Vanguard
Free and Unrestricted Learning Will Make the World One
“Shed the ‘small me’ and create the ‘large we’” says Professor Okuda. We spoke to him about his first attraction to the Islamic world, the importance of programs that link Japan and Arab nations, and the new perspective of world that can be obtained through such exchanges.
OKUDA, Atsushi
ProfessorFaculty of Policy Management
My First Encounter with Islam
Originally I was not particularly
interested in Islam as a religion. As an undergraduate studying law,
I was looking at the categorization of world areas through the
different kinds of legal system. As part of that study, I took a
course in Islamic law. That was my first introduction to Islam. With
the coming of the Renaissance in the twelfth century, Europe started
to adopt elements of Arab culture in various fields. While I was
studying this time period, I noticed that law was the only area not
mentioned. I thought this was strange and started to focus my
research on the Arab and Islamic impact on the codification of laws
in Europe. I needed to study the legal code that did not exist in
Japan at that time and went looking for it to Frankfurt, Sicily, and
then to Murcia in southern Spain. I attended an international
academic conference there. That was an important experience for me. I
found a Spanish book that presented the intellectual history of the
Muslims and Christians in Spain during the Middle Ages. After
returning to Japan, I finished my paper based on the legal code I had
found and also translated the Spanish book into Japanese.
Becoming Free
At that time, much had been published
in Japan on medieval Spain, but hardly anything even on basic
research of Islamic law. At the suggestion of my research advisor, I
set aside my comparative research on Islamic and Spanish laws and
took up an in-depth study of Islamic law. I found an appeal in the
laws of Islam that I did not sense in other legal studies. I was 29
years old at the time. Four years later at the age of 33, I moved to
Syria, and for six years I learned about Islam through academic study
and daily experience in that Islamic society. Allah is the one true
God according to Islam, and Muslims follow the teachings of the
Qur’an, upon which Islamic law is founded. This may make it sound
like people’s lives are restricted in many ways, but in fact their
lives are quite free. Believing in Allah alone means that you are not
concerned about or limited by other things, such as ethnicity,
nationality, or systems. To live under Islam means not to be swayed
by anything or anyone other than Allah. It means to live freely
without being the prisoner of anything. This way of life is quite
attractive. That is why Islam has continued to spread throughout the
world and through the ages regardless of ethnicity and nationality.
The Unrestricted Nature of Islam and SFC
While I was living in Syria, Keio
University asked me if I wanted to teach Arabic at their Shonan
Fujisawa Campus (SFC). My goal was not to teach language but to study
and teach about Islamic law. I was perplexed how to respond to the
offer. When I spoke to some people at SFC, I discovered that language
education at the Faculty of Policy Management and the Faculty of
Environment and Information Studies was not just teaching language.
The campus is also home to the Graduate School of Media and
Governance, which would allow me to pursue in-depth research. I
decided to take advantage of this opportunity and moved back to
Japan. Once I was here, I realized that SFC was truly an open and
free place. There are none of the usual barriers found at Japanese
universities amongst academic faculties or research areas. This
freedom is very similar to that in Islam, which also has no barriers
in Islam’s way of thinking. To study Islam—where one is bound by
nothing but Allah—requires an environment that promotes free and
boundless thinking and research. SFC is an ideal place for research
on Islam because SFC takes an interdisciplinary approach to identify
and resolve issues.My laboratory has students with a wide variety of
interests. We create videos, develop educational materials, and
organize exchange programs while conducting Islamic studies. We are
also involved in joint work with other laboratories. Right now we
are conducting research on the Qur’an database with Professor
Yasushi Kiyoki and members of his laboratory. The specialty of
Professor Kiyoki is semantic space of database. I am thrilled to see
development of this project in the future.
Arab Students Welcoming Program (ASP)
Okuda laboratory hosts a program called
the Ahlan wa Sahlan Program, or ASP (Ahlan wa Sahlan means “welcome”
in Arabic.). Under this program to promote cultural and academic
exchange between Japan and the Arab world, we have invited students
from Arab nations to Japan eight times so far. ASP offers
opportunities to Arab and Japanese students to study each other’s
language and experience each other’s culture. Language study
includes creating study videos of daily conversations, and the
students often collaborate on video skits that they produce. This
program was inspired by the 2002 visit by SFC students to Aleppo
University in Syria for language training. The Arab students were
very helpful and kind to the SFC students. While we were on the bus
back to the Damascus International Airport, the SFC students said
they wanted to do something for their new Arab friends in return. The
Japanese students said they wanted to do for the Arabs what the Arabs
had done for them. My students even offered to raise the necessary
funds themselves. When I heard this, I naturally wanted to get
something started, too. That is how ASP was created, and the program
has been held every year since 2002. As of academic year 2009, we
have welcomed a total of 36 Arab students to SFC. More than 40 SFC
students participated in the program in 2009.
I have been telling
students to see the world that is faster than the speed of light.
Human being exists in a web of interconnections that goes beyond
ethnicity, nationality, and, of course, time. People are all
connected not just in this world but in the next, as well. Students
can practice learning about these concepts through ASP where they
have opportunities to learn and create things together. I am pleased
to say that the program is slowly bearing fruit. An Arab student said
that, by interacting with students in Japan, he realized that nothing
could come of just hating other countries, societies, and people. He
realized that in other countries there were people just like him
studying at university and that they could join hands and do things
together. When I change, the other changes too. As this circle of
friendship widens, peace can spread in the world. I believe that
peace is created not by diplomatic efforts, but the efforts of
academia, which is not limited by national or personal interests.
This is why ASP needs to continue long into the future.
From a “Small Me” to a “Large We”
I would like to see a “large we”
created between Japan and Arab nations in the future. Today we are
divided into “us and them” or “small mes” based on ethnicity
and nationality. We need to think about how “us and them” can be
transformed into one “we”. The key here is to shed the “small
me” and to change ourselves. If we both change, we will become a
“large we”. If we can do this, not just Japanese and Arabs, but
the entire world can become one. To achieve this, people need to do
three things. First, they need to understand things correctly by
acquiring a wide range of knowledge, unbounded knowledge that is free
and unlimited. Next, they need to act based on acquired knowledge.
Finally, they need to tell others what they have learned. In reality,
this is an ongoing process of trial and error. Together with my
students, I will continue to strive towards the creation of a “large
we” by improving on my learning, and putting knowledge into
practice.
Professor, Faculty of Policy Management,Keio University
OKUDA, Atsushi
Professor Okuda received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in law from Chuo University. He was a research assistant at the International University of Japan (IUJ), a full-time research fellow at the IUJ Institute of Middle Eastern Studies (today’s IUJ Research Institute), as well as visiting researcher at Aleppo University’s Institute for the History of Arabic Science and vice president of that university’s Japan Center for Academic Cooperation. He became an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Policy Management at Keio University in 1999 and has held his current position since 2005. He specializes in Islamic studies, Islamic law, and Arabic language. His publications include Human Rights in Islam: Allah and Man in Islamic Law (Keio University Press, 2005) and Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed? The History and Theory of Islamic Law (Keio University Press, 2003), which is a Japanese translation of articles by Prof. Dr. Wael Hallaq.
(30 June 2010)
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