Muslims Today

Today is the birthday of our prophet Mohamed (peace be upon him), although he was deceased more than 1400 years ago his legacy is still with us today. Whether, you believe he was a great man or disagreed with his vision, his teachings are followed by around 1.5 billion people that live all around the world. The early Muslim philosophers live Averroes were able to preserve the Greek and Roman philosophies. Muslim mathematicians translated the decimal system from Sanskrit , thus benefiting humanity. Hassan Ibin al Haytham were one of the few scientist who focused and refined empirical research.

Currently, the Muslim is in a predicament economically, politically and socially. Muslim countries are the poorest the world. Politically 50% of the world refugees are Muslims. If one looks at the Arab world as a microcosm of the Muslim world, there are 53 news papers to 1000 Arab citizens showing the lowest information media to population ratios. There are 4.4 books translated to a million Arab, furthermore Arabs spend less than 0.2% of their gross national production on research and development. There are also 371 Arab scientists per million. It seems that we Muslims have forgotten the first command that God have ordered him prophet, “read”. Islam has encouraged people to analyze and think, yet governments have abused the religion by aligning themselves with orthodox theologians than encourage the status-quo helping to maintain government control and stifle dissent.

The problem is much more complicated than it looks. Creating a knowledge society that encourages free thought requires freedom of expression so that those thinkers do not fear prosecution and creates a meaningful exchange of ideas. Good education systems that focuses on scientific research and develop the critical thinking of students, is required. A free media that is accessible so that scholars can exchange information and also interact with the public is important.

Many would claim that Muslims do not have the resources to build a knowledge based society. However, I believe that ignorance is the reason behind our poverty. Muslims waste most of their resources on consumption and importation of technology rather than innovation. Most governments and companies attempts to focus on industrial productions were based on imported factories, these factories eventually became outdated and new machines had to be re-imported. Hence, technology importation led to a spiral of technology importation and further waste in resources.