In 1970, when I was a high school student in the US, I was thinking about the future of Islam in the US. I was very young and I remembered I could not do much. I thought what can I do? At least I can try with some of the Kuwaiti brothers who are close to me. And we did; I started with five, and then we decided to have a camp three months later and that camp was attended by thirty-four. And then later on we decided we would have a seminar, and that was attended by fifty-five and then alhamdulillah, that grew into a Kuwaiti Student Union and then it grew into the Arab Assembly. Before I left, the attendance was about seven thousand. So never doubt the reward of Allah (swt) first in this life and in the hereafter. With sincerity, the right approach and hard work, inshaAllah you will see the fruits, not only in the hereafter, but sooner than that in this life. Small things I have done in my life that I never thought would have an effect on Muslims or my fellow brothers and sisters. Reflecting on them now, subhaanallah, we see the baraka and blessing of Allah (swt) in them.

I remember doing a series of lectures for the brothers and sisters in one of the masjids in Kuwait. That series was called ‘The Stories of the Prophets’, peace be upon them, about six years ago. It was not intended for international release; it was intended for the brothers and sisters in the masjid. Then I was contacted by the brothers in Qurtoba which publish my books and tapes, they said: "Would you allow us to tape it?" I said: "Yes, no problem, on one condition that with the profits, you give some to the Islamic work among the youth." They said okay and it turned out to be a very profitable business for them and a very profitable business for the youth, who did not expect the income. They made about $300 000 for the youth, not counting the profits for Qurtoba. I did not get any, alhamdulillah, but that series distributed more than 4 million tapes. Again, reflecting back, if I had asked for money, probably it would not have been blessed as much, or if I was thinking of getting some fame out of it, etc. Maybe Allah (swt) would not have blessed it that much.

So my first advice, the first challenge that faces us is our intentions – what are we after; what do we want in this life and in the hereafter; why are we doing whatever we’re doing? That is the greatest challenge.

Alhamdulillah, I have established sixty-two organisations that in my life, written twenty books, produced twenty-eight tapes and twenty-eight albums. Many brothers ask me how do I do it? My answer is I don’t know, I never know. But I always tell them the following: to work and work hard is easy, it is not the biggest challenge. The biggest challenge is to be sincere about it, truly sincere to Allah (swt).

I could act sincerely. When I was studying management for eight years in Oklahoma, besides my petroleum engineering degree, I found something very interesting in the Western way of teaching in management. They never talked about ethics. Lately they are, but at that time, in the 80s and early 90s, they never talked about ethics. Except one time, one of our teachers said something that totally shocked me, because that was the first time I heard somebody in the Western world talking about management and ethics at the same time. He said sincerity is the key to success. I was totally shocked. For eight years I studied management with all the scholars, none of them talked about ethics. Now that tells you a lot about Western civilisation and how it is established. Anyway, I was shocked. He was talking about ethics and not only ethics, he was talking about sincerity. When he finished the sentence, I was even more shocked. To complete this sentence, he said the following: "Sincerity is the key to success, if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made."

I have learned in my life that we humans are very good actors. We can fake even sincerity. It is not your relation with those who will hear you, or have relation with you that counts. This life is too short and the human abilities are too valuable to be judged only on 60, 70, 100 years. What really counts is our relation with Allah, our Creator, that’s what really counts. And that is the biggest challenge that faces the world, the Muslims and the Muslim reawakening. That is the biggest challenge: to live for a reason. Every machine in this world has a manual that goes with it, tells you how to use it and the purpose of the machine.

I remember watching a video film, by PBS, called ‘The Incredible Machine’. That incredible machine was the human being. It gave comparisons about machines invented by humans and the human body. Take the kidney, for example, this small organ: if it fails, look at the huge machine that they have to replace it with and still it doesn’t function even close to it. Take the eye and compare it to the best cameras in the world, and they still don’t function even marginally as well as what the human eye can do. You take the best computers in the world and compare them to the human brain and it is less than 2% of what the human brain can do. When I was watching that movie, I was asking myself how come every machine has a purpose and a manual and they tell us this ‘incredible machine’, man, does not have a purpose and does not have a manual that goes with it? That is impossible! One of the subjects that I studied when I was in Pennsylvania was logic and philosophy on comparative religion. I studied the subject of logic deeply and it is so obvious that it is impossible for this human machine to just happen. Statistically speaking, it is impossible – impossible that we are not created by Allah (swt). Impossible that we are here for no purpose.

Seventeen years of my life spent in the US, and I was impressed by so many things I’ve learnt from that society. America is a very great nation, regardless that many Muslims hate it. I am sure Australia is a very great nation. These people are well organised, productive, efficient, etc. What they are missing is something that we have — spirituality and ethics. That is what is missing. If you add spirituality and ethics to these societies, including Europe, they will be the best among people. They have a lot of things that we are missing right now. Yes, spirituality and ethics are in our religion but we don’t practise them and that is why they are superior to us. But we are definitely superior to them, even today, with our backwardness etc, we are much superior when it comes to spirituality and ethics. If we can combine these two powers, spirituality and ethics on one hand, and the efficiency of the human body and brain on the other hand, then we can create the best civilisation humans have ever seen. That’s how I see the challenges facing us. We are not after the destruction of the world; we are after the reawakening of the world, the beauty and peace of the world.

Two years ago, I was lecturing in George Washington University for the Political Department – only two blocks away from the White House. I was visiting my daughter and they arranged a lecture for me, so I said to her what I would like to pass on to you today. Some Muslims and some Westerners don’t like what I say, but being among the leadership of the Islamic movement in the Middle East, I can say it because I know. Statistically speaking, the West has no alternative but to deal with the Islamic movement, because looking at the path of history in the last 50 years in the Arab world, the Islamic reawakening is so huge that if the trend continues, within 20 to 30 years, Muslims will be governed by Islamic governments. There is no turning back from that.

Look at history and study it and you will see, 50 years ago Muslims were crushed by dictatorships without much opposition. Today, in every Muslim and Arab country especially, the Islamic movement is either in power already, or first in the opposition. Even in Turkey, where Islam itself was crushed by Mustafa Kamal Attaturk in the beginning of the century, even there, the Islamic party, vote-wise, was number one. Algiers, which was totally crushed by the French, even wanting to change their identity, even there, the Islamic movement got 80% of the votes. It was only prisons and dictatorships and lack of democracy that the West proclaims that it defends all over the world that stopped them going into power. This is all over everywhere, in my own country Kuwait we see it very clearly. In one study done by Kuwait University of Political Science, the number of votes the Islamic movement gets every time in the elections compared to the collective votes of the government supported candidates, the leftists, the liberals, and the shiite collectively, the Islamic movement gets more every time, for the past 21 years. So I was telling them in George Washington University, "Don’t fool yourself, regardless of what you and your puppet Islamic governments do for you, in a few years you have no choice but to deal with us. We are extending a hand where we can talk to each other, but if you keep slapping that hand, then you are making enemies of a coming power."

We see this even more so after September 11 — these people are very shortsighted. They claim they have strategies – they don’t. It’s too short; you cannot stop the power within people. So we have a major responsibility towards ourselves, our God and towards the human civilisation: to make it ethical, spiritual, not only materialistic. And history is on our side. If things continue as they have in the past 50 years, the Islamic movement shall come into power.

Now, I can talk a lot about our relation with the West and how I see it, but let me talk about the Islamic movement itself, the Muslim ummah and the reawakening itself. What is going on today in the Muslim world has not happened in the past 800 years. Several times there were many reawakenings, but they were either limited in time or space, eg in India, Libya, Sudan, the Arab peninsula etc. But for the first time in history since the decline of Islam 800 years ago, the reawakening is everywhere, even in Australia. For years Muslims did not understand Islam, except some rituals, for years women had no place in the Islamic civilisation, for close to 600 years, Muslims were on the decline. Now it’s all changing.

How can we expedite it? By understanding our challenges and meeting them. I must emphasise the internal challenges. Yesterday I was asked what we can do while our enemies are planning against us, watching us so we cannot move? It is simply that this has always been there, it never stopped but even with it going on, since the time of Muhammad (s), we were able to have victory, several times in history. So we cannot ask our enemies or those who differ with us to stop planning and plotting and ask them to help us. What we can do is make sure that we are up to the level of facing these challenges, or even better, to overcome them.

I would firstly like to emphasise the mentality of logic. I have studied Islam and Muslims deeply and I have been associated with the Islamic movement for 32 years now. Our major problem, besides spirituality, appears to me to be the way of thinking. Politics, economics, whatever discipline, it goes back to the mentality. Unfortunately, many of scholars teach Islam in a way which destroys the logic mentality. In a large Islamic book exhibition in Kuwait, I saw the books from all over the Arab world and I was amazed at the huge number of books dealing with witchcraft, jinn, the eye and their effects on humans. I asked the publishers which books were the best sellers and I learned it was these books, which emphasise the idea that we stop using our brain and depend on an unseen power we have no control over to guide or control our life. Then people came to consult me and most of their questions were based on these issues. One man came to me and he was unstable, feeling he was not well, so I asked him what was his explanation of his situation. He said he believed there was a jinn inside me riding and controlling me – what can I do, doctor shaykh? I said jokingly: "Ride it, don’t let it ride you!"

I have studied the history of the Prophet (s) from 200 books. These things exist, but they are the rare exception, mentioned once in 23 years of the life of the Prophet (s) and now we see them 20 times a day. It all goes back to our mentality and how we think. I liked a question which was put to Muhammad Al Gazali: "Do humans have free will or not?" He answered: "Humans in the West have a will, in the East they don’t." The questioner said that this was a political answer, but he said: "No, this is not only political but also religious, because in the West they already know that they have a brain they can use and they use it. But in the East we are still asking if we have a brain."

That is the issue. If we decide we do have a brain and Allah (swt) has given us and tested us with free will, then we must use logic to run our life. Exceptions can happen — Allah’s Will controls everything, but Allah (swt) says that He does not change the status of any human until they change it themselves. This verse states that if we want something to change, we must change it ourselves. This change could be positive. We did so many things wrong in our history and the first thing that went wrong is we let dictators run our Muslim countries. From that point in history, we started to decline and to change this, we must take things in our hands and run them according to logic and not wait for the intervention of Allah (swt), because we have the duty to do so. We must work and do our best, what Allah wishes is His wish (swt). We have no say in that but we have a duty to do what Allah (swt) has ordered.

The next challenge is planning, planning, planning. I have two books on strategic planning which I teach to the Muslim world and you will be amazed that most governments have no plan at all and those who do have a five year plan, which is good enough for a shop, not a country. There are rare exceptions where they have 20-year plans, but there is no vision, they don’t know where they are going. In Kuwait, it’s so hot and I was once asked by the Minister of Planning in Kuwait to take a look at the strategic plan of Kuwait and make comments, which I did. He was my friend, so I said, firstly this is a 5-year plan, an operational plan for a country, not a strategic plan. Secondly, what kind of country do you want to build? What is your major income? What kind of identity does this country want to have? In the plan, you want it to be a petroleum country which it is already; you want to turn it into an investment country which we can do, but you want also Kuwait to be a farming country? And a tourist country. In 50 degree heat?! This is a plan to satisfy all needs and I believe that "Jacks of all trades are masters of none." You cannot master anything until you focus. This applies to our countries and also to Muslims. In each organisation there must be focus.

The art and science of strategic planning is unfortunately not used in many Muslim organisations. In Kuwait, alhamdulillah, we have taught the Islamic movement and Islamic organisations to plan. The Islamic movement in Kuwait has a 20-year plan. I would like to ask Muslim organisations here in such an advanced country as Australia, how many of you have a written strategic plan? (response) Only one? Don’t we have a problem? You should be teaching us how to plan – your organisations don’t have a plan? This is similar to what I have seen in Austin, Texas, when I visited the university and masjid. The masjid was dirty and smelly and the divisions among Muslims were so wide, reminding me of a saying of Shaykh Muhammad Al-Gazali: "Muslims are so good at dividing that they can divide the atom. If you see two Muslims, probably they belong to 3 parties."

In Austin, Texas, among the leadership of the masjid was a professor who was among the 5 members of the strategic planning team for IBM. But the masjid did not have even a 1-year operational plan. Somehow we manage, especially in the West, to have dual personalities. When we go to our jobs, suddenly we are good at planning, crunching numbers, pleasant to one another, respectful of points of view. But suddenly this changes when we enter the masjid. Why? This dual personality has to change, we must be as efficient, even more so, when it comes to Islamic work.

Planning is one, the ability to have a dialogue and discussion, understanding each other and trying to find the good points. The ability to talk to each other is missing and unfortunately it is not only missing in the Arab and Muslim world, it is also missing among Muslims in the Western world and that is a challenge. The challenge for the one who criticised me is that I should go and shake his hand and say brother I am sure that you said this about me because you care about this religion. You may have misunderstood what I said, or were told some things that were not true, so let me share my opinions with you and let’s see where we differ. The ability to talk to each other, not at each other, is a challenge. These challenges look small but they change our style and the way we act and think and that is the biggest challenge.

Our ability to utilise our resources is a huge challenge. We have brothers and sisters in the Islamic movement who are elites. In the US alone, the number of Muslim physicians is more than 10,000. We have great resources for spirituality and ethicc: our ability to unite them and channel them in one direction, even without trying to unite the Muslim world, which is a waste of time… Each organisation should focus on something they are good at and lead the way, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in the US, which is successful for many reasons, including its focus on human rights and political issues for Muslims. I don’t think they do a lot of charity and I hope they don’t go into investment.

I managed several companies and schools in Kuwait which were successful, alhamdulillah. Once I was asked the reason behind my success in running organisations. I said: "I am ignorant and this is why I am successful." When you know you don’t know everything and need help in certain things, then you ask for the best professional to help in these areas and so you can run your organisations correctly. But when you act as if you know everything, and if you are running an Islamic organisation and suddenly you are a master of investment while you know nothing about it and you waste the Muslims’ money because you acted as if you knew instead of asking those who truly know. That is a problem and it is a challenge to know our strengths and weaknesses, to build upon them and synergise. Wherever we’re weak, we’ll ask for the help from those who are strong in that area.

Among the resources which are not utilised in the Muslim ummah is the resource of women. Of course that is also true for the West. I have a lecture series I just recorded called ‘The Woman Leader’. In the Gulf, there is a lot of discussion about the rights of women, their right to vote and if they are able to handle public office or leadership, etc. Coming from Kuwait, where women are not allowed to vote, my personal opinion, a shari’ah opinion, is that women are eligible not only to vote and hold public office, but also to lead the country. That is my opinion. I am very well aware of the sayings of the Prophet (s) that some people take to the contrary of that and I studied that deeply. Many of these people, when they mention this hadith "that no people led by a woman will be successful," they have not studied that hadith, they have only heard it. This same hadith has 22 different versions and unless you study these different versions, you really don’t know what the hadith means.

When I did my research on leadership among women, even in the West, the percentage of women in the highest posts in the US is ½ of 1%, not even 1%. Such statistics can be found in the book ‘The Promotable Woman’. If that is the West, then we expect the East to be even worse when it comes to women. How can we change our mentality towards women, in real life, not only in lectures and seminars? That is a challenge. In Kuwait, we pioneered a centre called ‘The Leadership Training Centre for Young Women’, concentrating on girls in high school and university, with a detailed 4 year training programme, operating after hours and during holidays, written according to a curriculum of leadership providing the skills and knowledge to enable them to be leaders. We are trying to spread this idea all over the Muslim world, including the West. We just finished a 2-week leadership training camp for girls. I am taking the girls on a trip to Switzerland for another 2-week training camp and we have the same thing for young men.

So the youth, the women, these huge resources that the Muslim ummah has – how can we utilise them? That is a challenge. Whatever training camps we have are very small compared to the need of the ummah. I really enjoy the words of Dr Hasan Hathout when he said the Muslim ummah can never be successful as long as it hops on one leg, meaning, depending only on men. We need both legs of society. That is a challenge and it goes back to our mentality, the way men in the world – not only the Muslim world – look at women and especially in the Arab and Muslim world.

We have a huge challenge when it comes to education and I emphasise education specifically because it is a major source of reawakening. We can do a lot of work in many areas, but if we want to change masses then education is the major source. Running the American Creativity Academy in Kuwait for 4 years, I was able to get in very close contact with two systems: the educational system in the Muslim Arab world and the educational system in the West. I studied the educational systems of Britain, US, Singapore, Malaysia, etc and also Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Emirates, Jordan, and Tunisia. The educational system in the Muslim world is about 20 years behind the leading world, when it comes to Math and Science, not counting other subjects. Our universities are even worse.

When I came back in 1992, I was asked to give a seminar on time management by one of the Islamic banks in Kuwait. I declined, saying all my training materials are in English, so they said just give them anything in Arabic, even another author’s material with your name on it and your own ideas. A friend of mine agreed and gave me his training material on time management and it was exactly the same material I had seen before I left for the US 17 years previously. I said to the brother: "What is this?," and he said this is the best training material about time management in the Arab world. I said "Brother this is so backwards.," He asked: "Did time management change?" I said (astonishingly): "Yes it did! This is based on the second generation of time management, we are already teaching the fourth generation of time management." He asked: "What is that?" So I invited him to attend the seminar. I decided to write in Arabic to fill the gap of material about strategic planning, leadership, etc and when I began, I collected some books in Arabic on these subjects. I went to the book exhibition, looking for new books in Arabic on management to use as references for my books. My criteria was to buy only books published in the 90s and I collected many books and was shocked to find, in 1993, that I had bought a book published in 1994. I went through these books and understood many of them were curriculum texts for universities and I knew why we were so backward. The best among them all had for its most recent references books published in 1972. So we have a challenge to improve our educational system.

When I came back to Kuwait, I had a huge challenge. My kids were born and educated in the US; I ran away because I don’t want them to be part of the drugs and sexual revolution, so I went back to Kuwait looking for a school for my children. I found 3 kinds of schools. Firstly, the government schools have no education and no ethics. Secondly, Islamic schools had some ethics, but no true education and this applies to most Islamic schools even in the West. The third kind was the Western schools, 21 American and British schools in Kuwait (a huge amount for a small country) and it was part of Britain and the US. It had excellent education, but no ethics. The challenge was to have a school with education and ethics and I raise this challenge to you.

Studying history, I conclude that the present generation running the Muslim ummah – politically, administratively, economically, militarily – is not capable of running the ummah. It will not lead us to victory and that generation includes many who are here today. We were raised, with few exceptions who managed to escape, in a backward education, with a backward, slavery mentality to dictators, whether you call it the shaikh of a tribe which is a dictatorship, or if you call it an elected president that gets 99.9%, which is also a slavery mentality, or you see it in companies where most people are slaves to the boss. We are so used to being slaves that we cannot have the mentality of a free person. Where is the hope? The hope is in the next generation.

I wanted to talk about the challenge of understanding terrorism, jihad, globalisation, freedom and democracy, human rights, the challenge of being the best humans… But the greatest challenge for me right now is to keep to the time limit I was given, so I will end my presentation here.