Exercise extreme caution

OPINION among academics is divided on sources of funding for Islamic studies.

GRIFFITH University's embarrassment over a sweetheart funding deal with the repressive Saudi Arabian Government, with a $100,000 donation in the bag and potentially $1.37 million more to follow, has highlighted a growing disquiet in some quarters over sources of financing for Islamic studies.

A storm of criticism blew up when it was revealed Griffith Islamic Research Unit director Mohamad Abdalla had sought the Saudi funding.

There is no detectable surprise that Griffith University came a cropper over the issue.

And while terrorism and national security specialist Carl Ungerer's amazement that Saudi money could be deemed acceptable is not universal, it is significant.

"It is naive to think that Saudi Arabian funding is not going to be problematic, given we know the Saudi Government and its agencies have funded Wahabbist educational institutions around the world," the director of the national security project at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute tells the HES.

"It's one of the major problems we have in the ongoing hearts and minds campaign in Muslim world."

Senior female Muslim leader Aziza Abdel-Halim urged Griffith to return the Saudi funds, saying in The Australian on Monday: "If there are no guarantees they have a free hand in their curriculum ... then it is safer to give the money back."

There is even a guarded comment from a senior Muslim academic, the University of Melbourne's Sultan of Oman professor of Arab and Islamic studies Abdullah Saeed, who is an associate of Mohamad Abdalla, founding director of Griffith University's Islamic research unit through their joint involvement in the National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies.

He agrees funding is a sensitive area. "In the current climate one has to be very careful," says Saeed, the centre's lead director.

The establishment of the $2.4million Sultan of Oman chair in 2004 occurred without incident, but when Ismail Albayrak was appointed to the newly created Fethullah Gulen chair in the study of Islam and Muslim-Catholic Relations at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne last October, there was controversy.

Paul Stenhouse, a Catholic scholar of Islam, argued that Gulen, a Turkish Sufi leader now living in the US, was a disciple of another Sufi leader, Said Nursi, whose alleged goal was Islamic supremacy. The $2.5million chair was funded by the Melbourne Muslim community through the Australian Intercultural Society and international donations.

Albayrak flatly rejects Stenhouse's assertions regarding Nursi and Gulen and emphasises the courses offered will be non-political and in the Sunni orthodox Islamic tradition, although many other elements of Islam will be included, including some influenced by Gulen's teaching.

"Our main aim in this department is to give the correct information about Islam," says Albayrak, an expert on the Koran. "Theologically speaking, it should be taught by believers in the religion."

Courses will be open to non-Muslims as well as Muslims, but part of its brief is to "educate Muslim leaders, including people who want to become imams", and to have a strong emphasis on inter-faith relations.

Working out when strings are attached, or when universities are vulnerable to such claims, is presenting difficulties overseas as well as in Australia. The Australian's Richard Kerbaj, who broke the Griffith story last week, also reported the British Higher Education Funding Council for England was concerned about Saudi funding and the US Congress was examining Saudi donations to American colleges. MI5 had also reportedly warned Prime Minister Gordon Brown that funding from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries had caused a "dangerous increase in the spread of extremism in leading university campuses".

At the same time, The Guardian reported the HEFCE was considering a virtual centre of excellence linking academics with faith and community groups to boost Islamic studies.

So the safest funding sources for Australian institutions joining the post-September 11 rush to offer Islamic studies appear to be the universities themselves or the federal government. The Australian National University, for example, matched funds attracted in 2000-01 by its Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies: a $2.5 million endowment from Dubai, $650,000 from Iran and $450,000 from Turkey.

The Coalition government provided the money that enabled the $8 million centre of excellence to be set up in January 2007, shared between the University of Western Sydney as well as Melbourne and Griffith.

UWS, home to the largest cohort of Muslim students in the country, would not comment for this story.

Saeed says he would have to think twice about accepting Saudi money after last week's events. He points out, however, that although many Australians and others associate Saudi Arabia with the September 11 bombers and with Osama bin Laden, it is possible for the Saudi Government to offer money without wanting to influence recipients.

"For these reasons people think when you talk about Saudi Arabia, you are talking about militant extremists. But you have to recognise the Saudi Government is having major battles with bin Laden and has fights against the extremists: it's not a uniform society," Saeed says.

"But for people not familiar with the complexities, anything connected with Saudi Arabia means a problem. There are some Saudi people who are interested in a much more reformist version of Islam."

The centre of excellence was established to provide understanding "for Muslim and non-Muslim students of Islam in an Australian context and to help build Australia's capacity in dealing with Islamic issues", he says.

More than 300 students are studying a course at one of the three centres. The initiative was originally to consider training imams in Australia, but this was dropped because it was considered inappropriate for universities to act as de facto seminaries. Saeed says the centre is committed to the academic approach and Muslim students who aspire to religious leadership can complete its courses and then go elsewhere for further training.

Ahmad Shboul, chairman of the University of Sydney's Arabic and Islamic Studies department, approves of the establishment of centres for the study of Islam, deploring the knee-jerk reaction that immediately followed the events of September 11.

"Everyone was talking about Islam as if it was a danger: that's not how our university looks at things. I think our role is to explain things in their historical and sociological context in a detached and objective way," he says. "We need a much more reasoned approach that makes use of the talents of specialists we have in this country."

Shboul argues the recent investment by Australian universities in Islamic studies suggests they are playing catch-up. "We need to be stronger in this area and if we can get endowed chairs without strings attached, that's a very good thing.

"It goes back to who is designing the curriculum. There are people who are obsessed with Islam as a danger, v those obsessed with presenting Islam as the best: we do not need either of those in universities, we need a sociological-historical approach," according to Shboul.

Islamic studies thus apparently faces some knotty imperatives: the need for funding, the need for the money to be judged as coming from an impeccable source, and the need for courses and research priorities that are solidly moderate.

But underpinning the struggle to create and maintain good, non-threatening reputations, universities face the battle for dollars. "The bottom line is the universities are underfunded," Abdalla says.

And Ungerer concedes: "Universities are in a position where they have to attract money from a range of sources; when governments start funding institutions in other countries, the question should be what the purpose is. There is no problem as long as it is within the bounds of open academic debate."

He says a further area of concern is the potential for extremists to infiltrate university campuses and use their infrastructure to spread their message through student groups and gatherings.

But another terrorism specialist, Macquarie University's Clive Williams, from the Centre for Policing, Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism, is less concerned by the Saudi funding and by the potential sources of threat.

"Obviously Saudi Arabia promotes Wahabbism, but it promotes a peaceful form: it is simply a fundamentalist form of Islam," he says.

"It looks like we're bashing Islam around the head. I'm more in favour of openness and transparency rather than pressuring universities and others. Everyone who gives money to a university has some agenda, so if you are going to look at this agenda, you have to look at them all.

"In Australia if you look at the people who have become home-grown extremists, it's usually because they have been influenced by a charismatic person not usually operating out of a mosque, because the mosque has thrown him out."

Saeed says although universities have to be careful when it comes to "Islamic things", they must continue endeavouring to offer Islamic studies.

"Many universities are interested in this area but they are having problems with funding. But at the same time, (we) as the Australian community need to develop expertise in this area," he says.

Inter-faith expert Gary Bouma, based at Monash University, is inclined to dismiss the Griffith funding issue. "Significant elements in the Saudi Government are looking to promote inter-faith dialogue and good relations between Muslims and other faiths. That punitive side of Islam -- the Wahabbism and Salafism -- we have to remember it is like Calvinism, which was pretty nasty in its puritanical form. But it was the foundation for more secularised, more nuanced forms of theology such as Presbyterianism, and the same processes are at work within that puritanical form of Islam.

"We need Islamic studies centres where Australian Muslims can feel safe to pursue their theologies and the implications of their theologies, and what it is like to be a Muslim in a secular environment. We are going to see more of these chairs."