children are a precious gift from god, and the blessing of a child is a special time in a person's life. all cultures and religious traditions have certain ways of welcoming a newborn child into the community; also, each culture and religion has its own customs and traditions for the birth of a child. during and after the birth of a muslim child, there are certain rituals the mother and fa...

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq placed the question of Islam and Muslim politics squarely in the American public’s mind. In bookshops and classrooms, and on radio and television talk shows, Americans were treated to crash courses on the history of Islam, Muslim attitudes toward democracy, the reasons (some) Muslim women ...

Recently, a number of methods have been proposed to improve image retrieval accuracy by capturing context information. These methods try to compensate for the fact that a visually less similar image might be more relevant because it depicts the same object. We propose a new quick method for refining any pairwise distance metric, it works by iteratively discovering the object in the image from t...

Zhahirul Islam, Alex van Belkum, Alison J. Cody, Helen Tabor, Bart C. Jacobs, Kaisar A. Talukder, and Hubert P. Endtz Author affiliations: International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh (Z. Islam, K.A. Talukder, H.P. Endtz); Erasmus MC University Medical Center, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (Z. Islam, A. van Belkum, H.P. Endtz, B.C. Jacobs); University of Oxfo...

A hinterland in the old world of Islam, the early history of diffusion of Islamic civilization in Bengal is shrouded with mystery. Though the maritime and trade contacts between Arab world and Bengal can be traced during the early period of Islam, the religious and cultural interaction between these two far-fetched lands started growing only after the Muslim conquest of the region in the early ...

The expansion of Islam east of the Middle East has been, apart from a few notable exceptions, a relatively understudied subject. This is especially remarkable when one recalls that, by far, the world's greatest number of Muslims reside east of Karachi. The reasons for this neglect of scholarship, however, are not far to find. First is the identification of the Arab Middle East with the historic...

The discussion of identity within Islamic archaeology is rare, and it is often treated as a given, as if Islam was a monolithic category, when in reality it is composed of a variety of identity variables, such as those revolving around sectarian affiliation, ethnicity or gender for example. Ideally, Islam should be structured by ‘emphatic ideological denial of the primacy of ethnic identity (an...

Worldwide, Islam is the second most populous religion and, in many countries in the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa, it is the predominant religion. The population of Muslims in the United States is projected to dramatically increase in the next few decades. Understanding the role of Islam for people who believe in and follow Islam-Muslims-will provide nurses with important pe...

Political Islam, the book under review, contains eight sections; the first being introductory, the rest all with four articles each, under different themes, and captioned; Modern Understandings and Explanations of Islamism (section two), Political Islam, the State and Political Power (section three), Political Islam and Democracy (section four), Islamic Movements in Multicultural Settings (sect...

Islam has a general principle of increase in population. But the Muslims are equally obliged to take care of health, education and the provisions etc. for their offspring and wives in the best possible way. The Muslims would have to regulate and manage the number of children, if any situation affects their duties regarding their wives or children. Islam accomplishes permissibility of temporary ...