The Muslim World

Saudi Arabia is poised to become one of the world’s petro-chemical leaders in the coming decade, creating thousands of jobs as new industries emerge to take advantage of the Kingdom’s oil wealth. Dr. Abdul Wahab A. Al-Saadoun, energy sector, director general of Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA), made the remarks during the Saudi Energy Forum, where an international group of investors, business and industrial leaders gathered to examine future opportunities in the Kingdom.


“The petro-chemical industry is the cornerstone of the diversification drive that Saudi Arabia launched in the mid-1970s primarily to reduce the reliance of the national economy on volatile oil revenues,” Al-Saadoun told the delegates. Since the commissioning of the first plant in 1983, this industry has maintained a consistent and exponential growth pattern. It demonstrates an annual growth rate of about 12.2 percent, which is significant by international standards. This trend is likely to intensify in the next five to 10 years with an added capacity of 55 million tons in the next five years alone. This will extend to global share of Saudi Arabia from 7 per cent now to more than 15 per cent by 2010.

The King Fahd Holy Quran Printing Complex of Madinah unveiled five high-tech programmes for learning and spreading the teachings of the Quran. The main features of these programmes were displayed at a seminar on ‘Quran in the Oriental studies’ held in Madinah recently. Several personalities, including Madinah Governor, Prince Abdul Aziz Bin Majid, Minister of Islamic Affairs, Endowments, Call and Guidance, Dr. Saleh Al Shaikh and Minister of Education, Dr. Abdullah Al Obaid attended the seminar organised by the Complex. According to the Quran specialists who have prepared these programmes, the MP3 CD will enable people to listen to the Quran recitation without the support of either computers or CD players. “This CD will function by using MMC (multimedia card) batteries, and it is also highly portable,” they said. The main feature of the Madinah Mushaf in the digital form is that it is easy to search and find any verse of the holy book in the Othmani script.

Saudi Arab-ia’s Ministry of Health will organise an Arab conference on Child Health in February, 2007. The conference on “Health of Arab Child… investment of the Muslim Ummah,” will be held at King Faisal Conference Hall in Riyadh, said Minister of Health, Dr. Hamad Al Manie. The minister said that the conference will review the health situation of children in the Arab world during the last five years and will identify the major problems and handicaps in providing better health services for them in addition to looking into the major achievements. The conference will come out with a comprehensive plan for improving the child health and extending excellent services in the coming five years.

For the first time this year, Russian pilgrims will be able to fly by air for Haj, from Moscow to Jeddah on regular flights operated by the Russian airline Aeroflot.


Akhmed Bilalov, head of the Haj Council in Russia, said that this year, 18,000 Russian pilgrims will be visiting Makkah and Madinah. Some 13,500 of them will be from Dagestan, while 1,300 will be coming from Chechnya. The flights will stop in Kavkazskiye Mineralnye Vody for the convenience of pilgrims from the North Caucuses. Damir Gizatullin, deputy head of the Board, welcomed the start of direct flights from Moscow to Jeddah.

Learning the Arabic language has gained significant momentum since the 9/11 attacks, in light of a high demand for Arabic speakers, with enrollment in Arabic classes more than doubling. Dr. Michael Fisherbein, lecturer of Arabic at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), testified to the mounting tide. As of last year, we added a third section of Elementary Arabic. The demand for learning Arabic is so high that the university keeps waiting lists. He added that more students contact him every day asking whether they can take the class, but he has to turn them away as there is no funding for a fourth section. “I would estimate, a very rough estimate, that about a quarter of the students have some Arabic ethnic connection. Another quarter is non-Arab Muslims,” said Dr. Fisherbein. Arabic language has become the fastest growing foreign language taught at American colleges and universities. Since 2001, the Justice Department has increased its translation staff by more than 60 per cent, with a heavy emphasis on Arabic speakers. The FBI gets 60,000 applicants each year and only those who could pass the Arabic language test could get the big advantage.

A second Danish translation of the meanings of the Quran, and the first by a non-Muslim has been released in the Scandinavian country, in a bid to tell Danes what Islam is all about. “I tried my best to translate the Quran,” said Ellen Wulf, a Ph.D in Arabic language. Wulf said the translation was just a bid to introduce the Muslim holy book to Danes in a “simple and academic way.” “Those who want to thoroughly and accurately understand the Quran must first learn Arabic, the language of the Muslim scriptures,” she advised. It took Wulf three years to get the mammoth task done. She depended on two translations of the meanings of the Quran, a German and an English. The new translation, sponsored by a Danish businessman was launched at the Copenhagen University recently. Islam is Denmark’s second largest religion after the Lutheran Protestant Church, which is actively followed by four-fifths of the country’s population. There are about 1,80,000 Muslims in Denmark.

Muslim women politicians, business leaders, academics, cultural figures and activists are meeting in New York to try to improve women’s rights. The organisers hope to use the event to launch the first International Islamic Advisory Council for women. Key to this, they say, is advocating greater rights for women while working within the Islamic legal framework. The 120 delegates include, Baroness Uddin, the first Muslim woman to enter Britain’s House of Lords, Ingrid Mattson, the first woman president of the Islamic Society of North America, and Dr. Massouda Jalal, a paediatrician and political activist in Afghanistan. Organisers say the advisory council will present recommendations to political and religious leaders on global issues of direct relevance and concern to women. “Women’s rights often get debated in the press or they get debated among scholars who are not women,” said Daisy Khan of the American Society for Muslim Advancement. “We feel there are many Muslim women who have the scholarly background to be able to step up and speak authoritatively about it,” she added.

A Dubai Islamic Bank unit announced the launch of two $1 billion private equity funds and said they could soon be the first such products to be listed on the Dubai International Financial Exchange. Keba Keinde, chief executive of Millennium Finance, DIB’s investment banking unit, said that the company was in an advanced stage of discussions with regulators of the Dubai International Financial Centre for the listings.


Millennium’s two Shariah compliant funds will invest in the telecoms, media, technology and the energy industries. Its investors, Dubai Islamic Bank and Dubai World, have each invested $50 million in each of the two funds. “One of the main concerns of our investors is the liquidity and which is why we would like to list them as soon as possible,” said Keinde. The listings would be the first for a private equity fund in the GCC.

Slated to become the world’s tallest skyscraper and symbol of a city given to grandiose projects, “Burj Dubai,” or Dubai Tower, is rising in parallel with the profits of its promoter, Emaar Properties. Burj Dubai is taking shape as the centerpiece of a 20-billion-dollar venture featuring the construction of a new district, “Downtown Burj Dubai,” that will house 30,000 apartments and the world’s largest shopping mall. Launched in early 2004, the construction of the tower by South Korea’s Samsung should be completed at the end of 2008 and cost one billion dollars, according to Greg Sang, the Emaar official in charge of Burj Dubai. Burj Dubai already has 79 storeys, taking its height to more than 200 meters (656 feet).

Al Jazeera’s English-language television news channel is all set to reach 80 million homes worldwide. Al Jazeera English has begun broadcasting from the network’s main studios in Doha, Qatar. The first such international news and current affairs channel with its headquarters in the Middle East, it will far exceed the original launch target of 40 million cable and satellite households. Wadah Khanfar, director-general of Al Jazeera network, said: “Our launch figure is over double the original target we set for ourselves. This is unprecedented in the broadcasting industry - no other international news channel has launched with such a high number of homes across the world.” In addition to cable, ADSL, mobile platforms and satellite, Al Jazeera English will be available as a live stream to the one billion users of the internet worldwide. Al Jazeera’s English website, aljazeera.net/english was also re-launched to reflect the television’s look and editorial content. It will provide live streams of the channel, together with RSS feeds, e-mail newsletters and interactive discussion boards.

A cross-cultural group of 20 prominent world figures has called for urgent efforts to heal the growing divide between Muslim and Western societies. They say the chief causes of the rift are not religion or history, but recent political developments, notably the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The panel, drawn together by the UN, says a climate of mutual fear and stereotypes is worsening the problem. The Alliance of Civilizations, which includes Anglican Archbishop, Desmond Tutu and former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami, dismisses the notion that a clash of civilizations is inevitable, but says that swift action is needed. Their findings were presented in a report to the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan at a ceremony in Istanbul. The group argues that the critical symbol of discord is the Israeli-Palestinian, which, along with Western military interventions in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, contributes significantly to the growing sense of resentment and mistrust that mars relations among commu-nities. religious beliefs and traditions.

Non-Muslims in the Southern African country of Malawi have developed trust in halal food-stuffs, as meat products certified by the National Halal Body comply with strict veterinary requirements. “It’s much safer eating halal certified meat products. At least you are assured that they cannot just grab a sick animal for slaughter,” said Clement Chinoko, a Protestant based in Malawi’s commercial capital, Blantyre.


In most localities across the country, committees are being established at mosques to oversee the proper slaughtering of animals. Cornelius Kachenjera, a non-Muslim who was born and raised in the Muslim pre-dominant area of Chiradzulu, a few kilometers away from Blantyre, also prefers consuming halal meat products. “Besides being assured of maximum safety from diseases, I have resorted to consuming halal meat products because most of my friends are Muslims,” he said. Muslims make up 12 per cent of Malawi’s 12 million people. Islam is the second largest religion in Malawi after Christianity.

Yusuf Islam, formerly Cat Stevens, is being allowed back into the United States to promote his first new album in 30 years, “An Other Cup.” The 1970s singer happens to share his Muslim name with someone on the government’s “No-Fly” list and was refused entry to the US in 2004. His name has since been cleared, but Islam is shying away from political controversy. Fox 411’s, Roger Friedman got to listen to the CD (which includes a cover of the ‘Animals’ “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”) and said, “There’s nothing on ‘Cup’ that could offend anyone and there is plenty of love and peace for everyone.”

Six Muslim imams were taken off a U.S. Airways flight at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport recently and questioned by police for several hours before being released. The imams were returning from a conference in Minneapolis of the North American Imams Federation. Five are from the Phoenix-Tempe area, while one comes from Bakersfield, Calif. The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) expressed concern over the incident and called for an investigation into the behaviour of the airline staff and airport security. “We are concerned that crew members, passengers and security personnel may have succumbed to fear and prejudice based on stereotyping of Muslims and Islam,” said Nihad Awad, the council’s executive director, The advocacy group also plans to file a complaint “because, unfortunately, this is a growing problem of singling out Muslims or people perceived to be Muslims at airports, and it’s one that we’ve been addressing for some time,” said CAIR’s spokesman Ibrahim Hooper. Omar Shahin of Phoenix, leader of the group, said,. “They took us off the plane, humiliated us in a very disrespectful way”. He also said that the six imams spent the night at the Minneapolis home of a local imam, after U.S. Airways refused to put them on another flight.