when we actualize our knowledge of Reality.
