Islamic Renaissance

Looks like steps are going in that direction. Western universities are opening campuses in the Muslim World and Turkey is revising the interpretation of Islamic texts.

Outposts Abroad

The American system of higher education, long the envy of the world, is becoming an important export as more universities take their programs overseas.

In a kind of educational gold rush, American universities are competing to set up outposts in countries with limited higher education opportunities. American universities — not to mention Australian and British ones, which also offer instruction in English, the lingua franca of academia — are starting, or expanding, hundreds of programs and partnerships in booming markets like China, India and Singapore.

And many are now considering full-fledged foreign branch campuses, particularly in the oil-rich Middle East. Already, students in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar can attend an American university without the expense, culture shock or post-9/11 visa problems of traveling to America.

At Education City in Doha, Qatar’s capital, they can study medicine at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, international affairs at Georgetown, computer science and business at Carnegie Mellon, fine arts at Virginia Commonwealth, engineering at Texas A&M, and soon, journalism at Northwestern.

In Dubai, another emirate, Michigan State University and Rochester Institute of Technology will offer classes this fall.

But this does have some critics, particularly if the programs are men only.

California Polytechnic University, known for its efforts to nurture female engineers, plans an engineering program in Saudi Arabia that will be men only.

The proposal to develop a program at Jubail University College has angered some students and faculty, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The student newspaper, the Mustang Daily, said in an editorial that the plan would "jeopardize the honesty and integrity of our institution in the name of money." The mechanical engineering faculty voted 15-3 last fall to protest the move.

"No matter how you cut it, we're supporting the oppression of women,"

said Jim LoCascio, who has taught mechanical engineering at the school for almost 30 years.

Jubail has women students, although they must take classes separately from men. The engineering program would be open only to men.

And in Turkey, is a Reformation is in progress? Only time will tell.

Turkey is preparing to publish a document that represents a revolutionary reinterpretation of Islam - and a controversial and radical modernisation of the religion.

The country's powerful Department of Religious Affairs has commissioned a team of theologians at Ankara University to carry out a fundamental revision of the Hadith, the second most sacred text in Islam after the Koran.

The Hadith is a collection of thousands of sayings reputed to come from the Prophet Muhammad.

As such, it is the principal guide for Muslims in interpreting the Koran and the source of the vast majority of Islamic law, or Sharia.

But the Turkish state has come to see the Hadith as having an often negative influence on a society it is in a hurry to modernise, and believes it responsible for obscuring the original values of Islam.

It says that a significant number of the sayings were never uttered by Muhammad, and even some that were need now to be reinterpreted.

We can only hope.