Xenophobia is on the rise in Europe; and the ten million Muslims living there are often its targets. This paper contends that the fear and anxiety Westerners exhibit toward Muslims stem ultimately from a fear and anxiety regarding ourselves and our beliefs. I argue that the perceived standoff with Muslims causes us to doubt the sincerity and superiority of our own convictions. The latter are pr...

The majority of the world’s Muslim population follows the Sunni branch of Islam, and approximately 10-15% of all Muslims follow the Shiite (Shi‘ite, Shi‘a, Shia) branch. Shiite populations constitute a majority in Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, and Azerbaijan. There are also significant Shiite populations in Afghanistan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen. Sunnis and Shiites share ...

Few physicians in the United States receive formal education related to principles of infant care in Islamic families. Breastfeeding has a religious basis in Islam and it is recommended that the mother suckle her offspring for 2 years if possible. Weaning from the breast before that period is allowed if mutually decided on by both parents. The infant's father has an obligation to support his wi...

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...

Islamic bioethics derives from a combination of principles, duties and rights, and, to a certain extent, a call to virtue. In Islam, bioethical decision-making is carried out within a framework of values derived from revelation and tradition. It is intimately linked to the broad ethical teachings of the Qur'an and the tradition of the Prophet Muhammed, and thus to the interpretation of Islamic ...

Beliefs and customs surrounding death, funeral rites, and mourning provide a window into a society’s most deeply held values. In the monotheistic faith of Islam, eschatology – belief in the Day of Judgment (Yawm al-din) and resurrection (al-qiyama) – underlies many practices. Public mourning rituals that commemorate the deaths of saints and martyrs are closely linked to the concept of salvation...

The question of women‘s rights in Islam generates huge interest among Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Scholars of feminism are sharply divided on the question of women‘s status in Islam. One group associates Islam with misogyny and gender oppression, while the other celebrates the religion as a liberatory force for women. Remarkably, despite a surge in female educational attainment and conscious...

Using the POLITY IV and Freedom House indices, Rowley and Smith (2009) found that countries with Muslim majorities enjoy less freedom and are less democratic than countries in which Muslims are a minority. Because the POLITY IV and Freedom House indices have been criticized on several grounds, I reinvestigate Rowley and Smith ́s finding using the new Democracy-Dictatorship data from Cheibub et a...

The design of secure remote user authentication schemes for mobile applications is still an open and quite challenging problem, though many schemes have been published lately. Recently, Islam and Biswas pointed out that Lin and Hwang et al.’s password-based authentication scheme is vulnerable to various attacks, and then presented an improved scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) to...

As two fundamental requirements to ensure secure communications over an insecure public network channel, password authentication and update of password have received considerable attention. To satisfy the above two requirements, Islam et al. proposed a password authentication and update scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography. They claimed that their scheme could withstand various attacks. ...