The public and academic debate on the relation between Islam and secularism has been forcefully revived since 9/11 and the “Arab Spring”. Especially essentialist and monolithic depictions by Western scholars have claimed the incompatibility of Islam with secularism as a prerequisite for democracy. Another strand of literature claims that evidence of Islam’s democratic essence (Esposito and Voll...

Abortion is forbidden under normal circumstances by nearly all the major world religions. Traditionally, abortion was not deemed permissible by Muslim scholars. Shiite scholars considered it forbidden after implantation of the fertilised ovum. However, Sunni scholars have held various opinions on the matter, but all agreed that after 4 months gestation abortion was not permitted. In addition, c...

s of the articles in Arabic Sources of Tolerance and Intolerance in Islam by Ibrahim Kalin Healing Interreligious Relationships by Leo Lefebure Disagreeing to Agree: A Christian Response to A Common Word by James Cutsinger Religious Diversity and Harmonious Living: The Indian Story and Challenge by Michael Amaladoss Jews and Muslims: Why They Have More in Common than They Realize by Robert Eise...

this article presents muhammad arkoun's (1928-2010) key ideas on ethos, civil society, and secularism. following reflections on adab, arkoun's inspiration for rethinking islamic heritage (turāth), this contribution shows how arkoun reconsiders the impact of philosophy, both in theology as well as academic scholarship. the paper displays his hopes for generating an innovative intellect...

Breast-feeding practice has an important medical and socio-cultural role. It has many anthropological aspects concerning the "power structures" that find their expression in breast-feeding and the practices that formed around it, both socially, scientifically, and legally-speaking. Breast-feeding has been given much attention by religions and taboos, folklore, and misconception abound around it...

The few known palatographic studies on Estonian consonants date back to the 1970s, and no research in articulatory phonetics has been practised throughout the following four decades. Recently, the Estonian EPG corpus was recorded using a contemporary EPG system. In the paper we introduce first results on contemporary palatography patterns of Estonian sonorants and compare these to results from ...

The aim of this paper is to sketch a line of interpretation of certain political-philosophical discourses on 'Islam in Europe' through the interrelated concepts of appropriation and redemption. Muslim presence in Europe is generally perceived as 'problematic.' A specific vocabulary, including terms like 'liberal dilemma,' 'defense of freedom,' 'Muslim exceptionalism', and 'specification of acce...

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...