Family planning programmes initiated in the Islamic Republic of Iran from 1966 met with limited success. Following the 1986 census family planning was considered a priority and was supported by the country's leaders. Appropriate strategies based on the principles of health promotion led to an increase in the contraceptive prevalence rate among married women from 49.0% in 1989 to 73.8% in 2006. ...

Principal components are the benchmark for linear dimension reduction, but they are not always easy to interpret. For this reason, some alternatives have been proposed in recent years. These methods produce components that, unlike principal components, are correlated and/or have nonorthogonal loadings. This article shows that the criteria commonly used to evaluate principal components are not a...

Rapid advances in biomedical science and technology, which have revolutionized medicine and health-care services in different societies, have been associated with inevitable ethical challenges. Undoubtedly, these innovations could lead to irreversible disasters if they are not limited by appropriate regulations. Substantial attempts have been made in the Islamic Republic of Iran to establish a ...

This paper examines the issue of gender equality within Islam in order to develop an ethical framework for businesses operating in Muslim majority countries. We pay attention to the role of women and seemingly inconsistent expectations of Islamic and western societies with regard to appropriate gender roles. In particular, we contrast a mainstream western liberal individualist view of freedom a...

In most of the multi–criteria decision–analysis (MCDA) problems in which the Choquet integral is used as aggregation function, the coefficients of Choquet integral (capacity) are not known in advance. Actually, they could be calculated by capacity definition methods. In these methods, the preference information of decision maker (DM) is used to constitute a possible solution space. ...

This paper reviews the progress of Islamic banking from both theoretical and practical aspects. It highlights the basic principles on which Islamic banking is based and describes the operational details of Islamic banks. It mentions some of the misgivings with respect to the viability of Islamic banking and evaluates them objectively. It highlights the effects of Islamic banking on savings, inv...

Four options for assigning a meaning to Islamic Logic are surveyed including a new proposal for an option named Real Islamic Logic (RIL). That approach to Islamic Logic should serve modern Islamic objectives in a way comparable to the functionality of Islamic Finance. The prospective role of RIL is analyzed from several perspectives: (i) parallel distributed systems design, (ii) reception by a ...

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 ...

We estimated the prevalence of type 2 diabetes in the Islamic Republic of Iran by systematic review of all available studies in the country between 1996 and 2004 and aggregation of the data using meta-analysis and meta-regression methods. In those > 40 years the prevalence was 24% and it increased by 0.4% with each year after 20 years of age. The risk of type 2 diabetes was 1.7% greater in wome...

This article examines the unique risks associated with Islamic financial institutions and the secular state’s reticence to directly regulate their religious dimension. It argues that the state’s method of regulating the Islamic financial industry ignores special reputational risks associated with the religious and cultural distinctiveness of Islamic banks. The Financial Services Authority (FSA)...