I n Central Asia, as in other regions of the world with large Muslim populations, opposition groups are increasingly turning to the ideas of militant Islam in their efforts to challenge authoritarian rule. Activists fromKokand to Kabul have learned that political Islam provides an unusually potent language of opposition. In Central Asia, a wide array of opposition movements—the Islamic Movement...

Islam is now commonly considered to be the second largest religion in France behind Christianity. Accepting this demographic reality has never been easy for many French citizens. Too often discussions about Islam in France begin and end with a treatment of Muslims as a social problem. Too often the question is asked: Can Muslims fit into French society?. That question presupposes that Islamic v...

School of Mathematics and Statistics, Wuhan University, Wuhan, People’s Republic of China Email: [email protected] Abstract: The security of a password authentication and update scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography proposed by Islam et al. [S.K. Hafizul Islam, G.P. Biswas, Design of improved password authentication and update scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography, Mathematical and C...

One of the distinctive challenges of the period we live in is the significant presence of violence in our societies. These acts of violence stem from a doctrine of hatred and intolerance that fracture societies into constant turbulence and upheaval. For violent Islamist organizations like Al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia, this ideology of hatred is based on an extreme interpretat...

Commercial links and a common orientation towards maritime trade continued to bind Southeast Asian Austronesian communities together in historical times, and the spread of Islam is regarded as a consequence of these cultural ties. Islam required many changes in traditional Austronesian social and religious practices, as did Christianity, but the strength of Austronesian tradition, reinforced gr...

In this paper, an investigation on the relation between state-building and Near Eastern religion is attempted. Analyzing the city-state of Ḥaṭrā (Iraq, close to Kirkuk), it is demonstrated that pre-Islamic state craft in the region was dependent on the initiative of the Parthian monarchy in Iran. The kings of the Arsacid dynasty attempted to bestow the local Arabic tribes in the Jazira with a c...

During the last decade the agenda of local and global politics is heavily marked by the encounter of two powerful currents, namely democracy and political Islam. On the one hand Islam as a religion itself is facing a cultural dialectic between a modern and an authentic form, producing a synthesis which is only to be criticized again by a new radical antithesis. Within that framework political I...