Saturday, May 19, 2007

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN ISLAM

A lot has been said about knowledge management. Europe and Australia were the early adopters of knowledge management, and Malaysia is still struggling to define what is the suitable knowledge management practise to be adopted nationwide. The Information Age has forced us to see knowledge as an asset. With globalisation, we are increasingly confronted with worldwide competition and that has change our Islamic way of life. Changes partly come from information technology and artificial intelligence developments. However, more important changes are expected in people-centric practices to build, apply, and deploy knowledge and understanding for support of innovative and effective knowledge-intensive work in the name of modernisation and liberalisation.However, Islam has long started knowledge management by converting Al Quran verses into the explicit Al Quran today. This was acknowledged by Prof Dr Syed Naguib Al Attast few years back in an International Conference. This followed by tacit knowledge of Prophet Muhammad (saaw) into hadith with collections and traslation from Bukhari, Muslim, Tarmizi etc, collections of books by Imaam Ghazali, just to name a few.

What I am interested here is the practice of Islam as a way of life - a welstanchaung; according to the Al-Quran and Hadith, not according to Arab culture or Asian culture. I believe that in the advent of knowledge economy, it is vital that everyone of us equip ourselves with sufficient knowledge and understanding of Islam to face the challenges, and ensure islamic values is not being adapted and customised into today's needs but to be practised in all aspects of our day-to-day activity in economy, social system, legal practice, politic, ethics, cultural etc.

Lets put our brains together and contribute ideas in the name of Islam. Ultimately, we want to expand the philosophy of Islamic Knowledge Management, worldwide.