(1996). The Conradian inheritance in the African novel. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 101-108.

(1996). The Conradian inheritance in the African novel. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 101-108.

Arab countries; intellectual life; congresses.

Morals and athics; Arab countries; criticism.

Objective To determine the attitudes of Egyptian patients regarding their participation in research and with the collection, storage and future use of blood samples for research purposes. Design Cross-sectional survey. Study population Adult Egyptian patients (n=600) at rural and urban hospitals and clinics. Results Less than half of the study population (44.3%) felt that informed consent forms should provide research participants the option to have their blood samples stored for future research. Of these participants, 39.9% thought that consent forms should (...) include the option that future research be restricted to the illness being studied. A slight majority (66.2%) would donate their samples for future genetic research. Respondents were more favourable towards having their blood samples exported to other Arab countries (62.0%) compared with countries in Europe (41.8%, p<0.001) and to the USA (37.2%, p<0.001). Conclusions This study shows that many individuals do not favour the donation of a blood sample for future research. Of those who do approve of such future research, many favour a consent model that includes an option restricting the future research to the illness being studied. Also, many Egyptians were hesitant to have their blood samples donated for genetic research or exported out of the Arab region to the USA and European countries. Further qualitative research should be performed to determine the underlying reasons for many of our results. (shrink)

Islamic philosophy; Ibn al-Muṭahhar al-Ḥillī, al-Ḥasan ibn Yūsuf, 1250-1325; Muslim scholars; 13th century; history.

OBJECTIVES: To study some ethical problems created by accession of a previously nomadic and traditional society to modern invasive medicine, by assessment of physicians' attitudes towards sharing information and decision-making with patients in the setting of a serious illness. DESIGN: Self-completion questionnaire administered in 1993. SETTING: Riyadh, Jeddah, and Buraidah, three of the largest cities in Saudi Arabia. SURVEY SAMPLE: Senior and junior physicians from departments of internal medicine and critical care in six hospitals in the above cities. RESULTS: A (...) total of 249 physicians participated in the study. Less than half indicated they provided information on diagnosis and prognosis of serious illnesses all the time. Physicians who were more senior and those who spoke Arabic fared better than other groups. The majority preferred to discuss information with close relatives rather than patients, even when the patients were mentally competent. Most of the physicians felt patients had the right to refuse a specific treatment modality, and 68% denied patients the right to demand such a treatment if considered futile. Further analysis showed that physicians' attitudes varied along a spectrum from passive to paternalistic with the largest group in a balanced position. CONCLUSIONS: In traditional societies where physicians are regarded as figures of authority and family ties are important, there is a considerable shift of access to information and decision-making from patients to their physicians and relatives in a manner that threatens patients' autonomy. Ethical principles, wider availability of invasive medical technology and a rise in public awareness dictate an attitude change. (shrink)

Objectives: to assess physicians’ and patients’ views in Saudi Arabia towards involving the patient versus the family in the process of diagnosis disclosure and decision-making, and to compare them with views from the USA and Japan.Design: A self-completion questionnaire was translated to Arabic and validated.Participants: Physicians from different specialties and ranks and patients in a hospital or attending outpatient clinics from 6 different regions in KSA.Results: In the case of a patient with incurable cancer, 67% of doctors and 51% of (...) patients indicated that they would inform the patient in preference to the family of the diagnosis . Assuming the family already knew, 56% of doctors and 49% of patients would tell the patient even if family objected . However, in the case of HIV infection, 59% of physicians and 81% of patients would inform the family about HIV status without the patient’s consent . With regards to withholding ventilatory support, about 50% of doctors and over 60% of patients supported the use of mechanical ventilation in a patient with advanced cancer, regardless of the wishes of the patient or the family. Finally, the majority of doctors and patients were against assisted suicide.Conclusions: Although there was more recognition for a patient’s autonomy amongst physicians, most patients preferred a family centred model of care. Views towards information disclosure were midway between those of the USA and Japan. Distinctively, however, decisions regarding life prolonging therapy and assisted suicide were not influenced to a great extent by wishes of the patient or family, but more likely by religious beliefs. (shrink)

OBJECTIVES: To study the opinions of nationals (Emiratis) and doctors practising in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with regard to informing terminally ill patients. DESIGN: Structured questionnaires administered during January 1995. SETTING: The UAE, a federation of small, rich, developing Arabian Gulf states. PARTICIPANTS: Convenience samples of 100 Emiratis (minimum age 15 years) and of 50 doctors practising in government hospitals and clinics. RESULTS: Doctors emerged as consistently less in favour of informing than the Emiratis were, whether the patient (...) was described as almost certain to die during the next six months or as having a 50% chance of surviving, and even when it was specified that the patient was requesting information. In the latter situation, a third of doctors maintained that the patient should not be told. Increasing survival odds reduced the number of doctors selecting to inform; but it had no significant impact on Emiratis' choices. When Emiratis were asked whether they would personally want to be informed if they had only a short time to live, less than half responded in the way they had done to the in principle question. CONCLUSIONS: The doctors' responses are of concern because of the lack of reference to ethical principles or dilemmas, the disregard of patients' wishes and dependency on survival odds. The heterogeneity of Emiratis' responses calls into question the usefulness of invoking norms to explain inter-society differences. In the current study, people's in principle choices did not provide a useful guide to how they said they would personally wish to be treated. (shrink)

Galen's highly influential treatise On the Affected Parts is currently being critically edited by the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Over the last decade, a team of scholars, including the present authors as well as the late and lamented Aḥmad ʿEtmān, have worked on producing a critical edition of the Arabic translation of this text, and their efforts are now drawing to a close. Here we present new insights into how this Arabic translation relates to the (...) Greek textual tradition. (shrink)

Charles Tilly (1929-2008), sociólogo, historiador y politólogo norteamericano, es un autor imprescindible para la comprensión de la contienda política y el conflicto social. Sus investigaciones muestran cómo las bases sociales organizadas en diversas formas de acción colectiva pueden influir y condicionar la marcha de la historia. Sus estudios sobre las revoluciones, la formación y evolución de los Estados y su teoría de la acción colectiva giran en torno a su gran preocupación: la defensa de derechos ciudadanos y la búsqueda de (...) sistemas políticos atentos a las condiciones de vida de los más débiles. Esta obra presenta la mayor recopilación de reflexiones sobre su trabajo publicada hasta la fecha. Cada capítulo analiza sus textos, sus teorías y diseños metodológicos, y algunos añaden investigación de casos. Este libro ayuda a comprender un tiempo marcado por intensas movilizaciones populares, algunas con consecuencias muy relevantes, como las protestas que se extienden en 2011 desde Túnez a Egipto, Yemen, Libia, Siria, etc.,la llamada "primavera árabe" y distintas movilizaciones en el occidente democrático reclamando más atención a las demandas ciudadanas, como el Movimiento 15 de Mayo (15 M) en España replicado en otros países, las protestas en Grecia, Reino Unido, etc. (shrink)

The Greek original of Galen's is lost, nor has a copy of the complete translation into Arabic, made by Hunayn b. Ishāq in the first half of the ninth century, come down to us, though some passages of it are quoted by various Arab authors. A summary of the translation, however, was discovered by P. Kraus in a miscellaneous manuscript in Cairo and published by him in the Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Egypt, vol. (...) v/i. (shrink)

Yūsuf al-Nabhānī (d. 1932) became famous in the world of science with many works he wrote in the fields of Hadith and Kalam. On the other hand, he is a person who has proven himself with his works and poems in the field of madīh nabawī. For this reason, he was also referred to as Hassān and Busīrī of the period in which he lived. His diwan named al-Sābiqātu'l-jiyād fī madhi seyyidi'l-'ibād is an important work that contains the poems he (...) sang in the type of prophetic madīh nabawī. The divan in question consists of ten couplet odes in which each letter of the alphabet is determined as a rhyme. In these odes, which he wrote to express his love for the Prophet and for some other religious reasons, the influence of classical Arabic poetry and especially Būsīrī can be found. Mystical thought also has a great influence on the poems of Yūsuf al-Nabhānī. As a matter of fact, the narration of the Prophet in his poems is generally shaped in line with the concept of al-Haqīqa al-Muhammedī/al-Nūr al-Muhammedî. In this study, Yūsuf al-Nabhānī will be discussed as a madīh nabawī poet within the framework of his divan. In this context, the content and stylistic structure of his poems will be examined in the axis of literary criteria, and the effect of mystical thought on his poems will be tried to be explained in general terms. (shrink)

The present study aims at explaining how the Relevance Theory could be a viable approach to weigh up the main functions of some concessive Pragmatic Operators in Jordanian Arabic at the production and interpretation levels. A sample of twenty-two speeches delivered by members of the Jordanian Parliament the 16th was randomly selected for scrutiny. Three POs detected in their speeches were analyzed at the token level in light of three elementary RT assumptions about discourse connectives in general, namely connectivity, the (...) conceptual-procedural distinction, and monosemy. The major finding of this study was that concessive POs, as a subset of contrastives, are used to optimize relevance: highlight certain dimensions and/or suppress others of the scenario to the background. However, the point of departure from possibly all previous treatments is that the speakers, as politicians, still used them more strategically because total ambiguity resolution should not be a viable alternative in social settings laden with politics. (shrink)

Mulla Sadra (ca. 1572-1640) is one of the most prominent figures of post-Avicennan Islamic philosophy and among the most important philosophers of Safavid Persia. He was a prolific writer whose work advanced the fields of intellectual and religious science in Islamic philosophy, but arguably his most important contribution to Islamic philosophy is in the study of existence (wujud) and its application to such areas as cosmology, epistemology, psychology, and eschatology. Sadra represents a paradigm shift from the Aristotelian metaphysics of fixed (...) substances, which had dominated Islamic philosophy, to an analysis of existence as the ultimate ground and dynamic source of things. He posits that all beings derive their reality and truth from their wujud and that a proper philosophical analysis must therefore start and eventually end with it. The present work's focus on Sadra's gradational ontology provides a strong foundation for the reader to understand Sadra's other works and later texts by other philosophers working in the same field. This edition contains parallel English-Arabic texts and a new translation by preeminent scholar of Islamic philosophy Seyyed Hossein Nasr. (shrink)

Arabic language; grammar; syntax; linguistics.

Automatic synonym extraction plays an important role in many natural language processing systems, such as those involving information retrieval and question answering. Recently, research has focused on extracting semantic relations from word embeddings since they capture relatedness and similarity between words. However, using word embeddings alone poses problems for synonym extraction because it cannot determine whether the relation between words is synonymy or some other semantic relation. In this paper, we present a novel solution for this problem by proposing the (...) SynoExtractor pipeline, which can be used to filter similar word embeddings to retain synonyms based on specified linguistic rules. Our experiments were conducted using KSUCCA and Gigaword embeddings and trained with CBOW and SG models. We evaluated automatically extracted synonyms by comparing them with Alma’any Arabic synonym thesauri. We also arranged for a manual evaluation by two Arabic linguists. The results of experiments we conducted show that using the SynoExtractor pipeline enhances the precision of synonym extraction compared to using the cosine similarity measure alone. SynoExtractor obtained a 0.605 mean average precision for the King Saud University Corpus of Classical Arabic with 21% improvement over the baseline and a 0.748 MAP for the Gigaword corpus with 25% improvement. SynoExtractor outperformed the Sketch Engine thesaurus for synonym extraction by 32% in terms of MAP. Our work shows promising results for synonym extraction suggesting that our method can also be used with other languages. (shrink)

The current study tries to verify the effectiveness of a training program in increasing Crowdfunding awareness. The sample was (50) students in CIS, who were purposively selected and distributed equally into a treatment and control group. The researchers designed the study tools (a training program to increase Crowdfunding awareness). The study findings revealed the existence of statistically significant differences between the treatment and control groups in favor of the former. Furthermore, there were statistically significant differences between the pre and the (...) post measures of the treatment group in favor of the post measures. Furthermore the current study is unique by the virtue of its nature, scope and way of implied investigation, as it is the first study for Crowdfunding training program in Arabic world. (shrink)

While the concept of work ethic has been discussed in the Arab context :35–49, 2009), the significant conceptual and methodological limitations of the existing work ethic and work value research elucidate the need for a more robust investigation of the multidimensional work ethic construct in the Arab context. Multidimensionality of the work ethic concept has gained considerable attention in recent years as researchers attempt to move away from the religiously labeled Islamic and Protestant work ethic conceptualizations. The current (...) study examines the Arab work ethic through the use of the multidimensional work ethic profile on a sample of future business leaders in the United Arab Emirates. A total of 484 business students completed an Arabic version of the MWEP short form. The results show that centrality of work and hard work are the highest scoring work ethics followed by self-reliance, wasted time, and leisure. There are significant differences in work ethic dimensions across gender and categories of family breadwinner. No significant differences in work ethic dimensions are observed across categories of nationality and work preference groups. The findings are discussed in relation to the unique insight they offer on the nature of work ethic in an Arab context. (shrink)