Males have dominated medicine for many centuries. Females could not appear in the medical history equally till the end of the 18th century; although they always have been in medicine as healers. It is worth mentioning that first illustrations indicating female surgeons were found in the book written in Turkish by Serefeddin Sabuncuoglu in the 15th century; while Europe was newly waking up from ...

The microstructures and chemical compositions of stonepaste bodies from the Islamic Middle East, typically produced from a mixture of ten parts crushed quartz, one part crushed glass and one part white clay, are investigated using analytical scanning electron microscopy. For comparison, replicate stonepaste bodies are produced in the laboratory at firing temperatures in the range 900e1200 C, an...

Islamic finance has gripped the world with a strong fervor and passion. Interest in this discipline has proliferated to almost 60 countries, going beyond the Islamic world to the leading global financial centers. For quite sometime, United Kingdom has adopted an open door policy and provided a level playing field to Islamic finance and now Singapore is following its lead. Every day, Islamic fin...

Classical Islamic law recognizes only natural persons; it does not grant standing to imagined, juristic persons. This article identifies self-reinforcing processes that kept Islamic law from developing a concept of legal personhood indigenously. Community building being central to Islam’s mission, the early promoters of Islam had no use for a concept liable to facilitate factionalism. In subseq...

The rise of European science during the Renaissance is greatly indebted to the flourishing of the sciences during the Islamic Golden Age. However, some believe that medieval Islamic physicians and in particular surgeons had been merely a medium for Greco-Roman ideas. Contrarily, in some medieval Islamic medical books, such as Al-Tasrif of Al-Zahrawi (936-1013), the surgical instructions represe...

In this beautifully crafted book, Timur Kuran provides a remarkably rich analysis of how Islamic law impeded economic progress in the Middle East and North Africa. Kuran’s views are fresh and powerful, and they are subtle. He does not claim that Islamic law was generally bad for economic activity. He does not claim that prohibitions on interest denied credit to merchants or entrepreneurs. Nor d...

The rapid Arab-Islamic conquest during the early Middle Ages led to major political and cultural changes in the Mediterranean world. Although the early medieval Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula is now well documented, based in the evaluation of archeological and historical sources, the Muslim expansion in the area north of the Pyrenees has only been documented so far through textual sou...

The article is concerned with the latest developments in Indonesia's Islamic field. Its focus is on the role of social media in exchange relationships between Islamic preachers and their constituency. The article first discusses economic exchanges between preachers and their followers, and then it concentrates on social exchanges and how they are mediated today. Empirically, the article deliver...