[Muslim Role Models ]    [From Convention to Conviction ]   [Responsibility for Household ]    [Responsibility for Society ]   [Waking up to the Challenges ]   [Search for Knowledge ]   [References ]  Waking Up to the Challenges While Muslim women groups generally and FOMWAN in particular, have been active in recent years, they do not appear to have quite appreciated the gravity of the task ahead. Indeed Muslims generally have tended to underestimate the extent of their decay and the challenges ahead. We must realise that we are no longer dealing with the more familiar methods of the last three decades or so. The recent advances in science and technology have radically changed the rate and pattern of communication and have reduced the world to a global village where it is no longer feasible to insulate your self from events and fashions in any part of the globe. Today is the age of cable television and internet which bring all the moral decadence of the Western world right into our bedrooms. Some of these morally degrading programmes are too subtle to discern by many a parent or the message is buried under seemingly harmless children programmes like Sesame Street. Moreover, a lot of this moral trash comes packaged in advanced and sophisticated technology which is not only attractive and alluring to the youth but also tends to seduce many parents and policy makers in to believing that it is a necessary component of the development of society. A recent documentary on a British television, Hollywood Kids, has already shown how the violence in American films has dehumanised Western children. At the time the more perceptive were giving the warning of the consequences of this screen violence many did not take them seriously, until an eight year old committed a premeditated murder of a two year old in the UK and two young men in the US killed their two parents, which in fact provoked the documentary. In what appears to be the latest attempt to destroy the values which help keep the family together, young people are being taught that their is nothing naturally in being a heterosexual, that sexuality is all matter of convention or social construction. So young people are not only stripped of any sense of guilt in being lesbians or homosexuals but are in fact encouraged and enticed in to them as it is being portrayed as a sign of the liberation of the individual from socially constructed gender roles of old. When it started many dismissed it as pure nonsense, but before long they sensed the danger, as a recent Western writer observed: "Five years ago peopled laughed at the suggestion, but those who have been exposed to the influence of the gender feminist aren’t laughing anymore. Many mothers who sent their lovely daughters off to college to prepare for careers, are weeping, because their daughters have come home with lesbian lovers. An April 26, 1995 article, entitled "Dating Game Today Breaks Traditional Gender Roles," which appeared in The Wall Street Journal, reported on a growing number of young women coming out of US universities where they have been indoctrinated in women studies programs who are engaging in sexual relations with women and men. included is a report on Ms. Anji Dickson who can’t decide whether to marry her boyfriend or grow old with a woman."[12] This may appear far-fetched, but this is what the American parents also thought. A visit to any of our university campuses where we sent of our teeming young men and women would certainly suggest that we are not as far off from this disaster as many would want to believe. The uncomfortable truth is that our children look up to the West and not to their parents and they have already imbibed all the values and tastes of their peers in Atlanta, Manchester, Munich and Milan. We may wish it away but that is certainly not the solution. The solution is to wake up to the challenge and begin to address the problem and not to bury our heads in the sand like the proverbial Ostrich. We simply tend to be naive in our approach and until we are ready to be smarter, working just harder wont do in the circumstances.