This book investigates the central role of reason in Islamic intellectual life. Despite widespread characterization of Islam as a system of belief based only on revelation, JohnWalbridge argues that rational methods, not fundamentalism, have characterized Islamic law, philosophy, theology, and education since the medieval period. His research demonstrates that this medieval Islamic rational tra...

We present a comprehensive study of the use of value precedence constraints to break value symmetry. We first give a simple encoding of value precedence into ternary constraints that is both efficient and effective at breaking symmetry. We then extend value precedence to deal with a number of generalizations like wreath value and partial interchangeability. We also show that value precedence is...

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...

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...

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...