Using the POLITY IV and Freedom House indices, Rowley and Smith (2009) found that countries with Muslim majorities enjoy less freedom and are less democratic than countries in which Muslims are a minority. Because the POLITY IV and Freedom House indices have been criticized on several grounds, I reinvestigate Rowley and Smith ́s finding using the new Democracy-Dictatorship data from Cheibub et a...

The design of secure remote user authentication schemes for mobile applications is still an open and quite challenging problem, though many schemes have been published lately. Recently, Islam and Biswas pointed out that Lin and Hwang et al.’s password-based authentication scheme is vulnerable to various attacks, and then presented an improved scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) to...

As two fundamental requirements to ensure secure communications over an insecure public network channel, password authentication and update of password have received considerable attention. To satisfy the above two requirements, Islam et al. proposed a password authentication and update scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography. They claimed that their scheme could withstand various attacks. ...

Recently, Islam and Biswas proposed an efficient and secure ID-based remote mutual authentication with key agreement scheme. We have analyzed the security and performance of Islam and Biswas’s scheme and showed that their scheme has some pitfalls. In order to solve these problems, we have constructed an enhanced ECC remote mutual authentication with key agreement scheme and proven that the prop...

According to Islam, Allah created man to worship Him and to lead a virtuous life based on His teachings and guidance. But how can man know and fulfill his role and the purpose of his existence if he does not receive clear and practical instructions of what Allah wants him to do? The existence of prophethood, by which Allah sent a prophet to every nation to reveal His message in terms that the p...

Islamic bioethics is in good health, this article argues. During the twentieth century, academic researchers had to deal with a number of difficulties including the scarcity of available Islamic sources. However, the twenty-first century witnessed significant breakthroughs in the field of Islamic bioethics. A growing number of normative works authored by Muslim religious scholars and studies co...

Among the "Great Religions" of the world may be discovered repetition and similarity, as well as, variations and significant differences. This similarity becomes clear when it is understood that of the five great religions-Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism-a reduction to two may be made historically. Hinduism and Judaism may be considered the genesis of the other three: Hinduism ...