Power for its own sake. Budaya “kuasa” untuk “kuasa” kerana “kuasa.” Such is the Malay maxim uttered by the Regent of Perak, Y.T.M. Raja Dr. Nazrin Shah Sultan Azlan Shah, on Jan 15, 2009, in his Closing Address to The Third Islamic Economic Congress, to describe the epidemic besieging the Muslims in Malaysia, particularly the…
When Copernicus first introduced the heliocentric theory, that the earth revolves around the sun, it shook the very foundation of religious belief and become an issue in the courts of inquisition. People believed that it threatened the idea that an almighty God created nature, that it threatened their firm conviction that the glories of the…
The late Fazlur Rahman once remarked: “Obligation and rights are the obverse and converse of the same coin.” To use it as a currency, one cannot cut them into two. Mutually inseparable and indispensable, the one obviously cannot subsist for any length of time without the other. Written in the late 1980’s, his Major Themes…
These are the worst of times. “Deaf, dumb, and blind, they will not return (to the path). (2/al-Baqarah, 18).” What man sought was the light of truth and salvation; what he kindled was fire. The flames manifested by the blaze produced shock and awe and won the acclaim of all. But because the nature of…
It is to be duly noted that one of the distinctive features of the religious, intellectual and scientific tradition of Islam, is the utmost care given to the correct and precise connotation and denotation of terminologies, a feature rendered possible by the root system of the Arabic language. As such, it is commonplace in this…
Jim Baker, a modern writer on the history of Malaysia and Singapore, categorically states in his A Popular History of Malaysia and Singapore: Crossroads (2008) that the most distinctive features of the two countries are their multiracial populations. He describes that the majority of the population, i.e. the Malays, have inhabited the land for almost 2500 years. The…
Recently, on the 15th and 16th of October 2008, IKIM co-organized a Symposium on Islam and Asia with the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA), hosted by the latter in Tokyo. There were approximately 30 senior participants from 11 countries, including 7 delegates from IKIM. The overarching theme, “revisiting the socio-political dimension of Islam” was…
Creativity, as held by many, can take two forms. One is invention, which has quite often been described as “one’s creating totally new things.” The other is innovation, usually understood as “one’s doing old things in new ways.” Talks about creativity as well as interests in it have in fact been abounding. Recently for example,…
Last October I attended the ASEAN-Canada Dialogue on Interfaith Initiatives held in Surabaya. The delegates were from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Lao PDR, Myanmar and the Ambassador and officials from the Canadian Embassy in Jakarta. The Dialogue’s aims were to review concrete activities and initiatives in order to minimize social…
Esther Dyson, who wrote A Design for Living in the Digital Age, specializes in analyzing the impact of emerging digital technologies and of digital markets on societies. However, even this most powerful woman of the computing sciences (as some have called her) was uncomfortably overwhelmed by the present-day information explosion, as there are just too…
