ASIA BUZZ
	Asia Buzz: Enter the Dragon Saigon falls victim to the scourge of heroin - Wednesday, June 28, 2000 Asia Buzz: Social Engineering Singapore's been doing it for years - Tuesday, June 27, 2000 Asia Buzz: It's Not Fair Please let one more guy get rich quick - Monday, June 26, 2000 Culture on Demand: Perfect Score Ryuichi Sakamato is music to my ears - Saturday, June 24, 2000 Walkabout: Damage Control Comes to Paradise Fiji -- beautiful one day, dangerous the next - Thursday, June 22 2000 Asia Buzz: Comfort Zone Singapore, take a good look in the mirror - Thursday, June 22, 2000
	ASIAWEEK
	Intelligence The story behind today's news from the editors of Asiaweek From Our Correspondent Personal perspectives on news around the region

The good doctor has spent a noble past few days exhorting the foreign ministers of the Organization of the Islamic Conference ( a grouping of 56 Muslim countries) to embrace technology, or be left behind in the mosque. Failure to embrace modern science and the New Economy could usher in a new era of de facto colonialism, he believes. "We are behind the rest of the world," he says. "By failing to develop the Muslim countries, by failing to defend them and the Muslim people, we are committing even greater sins from which our personal devotion to daily rituals of our faith will not absolve us."

It's heady stuff, and he's absolutely right to exhort his audience into action. There's nothing in the Koran that I have read that says an embrace of Islam precludes a simultaneous embrace of knowledge and science. As Mahathir reminded his audience, "Islam enjoins us to seek knowledge. Enough of us must be assigned to the acquisition of the necessary knowledge and skills of the Information Age so as to enable us to catch up with our detractors and enemies."

This is classic Mahathir. With him there always seems to be a hidden message, and I suspect that behind his pleas to Islamic technophobes, there's an equally pointed message directed at his political opponents at home. His characteristically confronting tour d'horizon also speaks to the Malaysian states that have broken away from the Mahathir yoke, to embrace Malaysia's more fundamentalist Islamic party PAS. Kelantan and Trengannu states are two of Malaysia's poorest regions. They are also the two states run by PAS, and which rejected Mahathirism in last year's national election. Mahathir's message seems clear; he equates PAS with those backward Islamic nations that reject technology and scientific development as un-Islamic.

Mahathir doesn't say the Internet economy is the cure to all future economic ills. In fact, he makes an extraordinary claim that much of what is found on the Net runs counter to Islamic values. Half of e-commerce involves pornography, he reckons. That's not true, but at the root of his rant is a fundamental -- not fundamentalist -- truth.

Eric Ellis is Southeast Asia and Technology Editor of the regional finance portal AsiaWise.com

Ticked off at Asia Buzz? Turned on? Talk back to TIME
Write to TIME at mail@web.timeasia.com
Search for recent Asia Buzz