Controversies in Formative Shiʿi Islam

Controversies and considerations regarding the termination of pregnancy for Foetal Anomalies in Islam

BACKGROUND Approximately one-fourth of all the inhabitants on earth are Muslims. Due to unprecedented migration, physicians are often confronted with cultures other than their own that adhere to different paradigms. DISCUSSION In Islam, and most religions, abortion is forbidden. Islam is considerably liberal concerning abortion, which is dependent on (i) the threat of harm to mothers, (ii) th...

Controversies in Obesity Treatment

The markedly high prevalence of obesity contributes to the increased incidence of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, hypertension, sleep apnea, and heart disease. Because of high prevalence of obesity in almost all countries, it has been the focus of many researches throughout the world during the recent decades. Along with increasing researches, new concepts and controversies have been emerge...

Islam in local contexts: Localised Islam in Northern Pakistan

As Clifford Geertz remarked in his Islam Observed (1968), the idea of a ‘changing’ religion is a contradiction in terms, as religion is fundamentally concerned with what is permanent and eternal. Still, one way to come to terms with religious change is to consider the many ways that religion is interpreted, by laymen and scholars alike. Social anthropologists like myself have naturally found a ...

Islam in the West: From Immigration to Global Islam

Islam Almasri_TOCSJ

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...