Security is an amana.
A twelve-week intensive for seven Fellows, chosen from anywhere in the world, deep across offensive security, defensive security, and systems research, where the craft and the character are formed together.
The craft and the character, together.
Most cybersecurity education teaches power and stays silent on how to hold it. The Amana Fellowship refuses that. It joins frontier engineering to a fourteen-hundred-year tradition of reasoning about trust, and it does so for only seven people at a time, each known personally, and with direct access to the Oxford and Cambridge community.
Known personally
Not a course with a cohort, but something closer to apprenticeship. Seven Fellows, each understood as an individual.
Frontier rigour
Twelve full-time weeks reading state-of-the-art research and implementing it, ending in an original capstone the Fellow defends. No fluff.
Islam at the centre
Faith here is not kept in a separate room from the work. It is built into the work itself
Three disciplines, taken to depth.
No survey of the field, and no tour of tools. The Fellowship goes deep in three directions only: how systems are broken, how they are defended, and how they are studied. The breadth everyone else sells, we deliberately refuse.
Offensive security
Learning to break systems lawfully, so you understand how they truly fail rather than how they are meant to work. The craft runs from software up through networks and the cloud, and down into the wireless and the hardware, with a signature strand in radio and the physical layer that most engineers never reach. The aim is not a kit of exploits but the adversary’s habit of mind, held under permission and restraint.
Defensive security
Building and running systems that withstand real attack, not merely pass an audit. Hardening and secure-by-construction design, then detection and response: seeing an intrusion while it is happening and acting, on the working assumption that breach is a when, not an if. The discipline of the people who have to hold the line every day.
Systems security research
Moving from breaking to knowing. You learn to take a paper from the field’s hardest venues, reproduce its core result, and extend it into something of your own, written up plainly and defended in the open. This is the discipline that separates someone who uses tools from someone who can add to what the field knows.
The tradition has reasoned about trust for centuries.
Each technical theme is paired with the part of the tradition that has thought hardest about the same problem, and read alongside it. These are not metaphors. They are the same ideas, arriving early.
Break it, defend it, then advance it.
Six phases across twelve weeks, and three disciplines: breaking systems, defending them, and researching them. In each phase the engineering is taught alongside the part of the Islamic tradition that reasoned about questions of trust and restraint: verification in al-Ghazali long before zero trust, provenance in the chains of isnad long before the software supply chain. The aim is to form the skill and the character that governs it in the same motion. The tradition is not commentary on the craft. It is woven through it.
Foundations & the adversarial mind
How systems really work, and how they really fail. Isolation, memory, and the habit of looking at a thing and asking how it could be made to break. Your first exploit, written to see clearly, not to show off.
The tradition
Security begins as amana: a trust placed in your hands, to be guarded as something not your own. We open with the counsel to tie the camel and then rely on God, precaution is not the opposite of trust but its proof. The hardened system is the tied camel; the care you take is worship before it is engineering.
Breaking software
The craft of making a program do what it was never meant to. Memory corruption, the web, and reading a binary back into meaning, practised only on targets you have been given permission to attack.
The tradition
We study how things break the way Hudhayfa studied evil, who said he asked about it “for fear it would catch me.” Offensive skill is sought only to guard against harm, never to cause it. The line between a test and a trespass is itself an amana, and permission, asked and granted, is what keeps the one from becoming the other.
The wireless & physical frontier
The attacks most engineers never see, because they live below the software, in the radio and the silicon. WiFi, cellular, the things that carry signals on the assumption that no one is listening. This is the Fellowship’s signature ground.
The tradition
To listen to what was never meant for you is to stand at the edge of tajassus, the spying the Qur’an forbids, and sitr, the covering of what should stay hidden. So the power to intercept is taught beside the discipline to restrain it. Knowing how to listen is a skill; choosing not to is character, and the tradition treats the second as the harder of the two.
Defensive security
Now turn around and hold the line. Building systems that withstand real attack, hardening and secure-by-construction design, then detection and response: seeing an intrusion as it happens, and acting on the assumption that breach is a when, not an if.
The tradition
To defend is ribat, the vigilant guarding of the frontier that the tradition counts among the highest works, and ihsan, to act as though watched even when no one is. Al-Ghazali’s refusal to trust what he had not verified becomes zero trust: assume nothing because it is familiar, check everything. And the readiness for breach is a kind of humility, you guard with all your strength, then accept that you were never the one in final control.
The researcher’s craft
Moving from breaking to knowing. How to take a paper from the field’s hardest venues, reproduce its result honestly, and find the question it leaves open, the work that turns an engineer into someone who can add to what is known.
The tradition
No tradition built knowledge more carefully than this one. The hadith scholars graded every chain and weighed every transmitter, al-jarh wa al-ta’dil, accept nothing on authority alone, and record honestly what you do not know. That is method, and it is also sidq, truthfulness, made into a discipline: the seeking of knowledge as worship, governed by the refusal to overstate.
Capstone: knowledge that benefits
Your own contribution. Extend the frontier in a direction you choose, write it up plainly, and defend it in a viva before mentors and the community.
The tradition
The capstone is ‘ilm naafi‘, knowledge that benefits, the only kind the tradition finally honours. You extend the frontier to give something back, and you defend it in the open, because knowledge hoarded rather than passed on is a trust betrayed. What you receive as amana, you discharge by handing onward.
Twelve weeks here will put you years ahead in capability. But the deeper formation is of the heart: you leave able to reason about trust from first principles, with the adab to know the right place of what you hold and the ihsan to work as though observed when no one is. This is the leadership the tradition honours: power held as a stewardship to answer for, carried quietly.
Seven Fellows.
Known, each one.
- Completely onlineDelivered entirely online, so talent from anywhere in the world can reach it.
- TransparencyEvery session is recorded and observable.
- One mentorIn this first iteration the founder mentors all seven Fellows directly.
- Learn from the bestGuest sessions from some of the most accomplished Muslims in cybersecurity across the world, and direct access to the Oxford and Cambridge community.
- LifelongSuhba is the gateway; the alumni community, and the mentorship, does not end.
Mentorship is one-to-one but never private: every session is online and recorded, open to families to monitor, with khalwa honoured through observability. An independent safeguarding lead is maintained, and the framework is read and signed by the mentor, the mentee and the parent or guardian.
A systems and security enthusiast circling one question: how do we build systems people can depend on, and hold what is entrusted to us as an amana, guarded with the ihsan of working as though observed. Completing a master’s in Software and Systems Security at the University of Oxford. Born and raised in the Gulf, in Qatar, with Pakistani heritage, and working in close collaboration with the Islamic community in Oxford.
Connect on LinkedInI had to find my way through this largely alone. I am building the guide I never had.
The path from Doha to Oxford and into work at the frontier, I had to work out mostly on my own, and I struggled. There was no one to make the right introduction at the right moment, no one to tell me how things actually work. I wish there had been. Talent is everywhere; the guidance that turns it into a trajectory is rare, and for a long time I had to do without it.
In the tradition I come from, knowledge is an amana, a trust, meant to be passed on, not hoarded. And security troubles me: it hands a young person real power and says nothing about how to hold it. I wanted the opposite, a place where capability and character are formed in the same motion.
So I am taking only seven people, knowing each of them and giving them the mentorship I wish I had. I am not trying to train operators but to form stewards, people who hold power as something they answer for.
Grounded in the tradition.
The Fellowship is guided by a scholarly advisor who anchors its tradition, the reasoning on amana, trust and conduct that shapes how the craft is taught.
A scholar grounding the tradition: the reasoning on amana, trust and conduct that shapes how the craft is taught.
Before you apply.
Is it really free?
Yes. The Fellowship is completely free. There is no tuition or fee of any kind.
Who can apply?
Secondary-school and current undergraduate students, anywhere in the world. We select for trajectory and raw aptitude over credentials, weighting the slope over the intercept. Applicants under 18 are welcome with parental consent.
Do I need prior experience in security?
No formal credentials are required. We care far more about how you think and what you have built than about what you have on paper. What we do expect is a good command of mathematics, to roughly A Level standard, since the craft leans on it throughout. Show us something you have made and the way you reason, and the pre-work ramp will bring you to altitude before the twelve weeks begin.
Is it remote or in person?
It is fully remote. Fellows take part from anywhere in the world.
What is the time commitment?
Twelve full-time weeks over summer 2027, five days a week at eight hours a day, preceded by an individualised, assessed pre-work ramp through April and May. It is intensive by design, and meant to be the thing you do, not a thing you fit around something else.
Could the first cohort be delayed?
Possibly. The curriculum is being built with real care, and the bar for it is high, on both sides. The technical syllabus must be ready to the standard promised here, and the way the Islamic tradition is woven through it must be verified by a qualified academic Islamic scholar before any cohort begins. If either is not yet right, the first iteration of the Fellowship will be deferred to summer 2028 rather than run at anything less. The promise is the quality, not the date.
Why does a security programme centre Islam?
Because for a Muslim, skill is never separate from character. Islam asks us to be intentional in what we learn and why, so that mastery of a craft and the akhlaq that governs its use are formed in the same breath. A powerful skill placed in careless hands is a danger; the same skill held by someone of akhlaq becomes a trust well kept. So the tradition here is not decoration laid over the technical work. It is what gives the work its purpose.
Will I learn about AI?
Yes. We treat AI as a serious tool of the craft, and you will learn to use it well: to accelerate your learning, to move faster through real work, and to reason with it rather than lean on it. The aim is to make you sharper with these tools, not dependent on them.
Can I use AI to write my application?
Write it yourself. You may use AI the way you would a good editor or teacher, to refine your phrasing or to learn something deeply, but the thinking and the words must be your own. What it must never do is generate your answers or let you pass off what is not yours. You will be assessed rigorously and in person in the March interviews, so anything a model writes for you will not help, and it becomes obvious quickly. We want to meet your mind, not a model’s.
An invitation, earned.
The Fellowship is completely free. We select for trajectory and raw aptitude over credentials, and we weight the slope over the intercept. It is open to secondary-school and current undergraduate students anywhere in the world; seven Fellows are chosen for summer 2027.
Apply to the cohort
Intake 2027 · 7 places · FreeApplication received
Thank you. Every application is read by a person, not a filter. If your application moves forward, you will hear from us about an interview in March 2027.