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.