The concept of Islamic or Shariah-compliant finance is based on core tenets of Islam concerning property rights, social and economic justice, wealth distribution, and governance. One of the key features of the system is prohibition of riba (interest) and gharar (ambiguous contracts or deals) (Kabir and Mahlkrecht 2011, 74; El-Gamal 2009, 58–60). There is consensus among scholars that the prohib...

0 n 15 February of this year, shortly after the number of people Dr. Jack Kevorkian had helped to commit suicide swelled to fifteen, the Michigan legislature passed a law, effective that very day, making assisted suicide a felony punishable by up to four years in prison. The law, which is automaticallv reDealed six months after a I ‘ newly established commission on death and dying recommends pe...

How will the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) shape broader pursuit nuclear abolition? TPNW critics have argued that new agreement is likely to fuel divisions between and non-nuclear-weapon sates, undermining consensus hampering existing efforts at reducing eliminating arms. In this commentary, I argue one TPNW’s key strengths contributions precisely it pierces feigned abolitioni...

A common intuition about evidence is that if data x have been used to construct a hypothesis H, then x should not be used again in support of H. It is no surprise that x fits H, if H was deliberately constructed to accord with x. The question of when and why we should avoid such "double-counting" continues to be debated in philosophy and statistics. It arises as a prohibition against data minin...

Sunnism constitutes eighty percent of the Islamic world. The most academic and renowned religious seminary in the Sunni world is Al-Azhar University in Egypt, and it is from here that most verdicts on novel issues such as human cloning are decreed and disseminated throughout the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds. The perspective of this seminary and of other significant Sunni jurisprudential counc...