The Buyide wezir Abū I-Faḍl Ibn al-‘Amīd became famous as a poet and expert in epistolary literature, but also as a scholar and scientist. His letters, published here together with translation, commentary and complete glossary, inform us on questions of meteorology, physics, mechanics and psychology.

The Prophet, whom Allah sent the whole universe and humanity as mercy, produced not only many judicial rules and practices regarding the relations of a person with Allah and other people in Islam but also uttered sentences about the explanation of holy book, Qur’an, and about how this book can be put into practice. The issue whether and how much these sentences of the prophet (hadith) and acts of the prophet (Sunnah) are binding have been discussed by both hadith methodologists (...) and fiqh methodologists; accordingly, a great many studies were produced. In hadith methodology, the discussions about Sunnah of the Prophet had their reflections in the studies of fiqh methodology; and especially Hanafi jurists propounded considerations about this issue. Hussein b. Ali al-Saymerî (d. 436/1045) one of these jurists, is the student of Muhammad b. Mûsa al-Khwârizmî (d. 403/1012), who is the student of Abû Bakr al-Jassâs (d. 370/980), who is an authority in Hanafi methodology. al-Saymerî, who adopted the method of al-Jassâs in fiqh methodology, systematically categorized several fundamental issues which were discussed and were related to fiqh methodology during his time; and he defended the views of Hanafi scholars about these issues primarily against Shâfiʿîs and several fiqh and kalam schools. While presenting the views and evidences of Hanafis, al-Saymerî initially applied for the views of founder imams of Hanafi sect such as Abû Hanîfa, Abû Yusuf and Muhammad al-Shaybânî; following these scholars, he greatly benefited from Hanafi scholars from Iraq region, such as Abu’l-Hasan al-Karkhî (d. 340/952) and his student, Abu Bakr al-Râzî al-Jassâs. When the relevant parts of his study is analysed, it is seen that the effect of al-Jassâs is especially noticeable. In this article, we will study the binding issue of the Sunnah of the Prophet within the context of al-Saymerî’s study, which has extant and is called Mesâilu’l-hilâf fi usûli’l-fiqh. We consider that the different attitude of al-Saymerî about the Sunnah of the Prophet from the other methodologists and hadith scholars and the underlying reasons of these differences are worth to be investigated and emphasized. (shrink)

After the end of the Cold War, some Western politicians, using a number of research and university centers, try to put forward theories like the concept of a clash of civilizations and thus impose their policies on the world community and independent countries. In this regard, they are making attempts to present Islam as a kind of threat. Through false propaganda in the media dependent on them, such politicians try to portray the extremist and non-humanistic image of Islam in the (...) ideas of the world community and connect Islam with terrorism. (shrink)

The study aimed to identify the strategic sensitivity and its impact on enhancing the creative behavior of Palestinian NGOs in Gaza Strip, and the study used the descriptive analytical approach and the questionnaire as a main tool for collecting data from employees of associations working in Gaza Strip governorates, and the cluster sample method was used and the sample size reached (343) individuals (298) questionnaires were retrieved, and the following results were reached: The relative weight of strategic sensitivity was 79.22 (...) (%), and the relative weight of creative behavior was 78.99 (%), a statistically significant relationship between all strategic sensitivity and creative behavior, and the presence of a sensitivity effect The strategy’s strategy on creative behavior, there are statistically significant differences in the scale dimensions attributable to the gender variable and the differences were in favor of females, there are no statistically significant differences between the averages of strategic sensitivity due to the age variable, and the educational qualification, and there were no statistically significant differences in creative behavior according to The gender variable, age, educational qualification, specialization, and the study presented a set of recommendations, the most important of which are: the need for civil organizations in Gaza Strip to seek funding from external countries in order to provide self-income for associations to face crises and give them independence Mechanism in order to keep them to carry out their role in society, the need to follow up the strategic plan of civil organizations using e-mails as they pave the way to reach excellence and creativity in the field of work. (shrink)

Ethics plays an essential role in the philosophical framework of Abū Bakr al-Rāzī. Although most of his philosophical works have become extinct, two surviving works serve as primary sources for understanding his ethical theory. Although sharing certain foundational principles, these two works diverge in terms of ethical standards and exhibit distinct logical approaches to ethics, a facet that has largely remained unexplored within contemporary scholarly discourse. I aim to extract and reconstruct both of his ethical decision-making systems by shedding light (...) on the place of ethics in his philosophy, explaining the interconnection of the two ethical frameworks, reconstructing both of these ethical systems, and finally presenting them in patterns. (shrink)

This study aimed to investigate the role of religious and cultural education in solving radicalism conflicts that occurred in the Sibolga community in Indonesia. The method used in this research was qualitative with the type of grounded research. This study involved educational stakeholders and traditional as well as cultural leaders as informants in collecting data. These informants were chosen by using a purposive sampling technique. The data obtained in this study were qualitative data that were analysed descriptively by applying the (...) data triangulation technique. This study’s results indicated that two elements were used as steps to resolve the radicalism conflict that occurred in the Sibolga community in Indonesia. The two elements were educational elements and cultural elements. The educational element played a role in building the students’ character and creating tolerance among religious communities to maintain unity and integrity among citizens. Cultural elements acted as controllers of differences in society with all customs that were binding in society. Contribution: This article contributes to the completion of solutions for the many perpetrators of religious radicalism involving students. The role of religious and cultural education as a resolution of radicalism conflicts. In fact, the conflict resolution steps taken through these two elements had been successfully implemented in the Sibolga community, Indonesia, as one of the areas affected by radicalism. (shrink)

Sir Muhammad Iqbal, 1877-1938, Urdu poet and philosopher.

This short book, based on authentic sources, outlines the story of Imam al-Ghazali's life.

Muslim communities in the village facing the COVID-19 Pandemic attempts to find refuge from the plague and hope for survival. However, this led to more caution, which may lead to xenophobia. Via ethnography, this study unmasks the xenophobic attitude. This research discusses the root causes of panic in the community so that remedies can be implemented. The research attempts to explain, from a socio-anthropological viewpoint, how people and religious groups in the village perceive the pandemic of COVID-19 based on their (...) belief in their faith and in the science. The research takes place in Cigagak village, an area of approximately 7000 m2 on the outskirts of Bandung of West Java of Indonesia. This study examines the selected respondents from about 190 inhabitants who had close ties to managing places of worship and public places. This study utilises a collaborative self-ethnographic method and qualitative analysis. The influence of COVID-19 has moved to new exclusive and disintegrating practices from the inclusion-cohesive religious tradition. Therefore, this study tries to find out ways on how to reduce exclusive perception and religious practices to a minimum level and how to disappear xenophobia. Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic, inclusive awareness and actions were re-established, and even social cohesiveness was fostered. This study concludes that in its deep conviction nature, theology can change exclusive behaviour to be inclusive if it is based on the religious principles that are raised in response to human events. In this case, the Muslim community in a village can change the fear of COVID-19 pandemic to be a reducer of the panic based on the support of the religious doctrines.Contribution: This article used a collaborative self-ethnography with a religious socio-anthropological viewpoint. This study could help to solve social problems through theological convergence in Islamic milieu, especially that of the government’s formal Islamic organisation and organic Islamic leaders of the society. (shrink)

Saba Mahmood’s anthropological work studies the gain in skills, agency and capacity building by the women’s dawa movement in Egypt. These women increase their virtue toward the goal of piety by following dominant, often patriarchal norms. Mahmood argues that “teleological feminism” ignores this gain in agency because this kind of feminism only focuses on opposition or resistance to these norms. In this paper I defend Mahmood’s “anti-teleological” feminist work from criticisms that her project valorizes oppression and has no vision for (...) a nonoppressive feminist future. I argue the future envisioned by teleological feminists gets caught in “the Hegelian” trap of replicating past oppression in their feminist future. I find in Mahmood’s work the tools to escape this trap. I argue, rather than a movement of overcoming oppression, Mahmood’s work suggests an immanent and creative movement that emphasizes difference for a truly new future. I turn to a Bergsonian metaphor and argue that this movement can be seen as akin to the movement of biological evolution. I conclude using the work of Eve Sedgwick that the Egyptian women that Mahmood studies are being read in a “paranoid” fashion and demonstrate using Leila Ahmed a better “reparative” reading of these women. (shrink)

I begin the first part by showing how situationism should make us question traditional understandings of virtues as intrinsic dispositions. I concentrate specifically on situationist experiments related to mood. I then introduce Islamic virtue ethics and the dawa movement. In parts two and three I examine ethnography of the dawa movement to explore how they deal with worries about the influence of mood on their virtue. In part two I show how they train their habits in very traditional virtue ethics (...) ways in order to be more resilient when faced with virtue-diminishing affective situations. In part three I show how the situation, rather than hindering practitioners, is recruited into helping these women achieve piety. I conclude, in part four, by showing the dawa movement's creative use of the Islamic veil as a way to help these women deal with the objection that one cannot avoid all bad situations. Going beyond social psychological experiments, I examine two methodological sources not found in situationist debates. First, I argue for ethnography as an empirical method through which to study virtue. I draw on ethnography of the Islamic women's dawa movement. Secondly, the work in the philosophy of mind on ‘affective scaffolding’. (shrink)

The research addresses the effect of sense of control on perceived stress by controlling for the intervening effects of Religiosity and Materialism. A total of 609 emerging adults living in Dhaka city participated in the survey; surveyors used a 48-item structural closed-ended questionnaire to collect the responses. The elicited responses were quantified, and structural equation models were formulated to identify any associations among the variables of interest. The findings suggest that sense of control is a strong determinant of perceived stress; (...) neither religiosity nor materialism mediate the association. The study advances the transactional model of stress and coping. (shrink)

The notion of 'natural kinds' has been central to contemporary discussions of metaphysics and philosophy of science. Although explicitly articulated by nineteenth-century philosophers like Mill, Whewell and Venn, it has a much older history dating back to Plato and Aristotle. In recent years, essentialism has been the dominant account of natural kinds among philosophers, but the essentialist view has encountered resistance, especially among naturalist metaphysicians and philosophers of science. Informed by detailed examination of classification in the natural and social sciences, (...) this book argues against essentialism and for a naturalist account of natural kinds. By looking at case studies drawn from diverse scientific disciplines, from fluid mechanics to virology and polymer science to psychiatry, the author argues that natural kinds are nodes in causal networks. On the basis of this account, he maintains that there can be natural kinds in the social sciences as well as the natural sciences. (shrink)

Data analytics, machine intelligence, and other cognitive algorithms have been employed in predicting various types of diseases in health care. The revolution of artificial neural networks in the medical discipline emerged for data-driven applications, particularly in the healthcare domain. It ranges from diagnosis of various diseases, medical image processing, decision support system, and disease prediction. The intention of conducting the research is to ascertain the impact of parameters on diabetes data to predict whether a particular patient has a disease or (...) not. This paper develops an improved ANN model trained using an artificial backpropagation scaled conjugate gradient neural network algorithm to predict diabetes effectively. For validating the performance of the proposed model, we conduct a large set of experiments on a Pima Indian Diabetes dataset using accuracy and mean squared error as evaluation metrics. We use different number of neurons in the hidden layer, ranging from 5 to 50, to train the ANN models. The experimental results show that the ABP-SCGNN model, containing 20 neurons, attains 93% accuracy on the validation set, which is higher than using the other ANNs models. This result confirms the model’s effectiveness and efficiency in predicting diabetes disease from the required data attributes. (shrink)

With the growing call for private sector actors to address global challenges, it is necessary to first assess whether regions with the greatest needs are accessing corporate philanthropy. In this paper, we ask whether corporate philanthropy is reaching those with the greatest health-care needs. Drawing on economic geography and corporate homophily, we argue that corporate philanthropy tends to exacerbate health inequality as grants are destined for counties with fewer health problems. We test and find support for this hypothesis using data (...) on health grants made by US corporate foundations and county-level health data. Our results that corporate health grants are less likely to go to counties which have a lower proportion of medical service providers and insured citizens suggest that corporate foundations are unwittingly complicit in worsening the resource gap between small, poor, rural counties and large, wealthy, urban counties. From an ethical perspective, we provide some guidance as to how this may be corrected. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a unified causal account of natural kinds. Using as a starting point the widely held view that natural kind terms or predicates are projectible, I argue that the ontological bases of their projectibility are the causal properties and relations associated with the natural kinds themselves. Natural kinds are not just concatenations of properties but ordered hierarchies of properties, whose instances are related to one another as causes and effects in recurrent causal processes. The resulting account (...) of natural kinds as clusters of core causal properties that give rise to clusters of derivative properties enables us to distinguish genuine natural kinds from non-natural kinds. For instance, it enables us to say why some of the purely conventional categories derived from the social domain do not correspond to natural kinds, though other social categories may. (shrink)

My intention in this paper is to reframe the practice of veiling as an embodied practice of self-development and self- transformation. I argue that practices like these cannot be handled by the choice/chance distinction relied on by those who would restrict religious minority accommodations. Embodied self- transformation necessarily means a change in personal identity and this means the religious believer cannot know if they will need religious accommodation when they begin their journey of piety. Even some luck egalitarians would find (...) leaning exclusively on preference and choice to find who should be burdened with paying the full costs of certain choices in one’s life too morally harsh to be justifiable. I end by briefly illustrating an alternative way to think about religious accommodation that does not rely on the choice/chance distinction. (shrink)

Could some social kinds be natural kinds? In this paper, I argue that there are three kinds of social kinds: 1) social kinds whose existence does not depend on human beings having any beliefs or other propositional attitudes towards them ; 2) social kinds whose existence depends in part on specific attitudes that human beings have towards them, though attitudes need not be manifested towards their particular instances ; 3) social kinds whose existence and that of their instances depend in (...) part on specific attitudes that human beings have towards them . Although all three kinds of social kinds are mind-dependent, this does not make them ontologically subjective or preclude them from being natural kinds. Rather, what prevents the third kind of social kinds from being natural kinds is that their properties are conventionally rather than causally linked. (shrink)

On business ethics from Islamic perspective in Indonesia.

Discussions about politics and human power, including discussions about the concept of the state, have been a discussion that has been going on since Greek times until the time of the growth of Islamic philosophy. The overemphasis on the power of reason led early modern Western societies to reject religion in all political discourse. At this stage, all views of man, power, the constitution, and the state eventually ceased to be associated with God. On the other hand, especially among Muslims, (...) religion is still connected with discussions of politics and human power. This paper will reveal how secularization in political thought grew and developed through principles such as the state of nature and the social contract. Then, based on the thought of one of the influential Muslim scholars, Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas, the author tries to provide a critique of the views of Western thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and other philosophers, by presenting the concept of the ideal state form derived from the concept of tamaddun formulated by Al-Attas. This research is literature review research using the descriptive method. The findings of this research show that secularization is a product purely born by Western secular thinkers and not taken from any religious teachings, so Western political concepts cannot always be applied, especially in Muslim societies. (shrink)

In step with rapid advancements in computer vision, vehicle classification demonstrates a considerable potential to reshape intelligent transportation systems. In the last couple of decades, image processing and pattern recognition-based vehicle classification systems have been used to improve the effectiveness of automated highway toll collection and traffic monitoring systems. However, these methods are trained on limited handcrafted features extracted from small datasets, which do not cater the real-time road traffic conditions. Deep learning-based classification systems have been proposed to incorporate the (...) above-mentioned issues in traditional methods. However, convolutional neural networks require piles of data including noise, weather, and illumination factors to ensure robustness in real-time applications. Moreover, there is no generalized dataset available to validate the efficacy of vehicle classification systems. To overcome these issues, we propose a convolutional neural network-based vehicle classification system to improve robustness of vehicle classification in real-time applications. We present a vehicle dataset comprising of 10,000 images categorized into six-common vehicle classes considering adverse illuminous conditions to achieve robustness in real-time vehicle classification systems. Initially, pretrained AlexNet, GoogleNet, Inception-v3, VGG, and ResNet are fine-tuned on self-constructed vehicle dataset to evaluate their performance in terms of accuracy and convergence. Based on better performance, ResNet architecture is further improved by adding a new classification block in the network. To ensure generalization, we fine-tuned the network on the public VeRi dataset containing 50,000 images, which have been categorized into six vehicle classes. Finally, a comparison study has been carried out between the proposed and existing vehicle classification methods to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed vehicle classification system. Consequently, our proposed system achieved 99.68%, 99.65%, and 99.56% accuracy, precision, and F1-score on our self-constructed dataset. (shrink)

Mankind is faced with a number of serious problems that demand an effective solution. The prevalence of injustice and the frequency of financial crises are two of the most serious of these problems. Consisting of an in-depth introduction along with a selection of eight of Muhammad Umer Chapra's essays--four on Islamic economics and four on Islamic finance--this timely book raises the question of what can be done to not only minimize the frequency and severity of the financial crises, but also (...) make the financial system more equitable. The author considers the origins of Islamic economics and outlines its development and underlying principles. He compares the approach taken to ethics and economics in Islam with that taken in the West, considering whether lessons can be applied to the global financial architecture in order to mitigate against financial crises. The book also examines the case against interest and looks at both innovation in Islamic finance, as well as challenges facing the industry. Written by a leading authority in the field, this book will be a stimulating resource for students and researchers in Islamic economics and finance, as well as providing valuable insight to all of those with an interest in financial systems and their interaction with society. (shrink)

The philosopher's stone : the epitome of my knowledge -- Preface -- Introduction -- Collectania -- The need for a tool -- A dream to organize chaos -- Substance abuse and a headache -- A habit from paradise -- A sealed story -- Stealing a seal -- Loosing a tool -- Believe it or not -- A blessing in curse-dressing -- Growing pains -- Lost paradises -- Diaries, my beloved diaries -- A taste like honey -- Physics of the heart (...) -- Gems of a child -- A story of a lawyer -- Optical memories -- The talisman -- Prayer...prayer -- Meditation, concentration, contemplation and other buzz words -- The neurotic need for completion -- The microsoft way -- Anatomy of a need -- A side that shuns mattresses -- I want a tool -- The treatment device for the mujahid salah mustafa -- Meditation tips -- Epilogue: the case for I don't know. (shrink)

Kinds that share historical properties are dubbed “historical kinds” or “etiological kinds,” and they have some distinctive features. I will try to characterize etiological kinds in general terms and briefly survey some previous philosophical discussions of these kinds. Then I will take a closer look at a few case studies involving different types of etiological kinds. Finally, I will try to understand the rationale for classifying on the basis of etiology, putting forward reasons for classifying phenomena on the basis of (...) diachronic features, thereby making a provisional case for considering at least some etiological kinds to be natural kinds. (shrink)

This paper examines the phenomenon of ‘interactive kinds’ first identified by Ian Hacking. An interactive kind is one that is created or significantly modified once a concept of it has been formulated and acted upon in certain ways. Interactive kinds may also ‘loop back’ to influence our concepts and classifications. According to Hacking, interactive kinds are found exclusively in the human domain. After providing a general account of interactive kinds and outlining their philosophical significance, I argue that they are not (...) confined to the human realm, but that they can also occur elsewhere. Hence, I conclude by arguing that interactive kinds pose a challenge to scientific realism about kinds by making it difficult to make a distinction between real and non-real kinds. (shrink)

Scientists cannot devise theories, construct models, propose explanations, make predictions, or even carry out observations, without first classifying their subject matter. The goal of scientific taxonomy is to come up with classification schemes that conform to nature's own. Another way of putting this is that science aims to devise categories that correspond to 'natural kinds.' The interest in ascertaining the real kinds of things in nature is as old as philosophy itself, but it takes on a different guise when one (...) adopts a naturalist stance in philosophy, that is when one looks closely at scientific practice and takes it as a guide for identifying natural kinds and investigating their general features. This Element surveys existing philosophical accounts of natural kinds, defends a naturalist alternative, and applies it to case studies in a diverse set of sciences. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

There are many ways of construing the claim that some categories are more “natural" than others. One can ask whether a system of categories is innate or acquired by learning, whether it pertains to a natural phenomenon or to a social institution, whether it is lexicalized in natural language or requires a compound linguistic expression. This renders suspect any univocal answer to this question in any particular case. Yet another question one can ask, which some authors take to have a (...) bearing on the issue of the naturalness of categories, is whether a system of categories constitutes a unique way of organizing a particular set of entities or phenomena, or whether there are other legitimate classification schemes that can coexist with it. Another way of putting this is by asking whether systems of categories can cut across one another, and if so, under what circumstances. Some philosophers have claimed that crosscutting systems of categories cannot exist as genuine natural kinds. This paper examines that claim and puts forward some counterexamples, concluding that this notion of natural kind is not in tune with scientific classification and ought to be rejected in favor of an alternative. (shrink)

Due to existence of a huge amount of textual data either on the World Wide Web or in textual databases like PubMed, the development of novel automatic keyphrase extraction methods has emerged as one of the key research problems in recent past. Consequently, a number of machine learning techniques, mostly supervised, have been proposed to extract keyphrases from text documents. But, one of the main bottlenecks that hinders the success of such systems is the requirement of annotated corpora for training (...) purpose. In this paper, we propose the design of a deep text mining system to identify keyphrases in text documents that are either unstructured or semi-structured in nature. The novelty of our system lies in its applicability on a single document, instead of demanding a collection of annotated texts for training, to identify keyphrases embedded within it. The proposed system applies parsing techniques to identify candidate phrases. After mapping the original set of candidate phrases into a low-dimensional space using Singular Value Decomposition, the Markov Clustering technique is applied to cluster related sentences together. Finally, considering each cluster as a document, Latent Dirichlet Allocation is applied to identify feasible keyphrases that are presented to users in non-increasing order of their relevance score values. The efficacy of the proposed system is established through experimentation on datasets from two different domains. On comparative evaluation, we found that the proposed system outperforms KEA and KEA that apply the supervised machine learning approach for automatic keyphrase extraction from text documents. (shrink)