After years of invisibility, the position of migrant women from Islamic countries now forms the core of the Dutch discourse on integration and emancipation. This article presents the downside of this visibility by showing that it is situated within a growing culturalist discourse. In addition to being culturalist, this discourse focuses on the shortcomings of migrants and is flavoured with a touch of new realism in its argument that it is a right to break the taboos of migrants. More visibility (...) for migrant women will not help their empowerment if the basic assumptions of the dominant discourse are not challenged. Through presenting a case study, this article shows how this visibility can even strengthen the border between the Dutch as ‘emancipated self’ and Islamic migrants as the ‘unemancipated other’. In so doing it reinforces boundaries instead of alliances, isolation instead of empowerment, and suppression instead of emancipation. (shrink)

The current research examines the possible outcomes of cronyism like organizational deviance, organizational cynicism, and counterproductive work behavior and also investigates the mediating variable violation of psychological contract among cronyism and its possible outcomes. Many studies have investigated the presence of organizational cronyism at the workplace and its impacts on certain variables. However, the outcomes observed in this study, i.e., OD, OCy, and counter-productive work behavior were not empirically investigated previously as per researchers’ knowledge. The second gap this study fills (...) is the mediating effect of VPC between the studied variables. Thirdly, the study was conducted in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan, which is almost the first attempt to investigate this phenomenon in Azad Jammu and Kashmir. Data were collected from the employees working under different ministries of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan like education, forest, sports, information, local government, finance, and tourism. The data from 350 employees were collected through convenience sampling. The data collection process was conducted at two distinct time lags. Results show that OC significantly and positively relates with OD, OCy, and counter-productive work behavior, whereas VPC mediates the relationship among OC and OD, OC, and counter-productive work behavior. Employees enjoying special favors from the leadership seem to be more dedicated toward the organization than the employees who do not have this favor, and the ultimate result is negative for the organization. (shrink)

Preventing firms from engaging in greenwashing is a topic of significant theoretical and practical interest. This study examines the impact of penalties for environmental violations (PEVs) on mitigating greenwashing using a dataset of firms listed on China's A-share market operating in heavily polluting industries from 2014 to 2020. We also examine how firm-level characteristics moderate the relationship between PEVs and greenwashing. Our results demonstrate that PEVs can deter firms from engaging in greenwashing and that this negative effect is more pronounced (...) for firms with greater financial slack, effective internal controls and political connections. Additional analysis indicates that PEVs have a negative effect on greenwashing for firms in the growth and mature stages but not for firms in the ‘shake-out’ stage, and that there is a deterrence effect. Our findings have important implications for mitigating greenwashing behaviours through collaboration between governments and firms. (shrink)

Iranian women were extremely active during the revolution of 1979. They were or became active within various political organizations and fought for democracy and freedom. The focus of this paper is on the activities of a group of Iranian women leftists within Marxist organizations in Iran and their experiences in exile. These political activists had to leave Iran when it became a crime to be a Marxist. During their activities in Iran, their Marxist convictions limited the ways in which they (...) dealt with issues such as gender, sexuality, and women’s rights. However the fact that they became so active made them potentially aware of their rights as women. It was later when this potential knowledge became manifest. These women who initially underestimated women’s questions and suppressed their womanhood in the framework of Marxist ideology, became strong advocates of women’s rights and serious contributors in the women’s movement when they were in exile. (shrink)

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the discourse of othering of non-Western migrants has been growing in many European societies. And since 2015, refugees have become a quite visible component in this discourse. Although, for decades, the dominant image of refugees has been constructed as people ‘at risk’, new competing images of refugee men ‘as risk’ have recently gained ground. For refugee women, however, the image of being victims and ‘at risk’ still prevails. This shows a strong underlying gendered (...) logic of feminine vulnerability and masculine threat. In this article, I show how these images are situated within the dominant Dutch discourse of migration with taken-for-granted taxonomies of the self and the other. Specific in this normalised discourse for refugee women is that their agency is either ignored or their possible position as activists is not acknowledged to exist. Using examples from two studies in which my research team engaged with the method of narrative engaged research, I show the importance of this particular narrative method in unsettling the normalising power of othering. The theoretical argument of this article engages with ongoing discussions on power and agency. It argues that, when the power of exclusion works through repetition and is manifested in the daily normalisation of actions, agency needs to provide an alternative in the same fluid manner. Narratives in dialogue provide an illuminating angle for discussing this specific kind of agency, as I will show through some examples from research. (shrink)

This article focuses on the ways that the author’s somewhat in-between position as both an outsider/researcher and an insider/ex-political Iranian activist now in exile has contributed to the process of research on Iranian women exiles in the Netherlands and the United States. Feminist attention on life stories as a method, and feminist anthropologists’ attention to particularity, involvement and reflexivity give the author the space, and inspire her, to explore the issue of positioning. This makes it possible for her to engage (...) with the issues of home, identity and belonging, not only as a scholar but also as a woman in exile. In this way, the reflexivity resulting from this involvement enables her to reevaluate her own identity, sense of belonging, and life in exile, next to rethinking these essential themes within the social sciences on the theoretical level. The blurred boundary of the self and the other in her research has its moments of complication, but in the end, these complicated moments seem to be not only necessary but rewarding, in many ways. (shrink)

The writings of the medieval Islamic scholar Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya are used today by radical groups, such as al-Qaeda, to justify acts of terrorism. In order to explain this modern influence, this volume offers a fresh perspective on Ibn Taymiyya's life, thought and legacy. Contrary to his current image as an anti-rationalist puritan, it argues that Ibn Taymiyya is one of the most intellectually complex, rigorous and interesting figures in Islamic intellectual history.

Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya is one of the most controversial thinkers in Islamic history. Today he is revered by what is called the Wahhabi movement and championed by Salafi groups who demand a return to the pristine golden age of the Prophet.

Knowledge hiding has become an alarming issue for the organizations. Knowledge hiding is an employee’s intentional attempt to conceal knowledge requested by others at the workplace. Employee knowledge hiding significantly influences an organization’s effective functioning. This research is an attempt to extend previous work on antecedents of knowledge hiding. Drawing on conservation of resources theory, it is proposed that receiving poor treatment by organizations in the form of organizational dehumanization creates psychological distress among employees toward the organization. Distress among workers (...) in turn intervenes the path and increases the likelihood of engaging in knowledge hiding behaviors. An employee’s felt obligation for constructive change may moderate the relationship between organizational dehumanization and employee psychological distress. Data for the current study were collected from 245 employees of the telecommunication sector in three-time lags. The results support the direct and indirect effect of organizational dehumanization on employee knowledge hiding behaviors through the mediation of psychological distress. The results also support the moderation of FOCC between organizational dehumanization and psychological distress. Furthermore, the findings of the study may help organizational practitioners and managers about the value of effective organizational climate and practices for better organizational functioning through knowledge sharing and providing insight into undesirable repercussions of organizational dehumanization. Implications for organizations and practitioners are discussed. (shrink)

The productivity of researchers and the impact of the work they do are a preoccupation of universities, research funding agencies, and sometimes even researchers themselves. The h-index is the most popular of different metrics to measure these activities. This research deals with presenting a practical approach to model the h-index based on the total number of citations and the duration from the publishing of the first article. To determine the effect of every factor on h, we applied a set of (...) simple nonlinear regression. The results indicated that both NC and D1 had a significant effect on h. The determination of coefficient for these equations to estimate the h-index was 93.4% and 39.8%, respectively, which verified that the model based on NC had a better fit. Then, to record the simultaneous effects of NC and D1 on h, multiple nonlinear regression was applied. The results indicated that NC and D1 had a significant effect on h. Also, the determination of coefficient for this equation to estimate h was 93.6%. Finally, to model and estimate the h-index, as a function of NC and D1, multiple nonlinear quartile regression was used. The goodness of the fitted model was also assessed. (shrink)

According to the World Health Organisation, three to five million individuals are infected by influenza, and around 250,000 to 500,000 people die of this infectious disease worldwide. Influenza epidemics pose a serious public health threat. Moreover, graver dangers are encountered with influenza subtypes against which there is little or no preexisting human immunity. Such subtypes of influenza have the potential to cause devastating epidemics. Thus, enhancing surveillance systems for the purpose of detecting influenza epidemics in an early stage can quicken (...) response times and save millions of lives. This paper presents three adapting intelligence models: support vector machine regression, artificial neural network using particle swarm optimisation, and our intelligent time series to predict influenza epidemics. The novelty of the current study is that it proposes a new intelligent model to predict influenza outbreaks. The INTS model combines clustering with a time series model to enhance the prediction of influenza outbreaks. The innovation of our proposed model integrates the results obtained from the existing weighted exponential smoothing model with centroids obtained from clustering. We developed a surveillance system for influenza epidemics using Google search queries. The current research is based on a weighted version of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention influenza-like illness activity level obtained from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention data, as well as query data obtained from the Goggle search engine in the USA. The influenza-like illness data was collected from January 4, 2009, to December 27, 2015, stretching across a total time span of 312 weeks. Google Correlate was used to select search queries related to influenza epidemics. In total, 100 search queries were obtained from Google Correlate, 10 of which were better and more relevant search queries selected in this study. The model was evaluated using online Google search queries collected from Google Correlate. Standard measure performance MSE, RMSE, and MAE were employed to estimate the results of the proposed model. The empirical results of the INTS model showed MSE = 0.003, RMSE = 0.036, and MAE = 0.0185, indicating that the errors of the proposed model are very limited. A comparative model of predicting results between the INTS model, alternative Google Flu Trend, and autoregression with Google search data is also presented. The proposed model outperformed the existing models. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 94 Heft: 2 Seiten: 601-606.

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] a book or a movie or a poem comes precisely at the moment that one needs it. As any reader knows, this is a moment of profound communion, a rare moment in which we can feel less alone in our world and more together in our thoughts. This is the feeling that filled me as I (...) read Shahab Ahmed’s What is Islam? This is the book that I have been looking for. I wanted to thank the author for having finally brought such a book into the world, but he had just died. As I read it, I wanted to engage him in debate, ask him questions, think and rethink the issues he raises, but he is gone, and I instead turn to... (shrink)

This article challenges the widely-held belief, within and outside academia, that premodern Muslims did not make a distinction between the religious and secular. I explore the issue by examining several usages of the dīn – dunyā binary across diverse genres of medieval Islamic writings and assessing to what extent it accords with or diverges from the categories of the religious and secular as commonly used in the modern Western world. I situate my particular counter-claim vis-à-vis the argument against the relevance (...) of the religious–secular distinction to Islam made by Shahab Ahmed in his, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. My findings show that contrary to Ahmed and the broader consensus, premodern Muslims did in fact view the world in terms of distinct spheres of religion and non-religion and that this distinction was used to understand phenomena as diverse and significant as politics and prophethood. Nevertheless, the two categories interacted in a way distinct from the common understanding of the two in the modern world insofar as, under the medieval Islamic conception, it was religion that regulated the secular. My article will make sense of these similarities and differences in an effort to present an indigenous account of the religious–secular dialectic in medieval Islam, one that problematizes the current standard account which holds that these categories were invented within the modern West. (shrink)