Today, we find that there is more uncertainty, complexity, and turbulence in the world as we move into the 21st century. The condition of today’s Muslim Ummah in particular and the world in general is best depicted by a Chinese saying, “We are like a big fish that has been pulled from the water and is flopping wildly to find its way back in. In such a condition the fish never asks what the next flip or flop will bring it. It senses only that its present position is intolerable and that something else must be tried.”
Before we look at specific challenges of the Ummah, we must understand the new global context in which we live today. We are witnessing unprecedented changes in human history and progress. This period of unprecedented change and volatility at the dawn of 21st century is said to be another milestone in our history, the dawn of “Knowledge and Information Revolution”.
As we move into this new age of our history, we can drastically reduce the pain of this transition with the knowledge and resources at our hand and better strategies. But, to do so we need a new vision, new mental blocks, and new approaches. Old solutions and recipes are no longer relevant and will not deliver now because the forces of change we are facing today are very different from the past.
In the new world, wealth creation paradigms are changing very fast. Under the new Knowledge Revolution, knowledge becomes the key to wealth creation and national power. The power of brain and intellect has replaced the machine and muscle power. Creating knowledge societies, knowledge economies, knowledge companies, knowledge workers, and knowledge leaders are the new key success factors for any society. This implies that we must look at economic development and meaning of national power with new perspectives.
The picture today both at global and regional level looks very challenging. Muslims are a population of 1.3 billion people, which is 22 percent of world population and greater than the combined population of the United States, Europe and Japan, with 900 million living in 56 independent countries and about 400 million spread in other countries. The Muslim countries are endowed with important economic resources like oil (50 percent of world’s oil export), agriculture, coal, iron, uranium, tin, rubber, copper etc. Unfortunately, the region with world’s 22 percent population has two percent of world’s GDP, 1.5 percent of world’s FDI, and 1.3 percent of world’s trade. No Muslim country figures in the top bracket of Human Development Index. Muslims’ share of world income is less than six percent. Growth rate of Muslim countries has been 4.7 percent in 2003 compared with 5.2 percent of all developing countries. Likewise, they lag in all other economic indicators like savings rate, capital formation etc.
In this situation what are our options? To come up with the right response, we have to ask the right questions. In order to find answers to some of today’s pressing challenges we must first ask ourselves: Why we failed collectively to take notice of our decline, why were there no effective intellectual movements to wake up the Muslims, why we failed to take notice of the Industrial Revolution? Why were we slow to embrace modern and new technologies? Why did the Muslim demand for books grow too slowly to keep the printing press an economically unviable technology until the 18th century when Jewish refugees from Spain began printing books for Ottoman Jews as early as 1493? Why did it take Muslims centuries to recognize the limitations of their prevailing social and economic structures in relation to evolving ones of Europe?
In my opinion, the main barrier lay in deterioration of education system that taught people a finite set of information rather than how to use their own judgment, exercise their critical faculties and creativity, and experiment. Somewhere after 11th century creative thinking ended. In treating Islamic learning as having attained perfection and the Islamic world as self-sufficient, it gave legitimacy to values, attitudes, and practices that promoted stability and discouraged inquisitiveness. It helped support an educational system that emphasized rote learning and memorization at the expense of problem solving. This decay in educational system was fundamentally responsible for Muslim societies’ failure to shape public discourse in a manner that could have saved us from decline and ensured continued growth and freedom.
We must shun the status quo mindset that fails to recognize any change, negates reform, justifies poor governance, and ignores human development. Instead we need to adopt new knowledge economy mindset which seeks to prepare us for new competitive world by developing world class policies, institutions, and practices, guarantees implementation, promotes societal cohesion, ensures political stability, creates new and winning opportunities by sharing with people a vision for a better future, forging networks and alliances, harnessing positive synergies, creating winning mentality, unleashing enterprise, and building strong ethics and values. The new Knowledge Economy requires more than motorways and waterways. It requires building information ways for equitable flow of information and ideas as computer literacy replaces pen literacy as benchmark of education. It demands creating lifelong learning models and knowledge-based organizations with global perspectives, which excel in attracting, training, using, and retaining talent. Growing bellies and shrinking minds is a recipe for disaster for anyone in this age. Hence, the priorities have to change.
To accomplish this goal, we need to develop leadership capital of our communities at all levels to lead transformation of their respective organizations toward becoming creative, competitive, and high-quality and productivity-driven engines. This requires reforming our education and training programs to match the new challenge. If we failed to rekindle minds of our youth with continuous quest for learning and create a dynamic learning environment that harbors inquisitiveness, creativity, inquiry, and reflection we will miss the great Knowledge Revolution opportunity. We shouldn’t blame the circumstances; instead we must show responsibility and shape events by rectifying our weaknesses and turning crisis into opportunities. This will transform our societies into truly progressive, knowledge-led, just, and tolerant as envisioned by the teachings of Islam.
— Ahsan Iqbal is Pakistan’s former minister for economic planning.
