American Muslim pioneers hi-tech approach to Islam

American Muslim pioneers hi-tech approach to Islam

David Kennedy , Contributor, Jakarta
d_kenn@yahoo.com

A mobile phone service designed to expand understanding of the
Koran and provide practical Islamic teachings is gaining in
popularity.

Since March this year, 34,000 subscribers have joined the
AlQuran Seluler (AQS) service, which sends Islamic teachings by
text message directly to users' cellular phones and allows them
to hear sermons of well-known preachers such as Aa Gym, Arifin
Ilham and Ihsan Tandjung.

The sermons, readings and analysis of the Koran are proving
increasingly popular. Most subscribers phone the service at least
once a week, while others prefer to read the hadith, practical
teachings from the Prophet Muhammad's life sent by text message
to their cell phone.

Over 60,000 subscribers now avail of the service set up a year
ago, and about 5,000 new members are joining each month.

AlQuran Seluler's inventor is Craig Abdurrohim Owensby, a 47-
year-old, Jakarta-based American from Wisconsin, who converted to
Islam two years ago.

Owensby attributes the success of the phone service to the
philosophy of the company he created last year with his friend
and business partner Abdullah Gymnastiar, the popular preacher
also known as Aa Gym.

"We have not focused on profits, but on expanding the numbers
of people using the service," he said, explaining that the price
of the service was set deliberately low in order to reach as many
people as possible.

Text messages with the hadith cost Rp 1,000, and subscribers
can call and listen to six-minute prerecorded readings,
recitations and sermons for the price of a local call -- Rp 500
with a fixed line.

Owensby describes the aim of the service in terms of dahwah --
doing service to Allah.

"I thought the service would be helpful to Muslims, and that
if I do good dahwah and have a good business plan, it will take
care of itself," he said.

Although AQS has exceeded all original expectations, it only
became profitable recently due to technical delays in setting up
the billing system, which simply deducts credit points from a
person's cell phone.

Calls are kept cheap by using local telephone exchanges in
nine cities, including Jakarta, Bandung, Medan, Yogyakarta and
Surabaya.

It is perhaps not surprising that Owensby, the son of a
Presbyterian minister and an ex-priest himself, came up with the
idea of AlQuran Seluler given his background, an unusual
combination of religious marketing and telecommunications.

During his two-year tenure as an executive pastor at a church
in Houston, Texas, the congregation nearly doubled to over 6,000
members. Owensby, who has an MBA in brand marketing, helped run
the church along strict business lines and it also had a
successful show on the local television network.

Although he began his priesthood as a fundamentalist, after
two years, his faith in Christianity had waned for theological
reasons. He left the church and started a career in business
development, just as the dot-com boom was taking off.

It was during a posting with a telecommunications company in
Jakarta in 1997 that Owensby became interested in Islam. A year
later, he began to develop a business that could send tailored
services to peoples' cell phones, which eventually led to the
birth of AlQuran Seluler.

Owensby's religious background and desire to learn more about
Islam influenced his decision to convert, but seeing the effect
of Islam on communities living in extreme poverty in North
Jakarta was the deciding factor.

"I've seen poverty in my life, but the people here didn't have
the same attitude. There was joy in their lives despite the
suffering," he said.

"I thought I must respect a religion that keeps people
cooperating together to make sure that everybody is OK, because
there is that sense of the common united spirit. Also, the
internal street economies work, because there are limits to how
much profit people can make from the food they sell."

What he saw while exploring Jakarta's slums led him to study
more closely the role of Islam in sustaining people who have very
little, and it was this that eventually led to his conversion.

Owensby approached his new religion with the fervor and
dedication one would expect from an ex-priest, attending public
meetings and speaking to the media with his friend Aa Gym.

A tireless activist, Owensby is keen to use technology and
business principles to promote Islam at home and abroad. He
believes that Indonesian Islam has much to offer the world, and
that popular preachers here are extremely talented at
demonstrating how relevant the faith is to peoples' everyday
lives.

Building AlQuran Seluler as a successful business and a
teaching tool was also a way of counteracting the effect of the
modern media and capitalism, which he believes can undermine
religious practice.

"It's a war of ideas. We are competing with the idea that life
is just what you buy, a secular ideology that seeks to undermine
religious practice," he said, referring to the success of large
American corporations in selling entire lifestyles in the form of
brand names.

"Think of the system they have developed with TV programs and
ads aimed at every demographic segment. We need to be as good as
the mega-media marketers, or else we lose. It's simple -- we've
got to build businesses."

Owensby argues that Islam needs more effective funding
mechanisms, drawing from his experience with American churches
that have a system of collecting large donations to support
individual institutions.

AlQuran Seluler is designed to expand, but its inventor sees
profit merely as a means of allowing it to reach more people.

"AlQuran Seluler is as well-run as any business," said
Owensby. "The issue for me is about receiving the blessing."

The service is expected to open in Malaysia by early next
year, and an Arabic AlQuran Seluler is planned for the Middle
East, using preachers from Egypt and Saudi Arabia.