Study on conduct of life of Muslim women and women in Islamic perspective.

This article investigates the predictors of coping willingness among citizens exposed to coastal flooding. We focus especially on how place identity, perceived self-efficacy, anxiety-state and coastal flooding risk perception shape both active and passive coping willingness. Data were obtained from different areas at risk of coastal flooding located in France. The sample is composed of 315 adult participants (mean age = 47; SD = 15). We observe a direct relation between risk perception and active coping willingness. The model did not (...) confirm our expectations that a higher perceived self-efficacy would increase active coping willingness. Concerning passive coping strategies, the model reflects our expectations that a higher anxiety-state increases passive coping willingness, and that place identity acts as a mediator and reinforce the relation between anxiety-state and passive coping willingness. To our knowledge this is an unprecedented model that suggests the importance of anxiety-state and place identity in the study of coastal risks. Moreover, it suggests that place identity is reinforced when the living place is threatened and encourages the willingness to use passive coping strategies. Model fit indices suggest the good fit of our model and Bayesian model comparison reveals a very strong evidence of the better fit of this model compared to its saturated and independent equivalents. (shrink)

I develop a phenomenological account of racialized encounters with works of art and film, wherein the racialized viewer feels cast as perpetually past, coming “too late” to intervene in the meaning of her own representation. This points to the distinctive role that the colonial past plays in mediating and constructing our self-images. I draw on my experience of three exhibitions that take Muslims and/or Arabs as their subject matter and that ostensibly try to interrupt or subvert racialization while reproducing some (...) of its tropes. My examples are the Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2015), the exposition Welten der Muslime at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin (2011–2017), and a sculpture by Bob and Roberta Smith at the Leeds City Art Gallery, created in response to the imperial power painting, General Gordon’s Last Stand, that is housed there. My interest is in how artworks contribute to the experience of being racialized in ways that not only amplify the circulation of images but also constitute difficult temporal relations to images. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, I argue that such racialized images are temporally gluey, or stuck, so that we are weighted and bogged down by them. This essay received Honorable Mention from the American Society for Aesthetics Feminist Caucus Committee in the Feminist Research Essay prize in 2020. (shrink)

I argue that the temporality of colonialism is a disabling duration. To elaborate, I focus on a site in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks where disability/debility and racism intertwine – Fanon’s refusal of “amputation” in his experience of cinema. While such disability metaphors have been problematized as ableist, I argue that amputation is more than a metaphor of lack. It extends what racializing debilitation means and makes tangible the prosthetics that colonialism imposes and the phantoms and affects of colonized (...) life that it attempts to sever. Engaging with disability studies, especially Black and anticolonial theories, I articulate racism and (dis)ability as more than parallel or analogy and conceptualize a debilitating colonial duration, as instanced in our pandemic time. By reconfiguring the possibilities foreclosed through colonialism, I ask what routes there may be to make colonial duration hesitate and destabilize its inevitability, while dwelling with its wounds and ruptures. (shrink)

There are few examples in the literature of objective measures for the assessment of donor willingness. The author describes the scoring system in use at his own renal transplant unit which has brought objectivity to the process of determining the willingness of living related donors. In this system, a total score to determine the degree of willingness or unwillingness is calculated based on responses to a series of questions. The author believes that with minor modifications this system could be implemented (...) by transplant units in different countries and cultures to screen out donors who are acting under duress. (shrink)

Neutrosophy, the study of neutralities, is a new branch of Philosophy that has applications in many different fields of science. Inspired by the idea of Neutrosophy, Smarandache introduced NeutroAlgebraicStructures (or NeutroAlgebras) by allowing the partiality and indeterminacy to be included in the structures’ operations and/or axioms.

International economic law is peculiar. It claims universal character, yet eschews engagement with many, if not all, the racialised features of the global political economy. Its scholars mostly ignore imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism; they exclude slavery, predation, and racism altogether. In the following article, we draw upon Walter Rodney’s dialectics of development to offer a racial capitalist critique of international economic law. The disciplinary boundaries and operative logic normalised by its denizens corral us in a white, Eurocentric episteme. Ahistoricism, decontextualisation, (...) and externalisation are three epistemic devices at the forefront of the exclusionary discourse of IEL. In this space, the histories and epistemologies of Black peoples are ghettoised, treated as alien to the framework. After identifying this bias, we use the Black Radical Tradition to evaluate IEL’s amenability to the racial capitalism critique. (shrink)

Abstract - The aim of the study is to identify the degree of administrative transparency in the Palestinian higher educational institutions in the Gaza Strip. In the study, the researchers adopted a descriptive and analytical method. The research population consisted of administrative staff, whether academic or administrative, except for those in senior management or the university council. The study population reached 392 employees. A random sample was selected (197). The number of questionnaires recovered was (160) with a recovery rate of (...) (81.2%). The researchers used a questionnaire for the data collection and were treated using SPSS to obtain the results. The results show that there is no significant difference between male responses and female responses due to gender variable. The results also confirm that there is no significant difference between respondents' responses due to the age variable. The results also showed a significant difference between respondents' responses attributed to the university variable. There is a fundamental difference between respondents' responses attributed to the scientifically qualified variable. The results also confirmed a significant difference between respondents' responses attributed to the management level variable. The results also confirmed a significant difference between respondents' responses due to variable years of service. The research reached a number of recommendations, the most important of which is: The necessity of Palestinian universities to adhere to the application of transparency standards in all university activities. The need to benefit from regional and international experience in the application of transparency systems within universities and to examine the possibility of applying these systems in our universities. As well as the need to engage in the program of teaching transparency in universities, as it is confirmed that only five universities participated in this experiment. The importance of raising awareness among the employees of Palestinian universities to clarify the foundations of building transparency and its dimensions to represent the active supporter through workshops and seminars. (shrink)

I counter a tendency in critical phenomenology to read Frantz Fanon as derivative upon, indeed reducible to, other (European) phenomenologies, eliding the originality and contemporaneity of his method. I propose it is time to read phenomenology through Fanon, instead of centering analysis on his assumed debt to Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's body schema. Fanon reconfigures and ungrounds phenomenology in Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks). I show how he creates his own method through an anticolonial phenomenology of touch and affect (...) that breaks with the perceptual spectacle at the center of most phenomenologies before him. I read Fanon's “toucher du doigt”—in contrastive relation to Edmund Husserl's touch‐sensings—to define a phenomenology that dwells with colonial wounding and holds the memory of a “burning” colonial duration. This is to say that Fanon's phenomenology is not mere description; rather, Fanon invents a critical, distinctly temporal, and anticolonial method from the affective territory in which he has had to dwell. This method addresses the conditions of possibility for doing (critical) phenomenology. Fanonian phenomenology makes tangible the (de)structuring violence through which colonialism ontologizes itself, while providing tools to dwell with the wounding and critically mine it—to create possibilities for living otherwise than what colonialism makes of us. (shrink)

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469-1527; political views; political science; international relations; philosophy.

Specific classes of cyberspaces emphasize different types of digital transactions given the user’s context, thus making it essential to take into account what these environments can afford. In this way, we can portray the niches of technological use as ecologies of particular possibilities and compare how they differ between distinct spheres of human life. The present research is focused on describing the conceptual integration of a taxonomic crossover between Virtual Learning Environments and Educational Affordances of Technology, while also performing empirical (...) testing and determining the psychometric properties in a scale regarding the aforementioned taxonomy. The study sample consisted of 320 students in the departments of foreign languages from three different universities in Sonora. Students were given a questionnaire of 21 items organized into four subscales with a Likert-type response option to measure the notions concerning their usage of Virtual Learning Environments. Internal consistency procedures and confirmatory factor analysis by means of Cronbach’s alpha and Structural modeling support the derived factorial structure, which contains Cyber-Communications, Virtual Behavior Settings, Virtual Communities, and Availability and Access to Connectivity. This structure traces the environmental properties perceived by learners in a virtual environment. Results sustain the initial conceptual construction regarding the proposed taxonomy, conclude that the ‘Virtual Learning Environments Questionnaire’ demonstrates adequate psychometric properties, and validate it as a fitting measure to assess the perceived psychological experience of students in a digital educational setting. (shrink)

I develop a phenomenological account of racialized encounters with works of art and film, wherein the racialized viewer feels cast as perpetually past, coming “too late” to intervene in the meaning of her own representation. This points to the distinctive role that the colonial past plays in mediating and constructing our self‐images. I draw on my experience of three exhibitions that take Muslims and/or Arabs as their subject matter and that ostensibly try to interrupt or subvert racialization while reproducing some (...) of its tropes. My examples are the Jean‐Joseph Benjamin‐Constant exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2015), the exposition Welten der Muslime at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin (2011–2017), and a sculpture by Bob and Roberta Smith at the Leeds City Art Gallery, created in response to the imperial power painting, General Gordon's Last Stand, that is housed there. My interest is in how artworks contribute to the experience of being racialized in ways that not only amplify the circulation of images but also constitute difficult temporal relations to images. Drawing on Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, I argue that such racialized images are temporally gluey, or stuck, so that we are weighted and bogged down by them. -/- This essay received Honorable Mention from the American Society for Aesthetics Feminist Caucus Committee as runner-up in the Feminist Research Essay prize in 2020. (shrink)

This work is about the deceptive nature of psychotherapy. In particular, it is about those therapies that claim to provide the client with insight and self-knowledge when in practice they are a means of social control absorbing clients into socially acceptable norms. Through a philosophical analysis of key concepts such as knowledge, insight, and subjectivity, and through an examination of mechanisms intrinsic to psychotherapeutic practice, such as power, interpretation, and suggestion, this monograph unveils how psychotherapy deludes clients into believing they (...) have discovered their true self. Rather than gaining self-knowledge and insight into their true or core self, clients are subtly reconstructed and reconfigured along prevailing social values. Furthermore, the very epistemological and metaphysical world-view clients are deceived into believing is highly suspect and founded upon a fascistic understanding of knowledge. As an alternative to such domination, psychotherapy needs to reconstruct itself along Nietzschean-Deleuzian lines where the focus is on multiple identities, difference, and creativity. Rather than focusing on an analysis of past memories to alleviate symptoms such as anxiety or depression, therapeutic intervention should aim for a non-repressive conception of self-knowledge and insight based upon a creative future and not a regretful past. This entails a different understanding of knowledge and reality that is not based on subjugating the world to what we know about it, but on immersing ourselves within reality in all of its concrete richness. And such an approach is preferable not because it is “true” but because it is more liberating. (shrink)

ʻAyyānī, Yaḥyá ibn Ḥumaydān, ca. 12th century; Muslim scholars; Yemen; views on Islamic philosophy.

This article goes behind stereotypes of Muslim veiling to ask after the representational structure underlying these images. I examine the public debate leading to the 2004 French law banning conspicuous religious signs in schools and French colonial attitudes to veiling in Algeria, in conjunction with discourses on the veil that have arisen in other western contexts. My argument is that western perceptions and representations of veiled Muslim women are not simply about Muslim women themselves. Rather than representing Muslim women, these (...) images fulfill a different function: they provide the negative mirror in which western constructions of identity and gender can be positively reflected. It is by means of the projection of gender oppression onto Islam, and its naturalization to the bodies of veiled women, that such mirroring takes place. This constitutes, I argue, a form of racialization. Drawing on the work of Fanon, Merleau-Ponty and Alcoff, I offer a phenomenological analysis of this racializing vision. What is at stake is a form of cultural racism that functions in the guise of anti-sexist and feminist liberatory discourse, at once posing a dilemma to feminists and concealing its racializing logic. (shrink)

This paper suggests that time could have a much richer mathematical structure than that of the real numbers. Clark & Read (1984) argue that a hypertask (uncountably many tasks done in a finite length of time) cannot be performed. Assuming that time takes values in the real numbers, we give a trivial proof of this. If we instead take the surreal numbers as a model of time, then not only are hypertasks possible but so is an ultratask (a sequence which (...) includes one task done for each ordinal number—thus a proper class of them). We argue that the surreal numbers are in some respects a better model of the temporal continuum than the real numbers as defined in mainstream mathematics, and that surreal time and hypertasks are mathematically possible. (shrink)

As emphasised in Islamic sources, justice is one of the most important issues covered in the religion of Islam. In fact, justice is a central theme in Islam and has a special value in this regard. Conversation about justice and its nature, as well as its realisation in human communities, has been thus far a necessity in human life. Actually, the establishment and implementation of justice in all areas are crucial for the utopia. Given the importance of this subject, the (...) present study aims to determine and explain the components of the justice-oriented Islamic community based on the teachings of Nahj al-Balaghah. Therefore, the components that introduce justice orientation in the Islamic community are extracted from the sermons, letters and wise sayings (viz. narrations) of Nahj al-Balaghah. Afterward, the extracted components are classified based on the similarity of the themes and concepts. In the end, five classifications are introduced, including distributive justice, procedural justice, interactional justice, social justice and fairness.Contribution: Based on the determined indices, the model of justice-oriented Islamic community is developed. It is thus recommended to pay more attention to the realisation of a justice-oriented Islamic community by researchers and leaders. This is mainly because of the fact that the opposite of a justice-oriented community is one with injustice, where oppression and disrespect for the rights of others occur, divine blessings change, divine wrath and anger are provoked and destruction approaches. (shrink)

Corruption devours profits, people, and the planet. Ethical leaders promote ethical behaviors. We develop a first-stage moderated mediation theoretical model, explore the intricate relationships between ethical leadership and employee ethical behaviors, and treat ethical climate and organizational justice as dual mediators and leaders’ moral attentiveness as a moderator. We investigate leadership from two perspectives—leaders’ self-evaluation of moral attentiveness and members’ perceptions of ethical leadership. We theorize: These dual mediation mechanisms are more robust for high moral leaders than low moral leaders. (...) Our three-wave data collected from multiple sources, 236 members and 98 immediate supervisors in the Republic of Iraq, support our theory. Specifically, ethical leadership robustly impacts organizational justice’s intensity and magnitude, leading to high employee ethical behaviors when leaders’ moral attentiveness is high than low. However, ethical leadership only influences the ethical climate’s intensity but has no impact on the magnitude when leaders’ moral attentiveness is high than low. Therefore, organizational justice is a more robust mediator than the ethical climate in the omnibus context of leader moral attentiveness. Our findings support Western theory and constructs, demonstrating a new theory for Muslims in Arabic’s emerging markets. Individual decision-makers apply their values as a lens to frame their concerns in the immediate and omnibus contexts to maximize their expected utility and ultimate serenity-happiness. Ethical leadership trickles down to employee ethical behaviors, providing practical implications for improving the ethical environment, corporate social responsibility, leader-member exchange, business ethics, and economic potentials in the global competitive markets. (shrink)

This paper presents a methodology to design and implement programs intended to decide cases, described as sets of factors, according to a theory of a particular domain based on a set of precedent cases relating to that domain. We useDialectical Frameworks, a recent development in AI knowledge representation, as the central feature of our design method. ADFs will play a role akin to that played by Entity–Relationship models in the design of database systems. First, we explain how the factor hierarchy (...) of the well-known legal reasoning system CATO can be used to instantiate an ADF for the domain of US Trade Secrets. This is intended to demonstrate the suitability of ADFs for expressing the design of legal cased based systems. The method is then applied to two other legal domains often used in the literature of AI and Law. In each domain, the design is provided by the domain analyst expressing the cases in terms of factors organised into an ADF from which an executable program can be implemented in a straightforward way by taking advantage of the closeness of the acceptance conditions of the ADF to components of an executable program. We evaluate the ease of implementation, the performance and efficacy of the resulting program, ease of refinement of the program and the transparency of the reasoning. This evaluation suggests ways in which factor based systems, which are limited by taking as their starting point the representation of cases as sets of factors and so abstracting away the particular facts, can be extended to address open issues in AI and Law by incorporating the case facts to improve the decision, and by considering justification and reasoning using portion of precedents. (shrink)

Hādī ilá al-ḥaqq, Yaḥyá ibn al-Ḥusayn, 859-910; view on Islamic philosophy; Islam; doctrines.

If an asymmetry in time does not arise from the fundamental dynamical laws of physics, it may be found in special boundary conditions. The argument normally goes that since thermodynamic entropy in the past is lower than in the future according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, then tracing this back to the time around the Big Bang means the universe must have started off in a state of very low thermodynamic entropy: the Thermodynamic Past Hypothesis. In this paper, we (...) consider another boundary condition that plays a similar role, but for the decoherent arrow of time, i.e. the quantum state of the universe is more mixed in the future than in the past. According to what we call the Entanglement Past Hypothesis, the initial quantum state of the universe had very low entanglement entropy. We clarify the content of the Entanglement Past Hypothesis, compare it with the Thermodynamic Past Hypothesis, and identify some challenges and open questions for future research. (shrink)