The communications revolution is a two-edged sword, opening exciting doors to the future, yes, but also threatening venerable cultures and traditional values .

The telecommunications revolution - including the Internet and World Wide Web - is providing us with ever greater power at ever lower prices. And this fact could help enormously in redressing earlier imbalances in information flows .

Not only can we transport ourselves in a few hours to any spot on the planet, we can also transport our words and our values, our songs and our dreams, our newspapers and our films, our money and our credit, our books and even our libraries to any part of the world - in a fraction of a second .

For all Muslims, the concepts of Din and Dunya, Faith and World, are inextricably linked. So it is not such a surprising or incongruous thing for a Muslim leader also to be involved in the world of business, the world of sport, the world of science - or the world of publishing.

As globalisation unfolds, the Islamic world will be there in myriad ways. Multitudinous encounters are inevitable. It is time for all of us to ask: How can we ensure that these innumerable contacts will result in a more peaceful world and a better life? We should be seeking out and welcoming these encounters and not fearing them. We should be energising them with knowledge, wisdom and shared hope.

Educated men and women, from around the world, can achieve, in as little as twenty years, to begin reversing the hundreds of years of decay which have eroded our cultural identity.

Our cultural absence in the general knowledge of the Western world, partially explains why your media sees Islamic world and its thought as an ideological or political determinant in predominantly Muslim cultures

From the seventh century to the thirteenth century, the Muslim civilizations dominated world culture, accepting, adopting, using and preserving all preceding study of mathematics, philosophy, medicine and astronomy, among other areas of learning. The Islamic field of thought and knowledge included and added to much of the information on which all civilisations are founded. And yet this fact is seldom acknowledged today, be it in the West or in the Muslim world, and this amnesia has left a six hundred year gap in the history of human thought.

with a Muslim majority in some 44 countries and nearly a quarter of the globe's population, it should be evident that our world cannot be made up of identical people, sharing identical goals, motivations or interpretations of the Faith. It is a world in itself, vast and varied in its aspirations and in its concerns. Is there not something intellectually uncouth about those who choose to perceive one billion people of any faith as a standardised mass?

it must be made utterly clear that in so far as Islam is concerned, this violence is not a function of the Faith itself, as much as the media would have you believe. This is a misperception which has become rampant, but which should not be endowed with any validity, nor should it be accepted and given credibility. It is wrong and damaging.