Mumtaz Ahmad is professor in Hampton University’s Department of Political Science. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ “Fundamentalism Project,” Dr. Ahmad has been a Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Fellow of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies and the International Institute of Islamic Thought, a Fulbright Professor in Bangladesh and Pakistan, and a Vis...

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...

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...

Under this title I organized, on March 26 and 29, 2010, a workshop that discussed the place of Islamic law in the national codes of states with predominantly Muslim populations in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. What place do their codes assign to Islamic law? As none of the states concerned—with the exception of Turkey—declares itself to be a secular state, they can all claim that the law ...

At least from the nineteenth century onward, certain observers have viewed Islam as a religion that discourages entrepreneurship by fostering fatalism, conform-ism, and conservatism. 1 Leading Muslim reformers of the nineteenth century, including Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–97), believed that this view confuses a perverted form of Islam, which counsels passive resignation to events, with auth...

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 ...

Describing the Islamic financial system simply as 'interest-free' does not do justice to the system. Promotion of entrepreneurship, preservation of property rights, transparency and the sanctity of contractual obligations, which are crucial to any sound financial system, describe its essence. Today, Islamic financial and banking activities have reached an impressive size of over US$250bn, as co...

Timur Kuran has spent much of the last decade investigating the economic and institutional development of the Middle East. The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East brings the results of this research together to provide an explanation for the decline in the region’s economic fortunes. Although generations of scholars have sought to understand the Middle East’s economic dec...

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...