By Javid Hassan, Yahind News

An American Muslim of Indian origin has launched a novel initiative targeting Muslim students that is worthy of emulation by NRIs around the world.

Dr. Najma Sultana, originally from Hyderabad, who practices medicine in the United States, has instituted a scholarship fund worth Rs.50,000 for Muslim students who can pursue multi-media studies. The fund is administered by the International Media Institute of India (IMII) located in Noida, near Delhi.

IMII is offering full scholarship assistance for a limited number of Muslim students, enabling them to enroll for an 11-month post-graduate diploma course in multimedia journalism. The classes will start on 5th July 2010.
The scholarship amount is up to Rs. 50,000, according to information received by yahind.com

The prospective candidate should be a Muslim, whose parent’s annual income does not exceed Rs 10 lakh. The other condition is that his/her minimum marks at the graduation level must be 45% or above. However, preference will be given to the students coming from small towns and rural areas.

According to the institute’s website, students will learn to produce professional news stories for print, audio, video, web and mobile phone platforms. The faculty at IMII is drawn from top Indian and international journalists and is affiliated to the City University of New York’s path-breaking Graduate School of Journalism.

IMII is also offering Jane Louis scholarship for those bright and deserving Dalit, Tribal and Backward Class students who lack resources to undertake professional media education. Muslim students, in particular, have a limited presence in the mass media which has affected them in various ways.

Muslim-related news either suffers from distortion in the absence of proper reporting or misreporting of facts and figures. Alternatively, it could be underplayed or omitted altogether, because a non-Muslim journalist has missed out the significance of an event due to lack of a proper perspective.

Seen in this context, an educational event of significance to the Muslim world should be of interest to all those interested in the welfare of the community. The World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), a Riyadh-based International Islamic organization, will hold its 11th international conference on “Youth and Social Responsibility,” in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, in October this year. The participants in the event will include scientists, eminent personalities, intellectuals and preachers from around the world.

According to WAMY’s Secretary General, Dr. Saleh Al-Wohaibi, the Muslim youth face a series of challenges as a result of which they have become alienated from the society. Their problems are compounded by the fact that they stand on a shaky foundation, which is further weakened by the onslaught of modernity on the one hand and deviant forces on the other.

Their low educational standard also makes them a soft target of some hostile forces, which seek to exploit them as part of their own agenda.

Together with rising unemployment among the youth in the Muslim world, the situation calls for concerted action on the part of government agencies and members of the civil society. The need of the hour, according to Dr. Al-Wohaibi, is to draw up a comprehensive action program that seeks to reclaim this vulnerable section of the society through measures that are inspirational in their scope and dimension.

Researchers from around the world will share their experience with the participants to set the stage for an interactive discussion. The delegates will have access to research material for a better understanding of the issues under discussion. The whole thrust of the exercise is the launch of new initiatives through partnerships that seek to address the emerging challenges as part of social responsibility in the Muslim world.

The theme of the Jakarta conference is Social Responsibility—impact of youth participation. Other items on the agenda include the role of corporate social responsibility concerning the youth as well as their participation in charitable programs for raising funds. The fact that the Muslim world languishes in poverty amid plenty is a disconcerting thought, as during the reign of Caliph Omar ibn Abdul-Aziz (717-720 AD) there was no poverty in the Islamic State. No one qualified for Zakah money, as a result of which the money was sent out of the State to free slaves in Europe.

Today, 70% of world oil reserves, totaling 550 billion barrels, are in Muslim countries, which also account for 49% of the world’s natural gas reserves, totaling 2532 trillion cubic feet and 21% of world production of uranium, totaling 6,421 tons annually ( sources: Oil and Gas Journal and The Journal of the Uranium Institute).The fact that Muslim charitable organizations have to knock on doors to raise funds when it should be the other way round is a grim reminder of the pathetic situation in which we find ourselves at this juncture of our history.

It is argued that if the funds from the Ummah’s resources today were distributed according to Shariah, nobody in the Muslim world would be living below the poverty line. Clearly, our educational system has failed to empower Muslims in raising the standard of our living. The reason obviously is the misperception of Islamic teachings, which begin with ‘Iqra’ or ‘Read’ in “the name of thy Lord.”

While Islamic scholar Allama Yusuf Ali interprets it to mean acquiring knowledge, both religious and modern, for a better understanding of the marvels of Allah’s creation, our madrassas adopt a rigid view of the verse which, according to them, refers to the reading of the Holy Qur’an and traditions of the Prophet (peace be upon him).

For this reason, Indian madrassas and some Muslim educational institutions continue to resist government moves to combine science, mathematics and computer studies with their Islamic syllabus. As a result, their graduates remain an old drug on the market, with no takers for their service. Statistics also prove that Indian Muslims are at the bottom rungs of the educational and economic ladder due to their continued reluctance to embrace modern education along with Islamic studies.

This is borne out by the report of the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER), which says that one-third of Muslims in India survive on less than Rs 550 a month. In other words, three out of 10 of them lived below the poverty line in 2004-05. Even among the poor, urban Muslims were slightly better off compared to their counterparts in the rural areas who survived on Rs 338 a month during the year under review.

WAMY has been addressing the challenges facing the Muslim youth around the world by organizing periodically international conferences on various issues facing the community. Its 10th International Conference held in November 2006, was entitled “Youth: Shaping the Future”, which was inaugurated by the Grand mufti of Cairo’s Al-Azhar mosque, Sheikh Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi. The conference had five topics on the agenda: Future Building: Ideological Foundation, Diagnosis of Youth’s Status Quo, Foundations of Future Planning, Execution Institutions, Existing and Conceptualized Projects in Future Building. This conference sought to review the ground realities facing the Muslim Youth and how they could be tackled.

The role of the mass media in dealing with the contemporary challenges was the theme of the Third International Conference. Among its recommendations were the need to provide assistance for the publication of Islamic books, setting up of literary centers and clubs in different areas for awakening the youth to the multi-dimensional problems looming on the horizon. The conference also stressed the need to cooperate with universities of Muslim countries to collect films and copies of Islamic fine arts as part of the awareness campaign.

By another recommendation, it called for providing help to the students and research scholars in the field of arts, science and literature; allocate funds for prizes to be given for the best Islamic book on Islamic thought and Da’wah, besides financing research papers and studies.
Another major recommendation called on WAMY to organize a convention on the need to establish an international organization for Islamic Journalism, whose activities will include, but are not be limited, to:

1) Produce a guidebook on Islamic journalism and journalists in cooperation with Islamic organizations, Islamic news agencies and organizations of Muslim social scientists.

2) Call on news agencies and information media in the Muslim world to abide by Islamic teachings in their code of conduct.

3) Establish a league of Muslim journalists to develop their technical and ideological abilities and remain in regular contact with them. It took note of the recent trends in thoughts and theories of the information and media.
Keeping in view the great importance attached to education and the media in the formation of thought and behavior of a person, the conference felt that it was necessary to have a close connection and coordination between the education and communication departments for improving the welfare of mankind in general and that of the Muslim Ummah, in particular. Both the organizations should coordinate to reform thoughts and root out un-Islamic ideas which were imposed on the Muslim world by the invaders during their rule.

According to Dr. Abdulaziz Othman Altwaijri, Director General of Islamic Educational and Scientific Cultural Organization (ISESCO), scientific research in the Muslim world is below the desired level that inhibits scientific and technological progress in key areas. He pointed out that R&D spending in most member states does not exceed 1% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Against this backdrop, Muslim journalists could play a seminal role in educating the society on the obstacles that hinder the progress of their community by analyzing them within the framework of Islamic values for sustainable growth and development. They have to put forward the case, backed up by sound arguments, that Islam stands for peace and progress and is not inward-looking as seen by madrassas. In that context, the scholarship award scheme to promote media studies among Muslim students is a strategic move with far-reaching implications.

- Yahind.com

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