the politics of shifting to the east, which is interpreted in the statements of turkish islamist politicians as ottomanism, is a newly emerged strategy which is essentially comprehensible in the connection with the history and identity of the ottoman era and the new regional and trans-regional role of turkey. the ideology of ottomanism not only implies the expansion of turkey’s influence on the...

Given the long roots of bay‘a (pledge of allegiance) in Islamic tradition and the controversial claim by the Islamic State (IS) to be a caliphate, the application of bay‘a to the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and his project is a contested issue among radical Islamists. Based on secondary literature and IS ideologues’ own writings, this paper analyses IS’s claims of validity in their ca...

As Syria prepares to enter its seventh year of war, the tide seems to have turned in favour of the Assad regime. Government forces over-ran Aleppo at the end of 2016, assisted by air support from Russia. President Bashar al-Assad has now regained control of all the major population centres in the country, including the four largest cities. As The Lancet Infectious Diseases went to press, a ceas...

This paper investigates the ways in which terrorism is linked to education and poverty using data newly culled from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) documentary sources. The paper presents a statistical analysis of the determinants of participation in terrorist activities by members of the Hamas and PIJ between the late 1980s and May 2002. The resulting evidence suggests that both high...

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...

Islamic Finance is more than an asset class – it is a way of life lived by 1.6 billion Muslims around the world. But its reach goes even further – non-Islamic countries, governments, and businesses, have all invested in or issued Islamic securities for one reason or another. With the ongoing push of globalization of trade and finance, Islamic financial flows, long a localized phenomenon, have b...

centuries. Starting from the pre-Islamic era in the 6th century AD and extending to the 16th Century AD when the Ottoman Sultan Salim I in 1516 AD invaded and destroyed the Mamluk Dynasty in Syria and Egypt extending the Ottoman Empire into North Africa. The language of science at the time was Arabic. Many scientists and physicians throughout the Muslim Empire taught and wrote in Arabic. This w...

The notion of " Islamic finance " was born during the tumultuous identity-politics years of the mid-twentieth century. Indian, Pakistani, and Arab thinkers contemplated independence from Britain, and independence of Pakistan from India, within a context of " Islamic society. " Islam was assumed to inspire political, economic, and financial systems that are distinctive and independent of the Wes...