Speech by Mufti Dr Nazirudin Mohd Nasir at the PCICS Graduation Ceremony 2026

Assoc Prof Muhammad Faishal Ibrahim, Acting Minister in-charge of Muslim Affairs and Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Home Affairs

Mr Sa’at Abdul Rahman, President of MUIS

Ustaz Nor Razak, Chairman, Asatizah Recognition Board Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen

1. First and foremost, please join me to congratulate the 84 students of the Postgraduate Certificate in Islam in Contemporary Societies (PCICS) on their successful completion and graduation. I am certain all of you had worked very hard and made important sacrifices, together with your families, to successfully get to this day. May Allah bless your efforts and grant you greater success. Barakallah fikum wa fi juhudikum wa fi najahikum.

2. This also means that today, you formally join 2826 Asatizah in Singapore who provide important guidance and contribute towards a more thriving, dynamic and progressive socio-religious life for our Singapore Muslim community. This duty, or amanah, is an extremely heavy and deeply significant one – it is part of an amanah, that the Quran tells us, which was rejected by the mighty-looking heavens and earth. It is a Prophetic amanah and bequest.

3. The fulfilment of this amanah, is therefore, not trivial. Especially given the scope and scale of our contemporary challenges, and the complexity of our lived realities and conditions today. Guiding the community is not simply knowing or memorising verses of the Quran, or the Sunnah of our Prophet s.a.w., or the texts of our great scholars. These are the fundamentals and foundations, which we hope and expect your respective universities and institutions of learning would have provided you.

4. Guiding the community requires a much more advanced appreciation of the social, economic and political conditions, of our communities, as well as of the world in general. We have seen how global events and developments, especially crises, conflicts and wars, impact us and affect our religiosity.

5. In Singapore, we recognise that a more holistic understanding of the world around us is necessary before we can even teach and preach. The issues and challenges that our community faces are often intertwined with the broader developments, and the understanding of factors and conditions that affect religious practice is equally important in explaining the practice itself. In ‘ilm al-usul, for example, scholars have referred to this as idrak al-waqi’, and part of tasawwur al-mas’alah to get the tahqiq manat al-hukm right.

6. We believe this is an important part of the education and training of Asatizah who are competent in addressing new and more complex challenges. This is why we are working very hard today to incorporate new dimensions to Islamic learning in the upcoming degree programme at the SCIS. That will be a in couple of years time.

7. Today, the PCICS programme equips our Asatizah with skills and competencies in the areas of contextualisation, professionalisation and employability. It also provides opportunities for applied learning, through the capstone component. I understand many of you have undertaken exciting projects and assignments, some dealing with the Muslim intellectual history of Singapore, some on the impact of social media and cyberwellness. I hope you have truly benefited from these opportunities, in terms of appreciating the interconnectedness between religion and other aspects of modern life, and how this can positively impact on the ways we reach out and connect with the community.

8. As you chart your career path ahead and delve deeper into teaching Islam, please allow me to share a few advice – one that I shared with the larger body of Asatizah earlier this week.

9. As Asatizah and learned people on religion, we stand at the forefront in ensuring the quality and impact of religious education. What this means is that we collectively determine the quality, the depth and the scope of our community’s religious understanding. If we allow the level of understanding to stagnate or worse dip, even as religious interest, practice, and fervour increase, and issues become more and more complicated, we may end up with an unfortunate situation of a misguided way of religious life, and even a disillusionment with religion itself.

10. It is therefore our duty to be a vanguard of the quality of Islamic knowledge and learning.

• We need to ensure our attitude towards learning remain fresh, alive and interested, whatever stage of life, or Asatizah life we are in. Even, or perhaps, especially so the Mufti. Attitude, or in Malay (S) for Sikap.

• We need to be committed to the path of learning, unwavering in our efforts to take advantage to learn, and now especially with online and Gen AI opportunities. Making effort, or in Malay, (U) for Usaha.

• We need to plan for the future, hence efforts such as the Fatwa Lab and the SCIS, so that our community and Asatizah have the right platforms to deepen our understanding, studies and research on new issues and challenges. Planning, or in Malay, (P) for Perancangan.

• We need to be humble, respectful and kind even as we increase our knowledge and engage with those who hold different views. At the same time, employing our knowledge in ways that can bring positive change, not in causing harm and destroying the world. To be ethical, or in Malay (E) for Etika.

• We need to always reflect on life, challenges, God’s reminders and instructions to us. Reflection is one of the most important characteristics of learned people. Yes, we are all busy, but reflection is the soul that gives life to our knowledge. R for reflection.

11. And for this, I am very grateful for the efforts of Masjid Al-Khair, in helping our community understand the Quran. In fact, the programmes under Darul Tafsir is lead by one of the earliest alumni of PCICS, Ustaz Muhammed Faheem bin Abdul Khalil,serves as a Mosque Manager and Head of Darul Tafsīr at Masjid Al-Khair. Thank you Ustaz Faheem for your wonderful efforts, together with your team at Darul Tafsir, and I hope the PCICS programme you attended had really been instrumental in helping you carry out this role.

12. There you have it, S U P E R – I hope we can become Asatizah SUPER or SUPER Asatizah in our efforts to elevate our own learning and understanding and help our community elevate theirs as we prepare ourselves for greater challenges ahead.

13. On that note, and reflecting on what it means for us in the context of a more troubled and volatile world we live in, allow me to end with what I also shared with interfaith leaders and friends yesterday.

14. By the nature of our unique circumstances and conditions, especially our great diversity, we have dug deep in our traditions to uncover something more profound – that it is our common religious duty, first and foremost, to create an environment and condition that permits all of us to practice our respective ways of life safely and peacefully.

15. This is a path, and I should say a much harder one, that we have chosen for ourselves, as we deal with the risk posed by differences as an opportunity, and the threat of posed by diversity as a strength. Our peace and harmony today are the outcomes of (1) an extraordinary amount of introspection, looking inward into our respective traditions to grasp its core messages and essence, and (2) external contemplation, understanding our diverse social context and how we can be true to our religious teachings as kind and gracious neighbours to those who are different.

16. And not everyone out there can appreciate this delicate state of equilibrium. Hence why we get criticised when we extend courtesies across faith lines, when we say nice things about each other, when we choose measured or some say, even dispassionate responses, over passionate or toxic rhetoric. They may not understand that these are choices we have collectively made born from our lived experience of diversity. They might be stuck in a very exclusivist view of the world, but they should not be allowed to impose this myopic and parochial vision of life on us.

17. Our approach has allowed us to flourish with harmony and peace even as other societies show cracks and divisions. This is what is at stake, what sets Singapore apart, which we must protect and defend.

18. As we move forward, I am confident that our Asatizah will continue to serve as bridges between tradition and modernity, between scholarship and practice, and between our community and the broader society. You are living testimonies to the relevance and vitality of faith, in particular, Islam, in contemporary Singapore.

19. Congratulations once again to all our graduates. May your continued service bring benefit to our community and honour to our faith and nation.