This paper investigates the ways in which terrorism is linked to education and poverty using data newly culled from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) documentary sources. The paper presents a statistical analysis of the determinants of participation in terrorist activities by members of the Hamas and PIJ between the late 1980s and May 2002. The resulting evidence suggests that both high...

Islamic art is unique because its form and function permeate both distance and time. Since the birth of Islam, Muslim artists around the world have created pieces of art that share an uncanny resemblance to pieces created by other Muslim artists through common themes, appearances, and applications. These similarities include calligraphic elements, exaggerated depictions of plants and animals, a...

There is a serious lack of empirical studies on Islamic banking. This paper attempts to fill that gap to some extent. Using data for the 1990-98 period, several hypotheses and common perceptions about the practice of Islamic banking have been tested. The performance of Islamic banks has been evaluated using both trend and ratio analyses. For this purpose, some objective “benchmarks” for various...

Contemporary research on investment behaviour in Islamic perspective, most of the time, finds it expedient to assume zero rate of time preference in an Islamic economy. The author argues that there is no justification for that. According to him, there is nothing against positive time preference or against realizing a time value of money in an Islamic framework, as long as time value of money is...

Islamic medicine, Arabic medicine, Arab-Islamic medicine, or Greco-Arab and Islamic medicine refers to medicine developed in the Golden Age of the Arab-Islamic civilization, which extended from Spain in the west to Central Asia and India in the east. In temporal terms it covered a period of roughly nine centuries, from the middle of the seventh to the end of the fifteenth century. Medicine was ...

Recently there has been a heightened global concern over ‘contagion’ in the conventional financial markets. Our study is motivated by the desire to test empirically whether this contagion is reflected in the fast growing Islamic financial markets as well. This study is the first attempt at testing whether there has been any contagion among the Shari’ah-compliant stock markets during the most re...

This paper exposes the “roadmap” of how modern Islamist terrorism is financed, through both legitimate and illegitimate means: the networks and linkages between financing obtained on the one hand through sympathetic Islamic governments, Islamic charities and banks, seemingly legitimate businesses operating as fronts, and on the other hand through criminal activities running the full gamut from ...

This paper intends to examine the methods of reasoning that are employed in Fiqh and critically discuss their adoption in Islamic economics. The paper argues that the methods used in Fiqh are mainly designed to find out whether or not a certain act is permissible or prohibited. Islamic economics, on the other hand, is a social science. Like any other social science its proper unit of analysis i...

The notion of " Islamic finance " was born during the tumultuous identity-politics years of the mid-twentieth century. Indian, Pakistani, and Arab thinkers contemplated independence from Britain, and independence of Pakistan from India, within a context of " Islamic society. " Islam was assumed to inspire political, economic, and financial systems that are distinctive and independent of the Wes...