Since the introduction of Islamic bank, the intense competition in the banking industry has been increased exponentially. Islamic banks are not only competing among other Islamic banks providers but also with conventional banks which have offered Islamic windows as an alternative to their customers. As many banks started to offer Islamic banking services/products to the customers, one of the im...

The relationship between Islamic values and foreign languages in the school environment offers a relatively good example of the challenging aspects of Islamic identity formation amongst the students. Via focused group interviews, this study aimed to explore the teachers’ perceptions with regard to the influence of English language learning and the environment in the process of Islamic self-iden...

Almost every traditional personality theorist had something to say about religion, but the topic of how religious beliefs might affect individuals’ views of human nature remains largely unstudied. All religions, however, contain certain implicit ideas regarding personality that are likely to impact individual behavior. This article draws on Islamic sources to consider what a practicing Muslim m...

It is unclear whether the development of ‘‘Western’’ psychology and psychiatry, in the last century or so, has overall actually been good for our mental health. The article argues that a deficiency has been the lack of attention paid by these disciplines, to the spiritual component of the Self. There are, however, psychologies’’ developed within religious traditions, which integrate the spiritu...

Islamic banking is currently one of the fastest growing segments of the financial market industry, operating in over 75 countries through 300 institutions. While past literature has established the development of financial institutions as a determinant of economic growth, research on the correlation of the diffusion of Islamic banking with economic growth is limited. This study seeks to add to ...

In the last two decades one of the key questions that has occupied many feminist theorists is how should issues of historical and cultural specificity inform both the analytics and politics of any feminist project. Although this questioning has resulted in serious attempts at integrating issues of sexual, racial, class, and national difference within feminist theory, questions of religious diff...

A tile is a bounded subset of the plane, copies of which may be used to cover the whole plane without gaps or overlap. There are many sources (such as [1]) of beautiful images involving tiling, from medieval Islamic art, through Escher, to more modern work. Perhaps the simplest example of a tile, though, is a solid square, which may tile the plane in a familiar checkerboard pattern. The square ...

Islamic building codes require mosques to face Mecca. The further Islam spreads, the more apt are believers to fall into a quandary. X faces Y only when the front of X is closer to Y than any other side of X. So the front of the mosque should be oriented along a shortest path to Mecca. Which way is that? Does the path to Mecca tunnel through the earth? Or does the path follow the surface of the...

Syria’s support of Iran in the Gulf War needs explanation, surprising as it has both Arabs and non-Arabs. That Syrian policy is not self-explanatory can be attributed to pre-existing expectations about inter-Arab relations, whereby Arab states would stand by each other whenever challenged by foreign powers, even if those powers happened to be Islamic states. Demonstrating Arab solidarity become...