About Afiyah Collective

We aim to help people in the Phoenix area connect deeply with Allah ﷻ, His Messenger ﷺ, and each other through knowledge (‘ilm) and worship (‘ibādah).

Knowledge — One of our main intentions is to make personally obligatory knowledge accessible to everyone. The greatest knowledge that we teach is the knowledge of who Allah ﷻ and the Prophet ﷺ are, and this is our top priority in our curriculum.

Worship — It is through knowledge that we are able to worship Allah ﷻ as He loves. Once we put into practice what we learn, we are then able to experience transformational change inside-out. The primary way we will support you is by teaching you the knowledge that will facilitate your personal worship, as well as providing spaces of gathering for reading Qur’an and remembrance.

Connection — We need to connect in order to grow. The Prophet ﷺ had to connect with His Teacher, the Angel Jibrīl before knowledge could be transferred. Connection allows us to learn, which facilitates our worship, which only furthers our connection to Allah, the Prophet, ourselves and those around us.

We envision a community where every individual has learned their foundational Islamic knowledge and is able to make an impact on their respective circles of influence. We aim to work with Islamic institutions throughout the valley to facilitate making this essential Islamic knowledge accessible, while building a community that is deeply grounded in an Islamic worldview and ethos.

Ustadh Yamen Atassi is the founding director of Afiyah Collective. Ustadh Yamen graduated with degrees in Philosophy and Humanities and then went on to graduate from Qasid Arabic Institute in Jordan. In Jordan, he began his formal studies with scholars in Divine Law (Fiqh), Theology (‘Aqīdah), Prophetic Tradition (Hadīth), Arabic Grammar, Legal Theory (Usūl al-Fiqh), Qur’ānic Exegesis (Tafsīr), Islamic History, and Islamic Spirituality (Tazkiya). After two years of in-person study of the Islamic sciences, Ustadh Yamen enrolled in Hartford Seminary’s Islamic Chaplaincy Program, which he is working on completing. Since moving to Phoenix in 2020, he served as the Sacred Sciences Coordinator at Arizona Cultural Academy for three years. He now works as a Teacher Trainer at Basira Education, in addition to founding Afiyah Collective. Ustadh Yamen holds an ijāzah in Tajwīd (Hafs and Shu’bah) from Shaykh Abdullah Abu Sneineh, and continues to study with his teachers with a focus on Divine Law (Fiqh), Islamic Theology (‘Aqīdah), Qur’ānic Exegesis (Tafsīr), and Arabic Literature.