International Seminar on Islamic Thought

Abstract

“Islamic thought” has received a great deal of attention since the 9/11tragedy and the American-led invasion of Iraq. As a result, the conferenceorganizers considered it timely to invite selected individuals to discussthis topic at the International Seminar on Islamic Thought, which washeld at the National University of Malaysia (UKM) on 7-9 December2004.The conference attracted a sizeable number of participants from withinthe Association of Southeast Asian Nations region and beyond. The largecontingent of presenters (100+) was placed on thematic panels designed tocover the following topics: ethics, psychology, education, the environmentand technology, theology, philosophy, the Shari`ah, gender, social development,economics, civilization, and Qur’anic studies. The organizers dividedthe panels into specific time-slots. The languages of presentation wereBahasa Melayu, English, and Arabic.Given the large number of presenters, it is difficult to highlight allaspects of this conference. Therefore, interested readers are advised to gethold of the CD that contains all of the papers that were presented or sent forinclusion. These papers were edited by Ahmad S. Long, Jaffary Awang, andKamaruddin Salleh, and the digital publication was titled Islam: Past,Present, and Future.Prior to the seminar, the organizers invited Minister of HigherEducation Dato Shafi’ to give his input and support. This was then followedby contributions from the dean of the Faculty of Islamic Studies, which isan integral part of UKM, and two of the organizers. The seminar was officiallyopened with an important public forum on “Islam and Globalization,”chaired by Abu Bakr Ibrahim, who is a member of the Department of Usulud-Din (UKM). This forum was addressed by the two keynote speakers:Irfan Abdul-Hamid Fattah, who hails from Iraq and is attached to theInternational Islamic University of Malaysia (IIUM), and Azizan Baharuddin,director of the Centre for Civilizational Dialogue at the Universityof Malaya (UM).Fattah argued for replacing globalization with universalism, which heconsidered to be more suitable because the latter term is not beset withproblems and has no negative connotations. Azizan addressed the issues ofscience and technology, as well as economics in relation to globalization ...