Study of today's Islamic issues and their prospects based on scientific and technological viewpoints focusing on it and other high-technology

This study and research have aimed at analyzing the basic changes in Islamic societies and economies from the viewpoint of science and advanced technologies, such as IT. The main focuses are on; 1) Reevaluation of the historical developments of technological innovation in the Islamic world, which lead to today's IT applications. 2) Multilateral analysis of today' s Islamic issues from the combined viewpoints of technology-based global unification process and diversification process that has also been enabled by IT applications. As for 1), the analysis based on the historical documents of Mamluk period (1250-1517) has led us to the conclusion that, with Islamic pragmatism and sensitivity, the efforts for technological innovations in the agriculture sector contributed to the successful transformation of Egypt to a leading position in sugar production in the medieval Mediterranean world. Empirical information has been gained on the management of Islamic websites that have succeeded in effective interactive communications through the bilingual use of both Arabic and English. For 2), valuable information and knowledge have been obtained through two-way workshops and field survey activities in the Islamic regions; in particular, (1) Economic and business relation: with the two groups, the democracy-and reform-minded and the religious and conservative, contending with each other in the Mideast, the Gulf countries have tried to make a breakthrough in the traditional economic structure, stepping aside from the excessive oil dependence, and to strengthen the economic tie with East Asia, while the rest of the region have failed to try to tackle these modern challenges. Turkey' s efforts of economic reform and democratization have produced a realistic approach to EU participation and presented a new challenge to Western Europe; whether traditional Europe is permissive to Islamic efforts. Meanwhile Islamic finance has spread to Southeast Asia and has been gathering momentum toward the crucial part of international financial activities. (2) Information Technology relation: the seamy side of some Islamic internet activities has turned out to be related to cyber terrorism and we have learned some aspects of their activities. (3) Social and cultural relations: in Egypt, the positive stance of digitization promotion policy has favored the cultural property administration. In Southeast Asia, Indonesia has witnessed the contribution f Islamic democratic groups to the democratization process of the newly born government, while Malaysia has witnessed the successful development of personnel resources through investment from overseas and through the education system emphasizing the secondary education level toward the nurturing of young people specialized in technological managerial talents.