1,721,845 research outputs found

    A critical analysis of Christian responses to Islamic claims about the work of the Prophet Muhammad, ‘the Messenger of God’.

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    The aims of this study are to analyse critically the different Christian responses to the Islamic understanding of the work of Muhammad. Chapter one consists a short introduction leading to an appraisal of Muhammad which incorporates historical, hagiographal and Quranic source material, and in the light of relevant Christian and Muslim scholarship. The second chapter presents a summary critical analysis of Muhammad in Christian theological perspective, from 661 A.D. to modern times. Chapter three presents a critique of Christian responses to the Muslim allegations that the text of the Bible has been infected with corruption; and that Muhammad's advent and status are foretold in the unadulterated' scriptures, and in the Gospel of Barnabas. Chapter four examines the theological significance of the work of Muhammad for Christians. Thus, Jesus and Muhammad are critically assessed and contrasted in order to ascertain the importance, for Christians, of the Muslim claims in respect of Muhammad as ’the messenger of God’. Chapter five provides a critical evaluation of the various Christian responses to Muhammad. It is argued that many of the said responses have been entangled in myths and misperceptions which have severely distorted the true account of Muhammad's work. Consequently, many Christians have failed to appreciate the divine legitimacy of Muhammad's call to prophethood. Further, it is argued that Christians should accept that Muhammad is a genuine prophet, and the messenger of God. However, Muhammad's use of the power-structure in order to maintain Islam is in sharp contrast to Jesus’ decision to face the consequences of his ministry passively through faith in God. Accordingly, orthodox Christian belief in the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus provides another dimension to prophethood, where the messenger and the message become one, an identification which finds no parallel in Islam, and which, in the nature of the case, cannot find a parallel

    Conversion of African Americans to Islam : a sociological analysis of the Nation of Islam and associated groups

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    'Conversion of African Americans to Islam: A Sociological Analysis of the Nation of Islam Associated groups' is an empirical study of the religious experience of people who had/have distinctive features in terms of race, ethnicity and historical experience. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate how African Americans' (AAs) conversion experience in general, and the Nation of Islam associated groups' conversion in particular, differ from the studies of recruitment and conversion in the sociology of religion and New Religion Movements (NRMs). More specifically, their recruitment and conversion experiences to Islam diverge from those who converted to mainstream Islam. The study investigates how AAs' historical experience, soci-economic difficulties and the racism they encountered shaped and influenced their religious understanding. Research methods involved participant observations, a survey questionnaire, interviews, conversations, personal communications and correspondence. To collect ethnographic data eleven months field research was conducted mainly in the Chicago area and on two short visits to Detroit, and three years continued communications with Muslim officials and academics in the area. During the field research and afterwards through personal communication 181 survey questionnaire responses were received, and 23 Muslim officials, academics and ordinary Muslims were interviewed through semi-structured, unstructured interviews, conversation and correspondence. The thesis begins with a brief history of Islam and Muslims in general and the African American Muslims (AAMs) in particular. More emphasis is given on the historical development of the Nation of Islam (NOl). Then in Chapter III, discussions of schisms in the history of the NOT are examined from sociological perspectives of social and religious movements. In Chapter IV I aimed to formulate my own perspective to analyse and study the conversion experiences of AAMs to Islam. I used a multivariate approach, considering selectively widely held conversion and recruitment theories in the sociology of the religion. I consider in Chapter V the predisposing conditions for AAMs that influence their decision-making to join in the NOT, for example, political and nationalistic sentiments and socio-economic deprivations. In Chapter VI I have applied different terms to describe their religious experiences, such as conversion, alteration and reversion. I have analysed further their encounters with the NOT, the methods of recruitment they used and their major motives for joining the NOT and converting to Tslam. In the concluding chapters (Chapter VII VTTT) I describe the different responses of AAMS to Islam following the death of Elijah Muhammad. It is found out that the Islamic appeal has polarised. While Farakhan's NOT appeared to continue the tradition and style of the old NOI with the emphasis on nationalistic and socio-economic factors, Tmam W. D. Mohammed's community turned more to the religious and spiritual aspects of Tslam. These different approaches led to a polarisation of the appeal of Tslam to AAMS. This thesis contributes to knowledge in four key areas; the sociology of religion and religious movements, the sociology of social and nationalistic movements, religious and Islamic studies

    Modern Arabic literary biography : a study of character portrayal in the works of Egyptian biographers of the first half of the twentieth century, with special reference to literary biography

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    In Chapter one, I presented a comparative definition of the meaning of Sirah (PI.Siyar), Tarjamah (Pl. Tarajim), Manaqib, Tabaqat and Maghazi as they were understood in antiquity. I also showed how the meaning of Sirah in modern times has only narrowly developed. Although the method of biographical writing continuously developed in Europe, it hardly progressed in Modem Arabic Literature. The only exception was seen in the writings by the pioneers of enlightenment in Egypt at the beginning of the twentieth century. This change of direction relied on borrowing European methodology in biographical writing. In chapter two, I reviewed the early attempts at writing biographies in the nineteenth century by Abd al Rahman al- Jabarti and Ali Mubarak. Although both were the first pioneers in this respect, yet they followed the footpath of classical approach above all that of al-Maqarizi from whom -Ali Mubarak derived inspiration in his book Al-Khitat al-Tawfiqiyyah. In chapter three, I studied the twentieth century, starting with traditional biography writers who could not employ European methodologies and whose writings oscillated between biographical notes and biographical sketches; or whose texts were more of a literary study than a biography proper. In chapters four to nine, I selected the most renowned, productive writers who best represented methodologies of biography writing. Perhaps certain writers have not been mentioned in this period of study. This is not out of negligence but simply because their texts were totally out of reach, or their writings did not exhibit the required literary criteria. All methodologies representing the theory of biography writing in Egypt have been analysed in these chapters. All, in fact, form a digestion or assimilation of French,English and German schools. In Egypt, Taha Husayn is considered the chairman of the French school, al-Mazini and al-Aqqad of the English/German schools, al-Nuwaihi of the psychoanalytical/anatomical school and Sidqi who employed both. By contrast, al Iryan was the trailblazer of the distinguished biographical novel. In these chapters, I tried to lay out the general outlines these writers have produced in the production of biographical texts, and how these attempts were a successful step on the road of presenting literary biographies characterized by high world standards. Chapter ten may well seem traditional, but it is important to give a comparative outlook on the views of biography writers themselves when they study and analyse the same character. Among the characters studied ,I selected Bashsliar, Abu Nuwas, Ibn al-Run-i, al-Mutanabbi and al-Maarri. These are outstanding landmarks in the history of Arab verse and the subject of a multitude of studies as well. Modern biographers took these figures as a test field for the deployment and employment of biographical methodologies. I selected these examples to provide comparisons and explain how far these biographies were successful in producing a biography or a profile of those classical poets. The conclusion and the bibliographical list arrived at the end of research. I wish, however, to clarify one important point here. It seems that I could not fix the year 1950 as the temporal parameter of my research but took some textswhich were published shortly beyond that point. The reason for this obvious extension was either to give additional useful details or simply because chapters of such texts had already been published prior to that year and were known to the readership. At times I would satisfy myself with analysing the part rather than the whole. This again was meant to eschew repetition or was due to the fact that the book in question was not available

    Defects Inspection in Polycrystalline Solar Cells Electroluminescence Images Using Deep Learning

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    Solar cells defects inspection plays an important role to ensure the efficiency and lifespan of photovoltaic modules. However, it is still an arduous task because of the diverse attributes of electroluminescence images, such as indiscriminative complex background with extremely unbalanced defects and various types of defects. In order to deal with these problems, this paper proposes a new precise and accurate defect inspection method for photovoltaic electroluminescence (EL) images. The proposed algorithm leverages the advantage of multi attention network to efficiently extract the most important features and neglect the nonessential features during training. Firstly, we designed a channel attention to exploit contextual representations and spatial attention to effectively suppress background noise. Secondly, we incorporate both attention networks into modified U-net architecture and named it multi attention U-net (MAU-net) to extract effective multiscale features for defects inspection. Finally, we propose a hybrid loss which combines focal loss and dice loss aiming to solve two problems: a) overcome the class imbalance problem, and b) allowing the network to train with irregular image labels for some complex defects. The proposed multi attention U-net is evaluated on real photovoltaic EL images datasets using 5-fold cross validation technique. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed network can segment and detect various complex defects correctly. The proposed method achieved the mean intersection over-union (m-IOU) of 0.699 and F-measure of 0.799 which outperforms the previous methods

    Conflict of law and the methodology of Tarjīẖ : a study in Islamic legal theory

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    Islamic law never achieved unity but expressed itself in, at least, four surviving schools. More interestingly, contemporary Muslim communities are still divided among themselves on a number of issues related to their laws. This work describes how problem of legal conflicts have been tackled by Muslim jurists. It is an attempt to examine closely the phenomenon of conflict in Islamic law from the standpoint of usūl-al-fiqh or Islamic legal theory. In fact, much is heard nowadays of the contradiction in the body of Islamic law. Whilst in contrast, little is presented in terms of the methodology of removing this conflict. The present work therefore, attempts to redress this balance. The emphasis of the work will be concerned primarily with tarjīh methodology ; how to give preference to one piece of evidence or argument over the other when they conflict. Nevertheless, considerable concern is given to investigating the background to the conflict of law in the Shari'ah. This study of a neglected area in Islamic legal scholarship will be an important source of reference to students, both practising and theoretical jurists or to anyone who merely wishes to increase his knowledge of legal themes, particularly legal conflict. The very aim of the work is to argue that conflict is a natural and unavoidable consequence of legal study because legal conflict is only conflicting principles and arguments adduced by both the classical and modern jurists to reach what is actually intended by God in the target case. Therefore, conflicts are inevitable in most of the cases in fiqh owing to the variety of principles set out to deal with one piece of legal evidence, let alone with all the pieces of legal evidence in question. Tarjīh is therefore, an important and workable instrument in the re-examination of these conflicts and in arriving at the most accurate principle for establishing the law for as long as this is possible. It is hoped that the discovery of new facts and the increase of knowledge which results from the broadening and deepening of the research will positively contribute to the process of unification of Islamic law

    The application of Shari’ah and international human rights law in Saudi Arabia

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    This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel UniversityThe present dissertation provides an analytical and comparative study of the application of Islamic law (Shari’ah) and international human rights law in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It provides an analysis of the sources of Islamic law as well as the sources of international law to set the background for analysis and defines the nature of both laws. It also tackles the subject of the domestic application of international human treaties in Saudi Arabia. In addition, it examines some reservations Saudi Arabia has entered to some of the international human rights treaties it has ratified, specifically the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). It also sheds some light on the political, cultural and religious obstacles to the realisation of norms protected by international human rights treaties in the country, and in other countries for that matter, clearly stating the impossibility of implementing the provisions of the international human rights treaties in their entirety. This is due to the various political and legal developments towards the internationalization of the concept of human rights. It observes that despite the existence of the international human rights treaties, which aim at reinforcing a universal realisation of international human rights, these rights cannot be possibly realised by all countries. To stress the importance Saudi Arabia attaches to the issue of human rights, the dissertation discusses some rights of women before Saudi courts in family matters, an issue which has been criticised by some international human rights treaties, and examines to what extent the country has managed to tackle the issue of domestic violence, particularly violence against women. It provides an overview of the major causes of domestic violence against women in Saudi Arabia, presents some cases of domestic violence before Saudi courts and sheds some light on the measures taken by the Saudi government to combat domestic violence against women. It also tackles this issue both in the international and domestic legal frameworks, clearly stating the Islamic standpoint on the issue, namely that Islamic law, and Saudi Arabia for that matter, whose laws are essentially derived from the two main sources of Shari’ah. It also discusses the common forms of violence against women in Saudi Arabia and suggests a number of recommendations towards more effective protection of women against violence in the country. The dissertation concludes by presenting a number of obstacles in the way of executing judicial decisions in the Kingdom as well as the obstacles which negatively affect the performance of the new code of law practice. It also presents some recommendations concerning personal status law obstacles and hindrances to progress and attempts to answer the research questions it has posed

    Perception of market and pricing among the sixteenth century Muslim scholars

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    The present paper investigates the perception of market and mechanism of pricing among the sixteenth century Muslim scholars, a period hitherto unexplored. In the commencement it briefly states the insufficient attention that the subject of market – the most fundamental element of Economics – has received in the conventional economics. To set a proper perspective it examines the situation in the Islamic tradition in earlier centuries before it studies the understanding of market and pricing among the Muslim scholars of the study period. It also deals with their stand regarding the price regulation. For comparison purpose, it examines the treatment of market and pricing in the work of their contemporary Western scholars. The paper ends with a note on 'just price', one of the most important economic concepts in the medieval period.Market, Pricing Mechanism, Economic Thought,Just price. History of Islamic Economic Thought

    The role of the accused in English and Islamic criminal justice

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    This thesis is a comparative study of the role of the accused in the systems of English and Islamic criminal justice. It seeks to explore the underlying relationship between the individual and the state through an historical, structural and contextual analysis of their rules relating to questioning and of confessions. The analysis of the English system covers the period 1800 to 1984, with particular reference to developments during the nineteenth century when the foundations for the modern English state were established. The analysis of the Islamic system combines traditionally Islamic and modern methods, assessing the "Islamisation" movement in Malaysia through a religico-structural understanding of juristic opinion from the four main schools of Sunnite jurisprudence. The thesis contributes to existing knowledge on a number of levels: first, it questions and revises the "myth" of "progress" that has dominated observations of the history of the English criminal justice system; second, it elucidates the relationship between Islamic law in theory and the law that is applied and proposed in its name in Muslim states; third, it provides an analytical framework for drawing comparisons between the underlying values of the systems of English and Islamic criminal justice. While acknowledging fundamental differences in terms of outlook and articulation, the author concludes there are important similarities expressed through such notions as "suspect" in the English system and "kafir"I"fasiq" in the Islamic. These act as intermediate constitutional categories to whom the state owe less protection. But the author notes also that these similarities are not observed necessarily in the "law" which is implemented or proposed in Muslim states; exact correspondence depends upon the over-arching political structure and the institution of Caliphate. The thesis is divided into six chapters: chapter one sets out the conventional view of the historical development of English criminal procedure and evidence; chapter two subjects that to a critique and chapter three offers a revised thesis. Chapter four, explores methods for interpreting and explaining Islam; chapter five sets out rules relating to confessions and questioning according to the four Sunni schools; chapter six puts them into "context" through an examination of the "Islamisation" process in Malaysia

    KONSEP IDEAL MORAL SEBAGAI LANDASAN METODOLOGIHUKUMISLAM (TELAAH KOMPARATIF ANT ARA FAZLUR RAHMAN DAN MASDAR F. MAS'UDI)

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    Sebagaimana telah lumrah dalam diskursu.•> hukum Islam, seringkali pemahaman ke arah upaya kontekstualisasi terbentur dengan panduan bangw1ar1 mctodologi klasik yang tcrlanjur dianggap mapan. Kcnyataan ini seiling dcngan ma'>ih mcngcntalnya scjumlah pandangan yang mcmandang mctodologi klasik tcrhindar dari sebuah cacat epistemologis. Dalam pcmbahasan skripsi ini, pcnyll'>un hcndak bcrupaya mclctakkan khazanah mctodologi kla"ik scbagai scmangat kctauladanar1 dalam mcrwnuskan bar1gw1an mctodologi hukwn Islan1 yang lcbih solutif bagi problem-problem kcmanusiaan. Jika dalam mctodologi klasik lcbih mcnckankan pcnyclcsaian masalah mclalui proscdur tckstual-formalistik. maka tawaran dalam skripsi ini lcbih pada pcnckanan pencarian keseimbangan priorita-;-prioritas ma'>/ahfilJ dan pcnciptaan kcindahan moral hukun1, bukan semata-mata scbuah kcput usan hukun1 yang sckadar tcrikat dan gandrung pada prosedur litcralita-; tcks (ai-Qur'an dan ai-Swmah). Upaya kc arah tujuan tersebut, pcnclitian skripsi ini mcnggunakan pcrangkat analisis deskdptif-analitis-komparati[ scbagai acuan unt uk mcmperoleh data yar1g akurat dan obyektif Selanjutnya, perangkat analisis tcrscbut dijabarkan dengan pola nalar induktif dan koherensi inlemal. Pola nalar induklifadalah memiliki akar pijak pada sebuah realitas dengan mencermati proses-proses sosial untuk memperoleh nilai­ nilai moral-universal yang kemudian dijadikan Iandasan prinsipil dalarn proses keputusan hukum Islam. Sedangkan pola nalar koherensi intemal adalah upaya mencari keterkaitan internal (intemal relation) antara hukum dengan moralitas yang ditawarkan oleh Fazlur Rahman dan Masdar F. Mas'udi yang menyangkut perbedaan dan persarnaanya Dengan demikian, sebagai studi tokoh, skripsi ini menekankan penelaahan pendekatan moral dan tujuan kemaslahatan kemanusiaan universal,-walaupun sesungguhnya keduanya terdapat sisi-sisi perbedaan-yang diupayakan dapat berjalin kelindan dengan cakrawala pandang keseimbangan. Dcngan kata lain antara konsep "ideal moral" yang dipelopori oleh Rahman di sat u pihak dar1 ''lead m la/Jah" yang dipelopori oleh Masdar di pihak lain, satu sarna lain tidak untuk dipertentangkan, tctapi harus selalu bersanding secara padu mcmbcnt uk satu kcsatuan metodologi yang integral dalarn merumuskan hal-hal barl
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