We compare, using data envelopment analysis (DEA), the performance of Islamic and conventional banks prior to, during and immediately after the 2008 financial crisis (2004-2009). There is no significant difference in mean efficiency between conventional and Islamic banks when efficiency is measured relative to a common frontier. A meta-frontier analysis (MFA), new to the banking context, howeve...

Islamic banks underlie the fundamental principles of the Shari’ah, which encompass all business activities, financial contracts, and transactions. The Shari’ah Supervisory Board (SSB) monitors and certifies compliancy and is unique to the governance structure of Islamic banks compared to their Western counterparts. This study addresses the question of how the compositional characteristics of th...

Islamic medicine, Arabic medicine, Arab-Islamic medicine, or Greco-Arab and Islamic medicine refers to medicine developed in the Golden Age of the Arab-Islamic civilization, which extended from Spain in the west to Central Asia and India in the east. In temporal terms it covered a period of roughly nine centuries, from the middle of the seventh to the end of the fifteenth century. Medicine was ...

Each economy functions within a particular social framework, defined by its moral philosophy and legal system. What makes an economy Islamic is Sharīah, the moral/legal discourses of the classical fuqahā’, which defined the economy of classical Islam, shaped its micro and macro institutions, and modulated its actual performance. This economy, which was virtually effaced during the age of Europe...

In a world in which the intellect has become synonymous with reason and intuition with a “biological” sixth sense concerned with foretelling future events, it becomes difficult to understand what intellect and intuition, these two key faculties upon which knowledge is based, can mean in the context of Islamic thought. To understand the meaning of these terms in the traditional Islamic universe ...

The Système Internationale d’unités (SI) is about to undergo its biggest change in half a century by redefining the units for mass and current in terms of the fundamental constants h and e, respectively. This change crucially relies on the exactness of the relationships that link these constants to measurable quantities. Here we report the first direct comparison of the integer quantum Hall eff...

condensation (contraction) and rarefaction (expansion)are two terms in natural philosophy (physics) used inseveral different meanings. in this article the meanings ofthe two terms and their real and artificial kinds areintroduced and their differences with some terms such asgrowth, tumor, and, also, their opposite ones areexpressed. we have also evaluated the philosophical andexperimental argum...