The viability of an organization hinges upon the effectiveness of its workforce. Enhanced performance among employees directly correlates with heightened organizational efficacy. Consequently, this study endeavours to investigate the influence of religiosity, perceived social support, and religious work ethics on both career commitment and career success. Moreover, it seeks to scrutinize the mediating impact of career commitment and the moderating role of Islamic workplace spirituality. Data were gathered from employees engaged in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) situated in the Kingdom (...) of Saudi Arabia (KSA) through purposive sampling, yielding 210 valid responses. SPSS 26 served as the analytical tool for data examination. Results underscored the positive relationships between religious work ethics, perceived social support, and religiosity with career commitment, alongside the favourable impact of career commitment on career success. Additionally, the statistical validation of the moderating influence of Islamic workplace spirituality was evident. This research contributes valuable insights for policymakers and scholars, guiding future endeavours in employee-related studies. (shrink)

The Iraqi constitution of 2005 grants freedom of religious thought, belief and practice for all religions. This study was also based on the premise that the constitutional rights are not adhered to in Iraq, even by government officials, which could be due to the absence of suitable legislations subsequent to the framing of the constitutional provisions. An analytical and descriptive research design was adopted for this study. Data was collected from primary and secondary sources through documentation research and evaluation of (...) historical sources. The primary data comprised Articles of the Iraqi constitution, and a few national and international legal instruments related to religious freedom. Secondary data included empirical research studies, books, articles and other published sources. This study therefore took the form of an empirical legal research as it involved the issues of constitutional reforms in the field of religious freedom. A comparative approach was adopted in analyzing the documents about religion and politics related to both the Arab region and the West. The focus was on the measures that should be adopted to advance the dialogues of religious freedom and maintain religious neutrality in all government policies. The study found out that there were apparent contradictions between the constitutional provisions and the State Laws. Similarly, the Iraqi civil and penal codes remain silent regarding legal remedies for the violation of constitutional provisions. (shrink)

Video games are a $20-billion-a-year industry, but it is still treated as a niche market. The video game corporations hold considerable power over the articles that journalists write. Through in-de...

This book offers the first comprehensive introduction to one of the most significant Arab thinkers of the late 20th century and the early 21st century: the Moroccan philosopher and social theorist Mohammed Abed al-Jabri. With his intellectual and political engagement, al-Jabri has influenced the development of a modern reading of the Islamic tradition in the broad Arab-Islamic world and has been, in recent years, subject to an increasing interest among Muslims and non-Muslim scholars, social activists and lay men. The (...) contributors to this volume read al-Jabri with reference to prominent past Arab-Muslim scholars, such as Ibn Rushd, al-Ghazali, al-Shatibi, and Ibn Khaldun, as well as contemporary Arab philosophers, like Hassan Hanafi, Abdellah Laroui, George Tarabishi, Taha Abderrahmane; they engage with various aspects of his intellectual project, and trace his influence in non-Arab-Islamic lands, like Indonesia, as well. His analysis of Arab thought since the 1970s as a harbinger analysis of the ongoing “Arab Spring uprising” remains relevant for today's political challenges in the region. (shrink)

The evolution of Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) is the result of the amount of research in the field of education and artificial intelligence in recent years. English is the third most common languages in the world and also is the internationally dominant in the telecommunications, science and trade, aviation, entertainment, radio and diplomatic language as most of the areas of work now taught in English. Therefore, the demand for learning English has increased. In this paper, we describe the design of (...) an Intelligent Tutoring System for teaching English language grammar to help students learn English grammar easily and smoothly. The system provides all topics of English grammar and generates a series of questions automatically for each topic for the students to solve. The system adapts with all the individual differences of students and begins gradually with students from easier to harder level. The intelligent tutoring system was given to a group of students of all age groups to try it and to see the impact of the system on students. The results showed a good satisfaction of the students toward the system. (shrink)

Recently, due to the rapid progress of computer technology, researchers develop an effective computer program to enhance the achievement of the student in learning process, which is Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). Science is important because it influences most aspects of everyday life, including food, energy, medicine, leisure activities and more. So learning science subject at school is very useful, but the students face some problem in learning it. So we designed an ITS system to help them understand this subject easily (...) and smoothly by analyzing it and explaining it in a systematic way. In this paper, we describe the design of an Intelligent Tutoring System for teaching science for grade seven to help students know the 7 characteristics for living things smoothly. The system provides all topics of living things and generates some questions for each topic and the students should answer these questions correctly to move to the next level. In the result of an evaluation of the ITS, students like the system and they said that it is very useful for them and for their studies. (shrink)

La création d’entreprise n’obéit pas toujours à la finalité économique de la recherche du gain et du profit. Elle peut être aussi le moyen par lequel certains groupes sociaux, en l’occurrence ici les entrepreneurs d’origine maghrébine, contournent le marché du travail qu’ils considèrent comme le lieu privilégié d’expression de la discrimination ethnique. Seront analysées les trajectoires sociales et professionnelles de ces petits entrepreneurs et la façon dont ils mobilisent les réseaux sociaux pour trouver de nouveaux marchés, recruter du personnel ou (...) encore se procurer l’argent nécessaire pour lancer leur entreprise ou parer aux difficultés économiques conjoncturelles.The creation of an enterprise does not inevitably stems from an economic search for money and profit. It may also be the means through which some social groups – in this case entrepreneurs of Maghreb immigrant background – skirt around the labour market they regard as a privileged place for the emergence of ethnic discrimination. The social and occupational paths of these small companies’ heads will be analized, as well as the way they mobilize social networks with a view to finding new markets, recruiting staff or raising enough money to set up in business or face an economic crisis. (shrink)

L'auteur analyse les contributions de quatre penseurs arabes ayant travaillé sur le rapport au Turâth (tradition) et à la modernité : Abdallah Laroui, Mohamed Abed Al Jabri, Georges Tarabishi et Taha Abderrahmane. L'analyse tente de montrer que les apports divergents de ces quatre penseurs, quant à la manière d'assimiler le Turâth et la modernité occidentale afin d'échapper à leur emprise dans le but de façonner sa propre modernité, pourraient constituer le point de départ pour un nouveau rapport à la tradition (...) et à la modernité. (shrink)

Mit diesem Band wendet sich der Philosoph Mohamed Turki gegen die Behauptung, dass geisteswissenschaftliche Debatten in der arabisch-islamischen Welt ausschliesslich vom Diskurs des Glaubens beherrscht werden. In fundierter und zugleich überblickender Manier wird zunächst der historische Wandel von Bestimmungen des Rationalitätsbegriffs nachgezeichnet und verständlich gemacht, um anschliessend einzelne Diskurse der Gegenwart darzustellen. Deutlich wird dabei das Ineinandergreifen von Konzepten wie Glaube, Vernunft, Offenbarung und Interkulturalität, aber auch Konfliktlinien innerhalb der Diskussion. Die beziehungsreichen Aufsätze des Bandes vereinen Themen wie Pluralität, Toleranz, (...) Frieden und Menschenrechte aus dem Blickwinkel des arabisch-islamischen Denkens und verdeutlichen, dass eine Verbindung zum klassischen Kanon der abendländischen Geistestradition immer schon bestand und keinesfalls dazu im Widerspruch steht"-- Back cover. (shrink)

Islamic bioethics is in good health, this article argues. During the twentieth century, academic researchers had to deal with a number of difficulties including the scarcity of available Islamic sources. However, the twenty-first century witnessed significant breakthroughs in the field of Islamic bioethics. A growing number of normative works authored by Muslim religious scholars and studies conducted by academic researchers have been published. This nascent field also proved to be appealing for research-funding institutions in the Muslim world and also in (...) the West, such as the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). On the other hand, the article argues that contemporary Islamic bioethics is in need of addressing news issues and adopting new approaches for the sake of maintaining and improving this good health in the future. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to better understand how sustainability rating agencies, through discourse, promote an “ideology of numbers” that ultimately aims to establish a regime of normalization governing social and environmental performance. Drawing on Thompson’s (Ideology and modern culture: Critical social theory in the era of mass communication, 1990 ) modes of operation of ideology, we examine the extent to which, and how, the ideology of numbers is reflected on websites and public documents published by a range (...) of sustainability rating agencies. Our analysis indicates that the ideology of numbers promotes a relatively narrow vision of corporate social and environmental responsibility. That is, it establishes some areas of visibility while leaving in the shadow certain aspects of the ways in which companies fulfill, or fail to meet, their social and environmental responsibilities. The ideology of numbers also exerts power by identifying those companies that are deemed to be worthy of inclusion, or not, in a supposedly socially responsible corporate elite. (shrink)

The rapid advancement of information and communication technologies has resulted in a variety of maintenance support systems and tools covering all sub-domains of maintenance. Most of these systems...

— Y.K. Karaosmanoglu: "General, this party has no doctrine...".— Mustafa Kemal: "Of course it hasn't, my son; if we had a doctrine, we would paralyze the movement”.The many studies, articles, essays, conferences and seminars dedicated to the personality and the work of Mustafa Kemal are still far from having exhausted an area of knowledge with many facets, a historical reality with unending extensions. By studying the apologetic literature about the civilizing hero and a historiography which is limited to the relatively (...) neutral description of the rich career of an individual, it can be noted that there are very few writings inspired by the desire not only to analyze, to explain and to understand but also to think through the Kemalist revolution. (shrink)

Brigitte Foulon et Mohamed Nachi nous indiquent ainsi que le concept d'ikhtilâf (la possibilité de divergences d'opinions entre les autorités du droit religieux) fut très tôt admis comme légitime dans le sunnisme.

Background Bioethics and law distinguish between the practices of "physician-assisted death" and "allowing the patient to die." Discussion Advances in biotechnology have allowed medical devices to be used as destination therapy that are designed for the permanent support of cardiac function and/or respiration after irreversible loss of these spontaneous vital functions. For permanent support of cardiac function, single ventricle or biventricular mechanical assist devices and total artificial hearts are implanted in the body. Mechanical ventilators extrinsic to the body are used (...) for permanent support of respiration. Clinical studies have shown that destination therapy with ventricular assist devices improves patient survival compared to medical management, but at the cost of a substantial alteration in end-of-life trajectories. The moral and legal assessment of the appropriateness and permissibility of complying with a patient's request to electively discontinue destination therapy in a life-terminating act in non-futile situations has generated controversy. Some argue that complying with this request is ethically justified because patients have the right to request withdrawal of unwanted treatment and be allowed to die of preexisting disease. Other commentators reject the argument that acceding to an elective request for death by discontinuing destination therapy is 'allowing a patient to die' because of serious flaws in interpreting the intention, causation, and moral responsibility of the ensuing death. Summary Destination therapy with cardiac and/or ventilatory medical devices replaces native physiological functions and successfully treats a preexisting disease. We posit that discontinuing cardiac and/or ventilatory support at the request of a patient or surrogate can be viewed as allowing the patient to die if--and only if--concurrent lethal pathophysiological conditions are present that are unrelated to those functions already supported by medical devices in destination therapy. In all other cases, compliance with a patient's request constitutes physician-assisted death because of the pathophysiology induced by the turning off of these medical devices, as well as the intention, causation, and moral responsibility of the ensuing death. The distinction between allowing the patient to die and physician-assisted death is pivotal to the moral and legal status of elective requests for death by discontinuing destination cardiac and/or ventilatory medical devices in patients who are not imminently dying. This distinction also represents essential information that must be disclosed to patients and surrogates in advance of consent to this type of therapy. (shrink)

Contre les lectures qui visent à minimiser chez Hegel et Marx le rôle des actions individuelles, on tentera de montrer que les formulations hégélienne et marxienne du principe de faisabilité mettent au contraire cet agir au premier plan. Mais, on verra que la traduction matérialiste de ce principe conduit à l’opposition des modalités de cette faisabilité : participation d’un côté, révolution de l’autre. Si l’action historique comme praxis révolutionnaire est toujours suspendue à sa coïncidence avec les circonstances, celle-ci ne signe (...) pas tant la limite de cette praxis que son surgissement imprévisible, jamais assuré de son succès, ni de son échec, ce qui pose le problème de son organisation. (shrink)

In this paper, we designed and developed an intelligent tutoring system for teaching Photoshop. We designed the lessons, examples, and questions in a way to teach and evaluate student understanding of the material. Through the feedback provided by this tool, you can assess the student's understanding of the material, where there is a minimum overshoot questions stages, and if the student does not pass the level of questions he is asked to return the lesson and read it again. Eventually this (...) administration is a special teacher for the students and can continue with him until he fully understands the lesson without weariness or boredom, regardless of the level of student. (shrink)

. In the wake of the February 1997 announcement that Dolly the sheep had been cloned, Muslim religious scholars together with Muslim scientists held two conferences to discuss cloning from an Islamic perspective. They were organized by two influential Islamic international religioscientific institutions: the Islamic Organization of Medical Sciences and the International Islamic Fiqh Academy. Both institutions comprise a large number of prominent religious scholars and well‐known scientists who participated in the discussions at the conferences. This article gives a comprehensive (...) analysis of these conferences, the relation between science and religion as reflected in the discussions there, and the further influence of these discussions on Muslims living in the West. Modern discussions on Islamic bioethics show that formulating an Islamic perspective on these issues is not the exclusive prerogative of religious scholars. Formulating such perspectives has become a collective process in which scientists play an essential role. Such a collective approach strengthens the religious authority of Muslim scholars and makes it more influential rather than undermining it. (shrink)

The study aims to identify the reality of management of electronic documents and electronic archiving retirement in the Palestinian Pension Agency -analytical study, as well as to recognize the reality of the current document management system in the Palestinian Pension Agency. The study found the following results: that the reality of the current system for the management of documents in the agency is weak and suffers from many jams. Employee in the agency understand the importance and benefits of the management (...) of electronic documents system, where the application of electronic document management system provide important features and benefits most of which reduce the loss of documents between departments, illustrates the flow path, the speed, accuracy, transparency, and reduce the proportion of damage and destruction of files. Furthermore, the electronic documents system cost will be less than the cost of the current system and it will reduce the tasks assigned for the staff. The existence of a clear adoption of the agency for the policies and procedures established for the application of electronic documents management system. There are weak plans for training and developing of staff in the agency to raise their efficiency. The study found a set of recommendations, including: increased interest and awareness of the need to implement policies, mechanisms, and procedures to ensure the success of electronic document management system through benefiting from the experiences of other organizations and the private sector. The agency need to increase and develop its services for retirees in order to encourage the private sector, universities, and institutions to join the agency, and open the way for all segments of society in Gaza and West Bank and enhance its competitiveness between international social security institutions. The need to focus its attention on developing and publishing appropriate clear plans and specific goals about management of electronic documents and the agency should be committed to apply them. The need to focus on the establishment of a public management of archiving in the structure dealing with all technical operations and having competent and qualified employees in the field of electronic document management. The need to focus on the Palestinian National Archives and the follow-up with the international standards by the International Council Archives (ICA). (shrink)

This paper explores the important role of critical science, and in particular of post-colonial and decolonial theories, in understanding and shaping the ongoing advances in artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is viewed as amongst the technological advances that will reshape modern societies and their relations. While the design and deployment of systems that continually adapt holds the promise of far-reaching positive change, they simultaneously pose significant risks, especially to already vulnerable peoples. Values and power are central to this discussion. Decolonial theories (...) use historical hindsight to explain patterns of power that shape our intellectual, political, economic, and social world. By embedding a decolonial critical approach within its technical practice, AI communities can develop foresight and tactics that can better align research and technology development with established ethical principles, centring vulnerable peoples who continue to bear the brunt of negative impacts of innovation and scientific progress. We highlight problematic applications that are instances of coloniality, and using a decolonial lens, submit three tactics that can form a decolonial field of artificial intelligence: creating a critical technical practice of AI, seeking reverse tutelage and reverse pedagogies, and the renewal of affective and political communities. The years ahead will usher in a wave of new scientific breakthroughs and technologies driven by AI research, making it incumbent upon AI communities to strengthen the social contract through ethical foresight and the multiplicity of intellectual perspectives available to us, ultimately supporting future technologies that enable greater well-being, with the goal of beneficence and justice for all. (shrink)

A Critique of Localized Realism Abstract In an attempt to avert Laudan’s pessimistic induction, Worrall and Psillos introduce a narrower version of scientific realism. According to this version, which can be referred to as “localized realism”, realists need not accept every component in a successful theory. They are supposed only to accept those components that led to the theory’s empirical success. Consequently, realists can avoid believing in dubious entities like the caloric and ether. This paper examines and critiques localized realism. (...) It also scrutinizes Psillos’s historical study of the caloric theory of heat, which is intended to support localized realism. (shrink)

Death is the opposite not of life, but of power. And as such, Mohammed Bamyeh argues in this original work, death has had a great and largely unexplored impact on the thinking of governance throughout history, right down to our day. In Of Death and Dominion Bamyeh pursues the idea that a deep concern with death is, in fact, the basis of the ideological foundations of all political systems. Concentrating on four types of political systems—polis, empire, theocracy, and modern (...) mass society systems—Bamyeh shows how each follows a specific strategy designed to pit power against the equalizing specter of death. Each of these strategies—consolation, expansion, preparation, and repression—produces a certain style of political behavior, as well as particular psychic traumas. In making his argument, Bamyeh revisits a wide range of empirical and theoretical discussions in existentialist philosophy, psychoanalysis, comparative historical sociology, literary studies, and anthropology. By demonstrating how schemes of power are by definition also schemes for defying death—despite their claims to the contrary—his book encourages us to think of a new style of politics, one oriented toward life. (shrink)

We introduce the notions of weakly and locally positive Robinson theories. We give a characterization of weakly positive Robinson theories by the amalgamation property, and a syntactic characterization of locally positive Robinson theories.

: The thesis put forth in this study is that, while coitus interruptus was known to the early Muslims, it was not practiced for reasons that were primarily theological. For ʿazl is in obvious conflict with the rule that prevailed until the third/ninth century, that of enjoining the believer to marry and procreate without trying to curb one’s fertility. A careful examination of the oldest traditions on the subject leads us to conclude that only about the end of the first/seventh (...) century some religious authorities spoke in favor of resorting to this contraceptive method, in a limited context – the relationship between a master and his slave girl. And it is probably during the same period that the controversy over coitus interruptus arose. This is why it is anachronistic to see traditions in favor of coitus interruptus as testimony on how long this type of birth control has been practiced in the Islamic world. In addition to relying on textual criticism, the study uses prosopographical information to show that the first Muslims often had many children with concubines. Some Muslim authorities encouraged believers to resort to coitus interruptus, not in order engage in «birth control» but because of the negative reputation of slave girls. To avoid having children with them was to avoid having «illegitimate» children – who were considered evil – and especially to avoid increasing their number so as not to hasten the end of the world. Later, when the rule that believers must marry and produce offspring ceased to be a dogma, allowing for celibacy to be an option, albeit for a tiny minority, coitus interruptus came to be permitted as a means of limiting births, but only if the purpose was religious in nature. Birth control for strictly economic reasons continued to be strictly forbidden. (shrink)

El sufismo es una corriente estrictamente islámica cuyos seguidores se entregan a la práctica de un misticismo de base ascética en un ambiente religioso de gran ritualidad. Es característica fundamental del sufismo la imprescindible participación de un maestro de espíritu que asume el papel de guía en la formación del novicio devoto, facilitando su progresión en el Camino. Algunos de estos personajes, poseedores de gran carisma y detentadores de virtudes extraordinarias y ejemplares, llegaron a despertar, primero en sus educandos y (...) luego en los seguidores de sus doctrinas y enseñanzas, tal nivel de admiración que llegaron a ser considerados santos. El artículo analiza las características y circunstancias que concurrían en estas singulares personas, así como la esencia de la cualidad que las adornaba, la santidad. Además, también se aborda un fenómeno relacionado con lo anterior, que se produjo en las zonas rurales y suburbanas de Marruecos y otros lugares del Magreb, el santonismo. Este último sería el culto que se daría a una determinada persona, el santón, por parte de sectores de la población poco islamizados en los que sobrevivirían ciertos atavismos preislámicos. (shrink)

Much empirical analysis and econometric work recognizes that there are nonlinearities, regime shifts or structural breaks, asymmetric adjustment costs, irreversibilities and lagged dependencies. Hence, empirical work has already transcended neoclassical economics. Some progress has also been made in modeling endogenously generated cyclical growth and fluctuations. All this is inconsistent with neoclassical general equilibrium. Hence there is growing evidence of Kuhnian anomalies. It therefore follows that there is a Kuhnian crisis in economics and further research in nonlinear dynamics and complexity can (...) only increase the Kuhnian anomalies. This crisis can only deepen. However, there is an ideological commitment to general equilibrium that justifies “free enterprise” with only minimal state intervention that may still sustain neoclassical economics despite the growing evidence of Kuhnian anomalies. Thus, orthodox textbook theory continues to ignore this fact and static neoclassical theory remains a dogma with no apparent reformulation to replace it. (shrink)

This research explores the relationship between the bounded in-degree and out-degree of an argumentation framework and the computational complexity of the problems of Credulous Acceptance ( CredA ) and Skeptical Acceptance ( SkepA ) under preferred extensions. Researchers have studied the complexity of these problems when the in-degree [Formula: see text] and out-degree [Formula: see text] of the arguments are restricted to [Formula: see text]. Despite this restriction, the computational complexities of CredA and SkepA persist. Based on these results, we (...) presents new results that provide deeper insights into the impact of additional constraints on the argumentation framework. Specifically, we show that when “[Formula: see text]” or “[Formula: see text]” is restricted to [Formula: see text], both problems CredA and SkepA can be solved in polynomial time. Subsequently, we impose additional constraints on the argumentation framework by analyzing the quantities “[Formula: see text],” “[Formula: see text],” and “[Formula: see text].” For an argumentation framework [Formula: see text] and all arguments “[Formula: see text]” of [Formula: see text], the parameter “[Formula: see text]” indicates the maximum number of attackers that any argument “[Formula: see text]” can have among all those that are not attacked by “[Formula: see text]” [Formula: see text], “[Formula: see text]” indicates the maximum number of arguments that any argument “[Formula: see text]” attacks among all those that do not attack “[Formula: see text]”, and “[Formula: see text]” denotes the maximum number of arguments that any argument “[Formula: see text]” attacks among those that attack “[Formula: see text]”. Surprisingly, even when all these quantities are restricted to [Formula: see text], the computational complexity of CredA persists. Furthermore, we explore the influence of symmetric attacks by fixing “[Formula: see text]” to zero, while setting “[Formula: see text]” and “[Formula: see text]” to [Formula: see text]. Remarkably, the complexity of CredA persists under this restriction as well. (shrink)

This paper presents some thoughts focusing on the problems of ethnico-cultural communalism, its meaning in the current global socio-political context and its implications with regard to principles of democracy, citizenship and the nation-state. It gives particular attention to the issues of interculturality and intercultural communication (IC) as central markers in the contemporary socio-political landscape. The author claims that IC (particularly in its communal and ethnic forms) may prevent or resolve the communal separation that threatens many groups throughout the world. Apart (...) from the essential role it has in production, reproduction and circulation of meaning within, as well as outside, the group, the discourse developed by communal communication media is an ideological, reflexive construction whose aim it is to create an impact on the social cognition of its receivers. This is why ethnicocultural groups scattered around the world generally have effective communal media that reinforce their social, cultural and political cohesion at local, national and global levels. Because, as well as expressing their positions and views on the issues facing a nation's society, this formal discourse provides group members with a legitimate and coherent framework for action and argument. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Renaissance Thought on the Celestial Hierarchy:The Decline of a Tradition?Feisal G. MohamedThe Dionysian arrangement of the angels was dismantled on the one hand because its author was increasingly regarded as a "counterfait," and on the other hand because Protestants upheld the Bible's supremacy over all the "vain babblings of idle men." In consequence, those who like Spenser celebrated the "trinall triplicities," look back upon a great past that had (...) provided a vision hallowed by time and graced by an impressive array of intellects.—C. A. Patrides1It has been some forty years now since C. A. Patrides first argued in these pages that English Renaissance views on the celestial hierarchy constitute "the decline of a tradition," an argument made so convincing by his encyclopedic articles on the subject that scholars have been content to accept it. Indeed there is a good deal of evidence suggesting that the tradition of the ninefold hierarchy of angels associated with the Pseudo-Dionysius suffered serious injury at the hands of the Renaissance and Reformation. Subjected to the scrutiny of Renaissance scholarship and in light of the rediscovery of several Neoplatonists, particularly Proclus, it became quite clear that the Corpus Dionysiacum had been written centuries later than its author pretended. In the mid-fifteenth century Lorenzo Valla argued that because the Areopagus was a legal rather than a philosophical assembly, because none of the Greek or Latin fathers make mention of Dionysius, and because the claim in the letter to Polycarp to have witnessed [End Page 559] in Heliopolis the solar eclipse at the moment of Christ's death is a clear fabrication, placement of the Corpus in the first century should be doubted.2 These suggestions went largely unnoticed until Desiderius Erasmus, returning from England (where William Grocyn had begun murmurs regarding the Areopagitic origin of the Corpus), discovered in Louvain a manuscript of Valla's commentary on the book of Acts and incorporated its conclusions in his influential annotations on the New Testament.3 The discovery of Dionysius's pseudonymity and Erasmus's suggestion that Dionysian ceremonies could no longer be connected to the apostolic church would damage permanently the now Pseudo-Areopagite's influence. In a classic case of complicity between Renaissance humanism and Reformation theology—both Protestant and Catholic, it must be stressed—the sixteenth century turned away from Dionysian thought in general and from The Celestial Hierarchy in particular. The interrogation of apostolic origin begun by prominent Catholic thinkers like Erasmus and Cardinal Cajetan was most convenient to reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin, both of whom described the author of the Corpus as "Dionysius, whoever he was."4Such an open-and-shut presentation of sixteenth-century Dionysiana, however, ignores several factors. One of them is that Renaissance scholars were not the first to question the dating of the Corpus: Peter Abelard fueled general perception of his heretical tendencies by suggesting that Dionysius may not have been the Pauline convert mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles.5 Much more important, however, is the number of Renaissance scholars for whom Dionysius was a formative influence. Despite his stance on the authenticity of the Corpus, Lorenzo Valla describes Dionysius in the peroration to his Encomium Sancti Thomae Aquinatis as playing the flute in a celestial symphony before the throne of God.6 For Nicholas Cusanus, as F. Edward Cranz describes [End Page 560] it, "Dionysius is the most important Christian theologian with no runner-up who is even close."7 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola saw Dionysius's writings as following directly from the teachings of Paul.8 Marsilio Ficino employed Dionysius in his comments on angels in the Theologia Platonica, translated and commented on The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology, and consistently endorsed first-century dating of the Corpus Dionysiacum.9 Ambrogio Traversari, who described Dionysius as "Apostoli disciplus," would also produce a fresh translation acceptable to humanist tastes in 1437, which would receive wide dissemination in the 1499 edition produced by Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples.10 Lefèvre saw the Corpus as apostolic in origin and authority and went so far as to endorse the traditional conflation of Dionysius with Saint... (shrink)

The Arab Spring of 2011 has highlighted an unprecedent fact in the region: it was the young and educated population who established the spearheading of change, and led their countries to democracy. In this paper, we try to analyze how science has been a key factor in these moves, in Tunisia as well as in Egypt, and how it can help to anchor democracy in these countries.

This research examines the methods by which a common person can recognize a Mujtahid. The study presents the various juristic schools of thought on disputed issues, clarifies the preponderant opinion and its evidence, and explains the less favored opinions along with their evidence and the responses to them. The research concludes with a summary of the findings that the researcher arrived at through this study.