The Question of Palestine and the Muslim World

The question of Palestine (and the city of Jerusalem) is a core issue that remains at the centre of the Muslim mind in our time. This is because most Muslims feel that the Zionist Movement created the State of Israel in Palestine after World War II by depriving the local population of their fundamental right to exist in their ancestral homeland. The global Zionist Movement conspired, resorted to terrorist tactics and executed an ethnic cleansing campaign to create the State of Israel. The Zionists first secured the support of British politicians and then the American leaders in favour of their search for an exclusive Jewish state covering the entirety of the former British Mandate of Palestine. Although the Palestinians – like Muslims in various parts of the world – quickly developed a national consciousness in the inter-war period and tried to protect their fundamental rights, they were no match for the Zionists who had already secured the support of major powers of the globe (e.g. Britain and the US). Later, Israel managed to obtain UN membership in its third attempt with the commitment to allow all Palestinians to return to their ancestral home. But in practice, Israel has ignored all UN resolutions regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel has gradually developed a legal framework to deny the citizenship rights of the original population of Palestine and continues to build new Jewish settlements by demolishing Palestinian homes. While the Palestinians continue to suffer under Israeli repression, the OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation) and most Muslim governments have largely abandoned the Palestinian cause of liberation. This, in turn, frustrates much of the Muslim youth around the world – fuelling fundamentalism and extremism. 

Plasma Treatment of Zinc Oxide Thin Film and Temperature Sensing Using the Zinc Oxide Thin Film

Zinc oxide is a direct and wide bandgap, II-VI semiconductor. It has large exciton binding energy, large piezoelectric constant, strong luminescence, and high thermal conductivity. These properties make zinc oxide as a suitable material for various optoelectronic applications. Vacuum based processes of fabrication of zinc oxide thin film dominate the market for their better electrical and optical properties. In this work, zinc oxide thin films were prepared by easy and low cost solution method with oriented crystal growth along (002) plane. To improve electrical and optical property of the fabricated zinc oxide thin films, films were treated with oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen plasmas. Oxygen plasma treatment improved the crystallinity of zinc oxide thin film. Hydrogen plasma treatments were found very effective in improving the electrical conductivity of the film sacrificing film’s transmittance. Nitrogen plasma treatment following hydrogen plasma treatment could restore the transmittance maintaining the improved electrical property. Sequential oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen plasma treatment decreased the resistivity of zinc oxide thin film by more than two order maintaining transmittance close to the as deposited film. This work also reports a temperature sensor based on the temperature-dependent bandgap of zinc oxide semiconductors. Transmittance measurement of the ZnO films at different temperatures showed sharp absorption edge at around 380 nm and red shift characteristics. An optical temperature sensor was established using the zinc oxide coated glass as sensing element, ultra-violet light emitting diode as light source, and a ultra-violet photodiode as light detector. Short circuit current of the photodiode was measured over a range of the zinc oxide film’s temperature. The short circuit current decreased linearly with the increase of the temperature and the sensitivity was ~0.1 μA/°C

Assessing the determinants of interest rate spread of commercial banks in Oman : an empirical investigation

This study aims to examine the factors that determine interest rate spread (IRS) of commercial banks listed on Muscat security market over the period 2008 – 2014. They are classified into four groups of financial, economic, market and legal indicators. The Spearman correlation matrix results show that all economic indicator variables have significant relationship with interest rate spread except GDP variable. No significant relationship exists between financial indicator variables and interest rate spread, but in legal indicator variables there is significant relationship with interest rate spread only in two variables the size of government and regulation. Finally, there is a significant relationship between market indicator based on market concentration measured by Herfindahl-Hirschman Index and interest rate spread. OLS regression analysis indicates a statistically significant impact on IRS by factors like return to asset ratio, liquidity risk and risk aversion within the financial group and unemployment rate, debt services ratio and principal repayment from the economic group and Herfindahl-Hirschman Index based on market concentration group. Finally, there is a significant impact of sound money and regulation within the legal group on IRS. The researchers recommend an adaptation in the monetary policy to exploit the high level of liquidity in the banking sector by facilitating easy access to debt to individuals as well as firms thus providing the margin competitive interest rate.peer-reviewe

Advances in Mechanical Metamaterials for Vibration Isolation: A Review

The adverse effect of mechanical vibration is inevitable and can be observed in machine components either on the long- or short-term of machine life-span based on the severity of oscillation. This in turn motivates researchers to find solutions to the vibration and its harmful influences through developing and creating isolation structures. The isolation is of high importance in reducing and controlling the high-amplitude vibration. Over the years, porous materials have been explored for vibration damping and isolation. Due to the closed feature and the non-uniformity in the structure, the porous materials fail to predict the vibration energy absorption and the associated oscillation behavior, as well as other the mechanical properties. However, the advent of additive manufacturing technology opens more avenues for developing structures with a unique combination of open, uniform, and periodically distributed unit cells. These structures are called metamaterials, which are very useful in the real-life applications since they exhibit good competence for attenuating the oscillation waves and controlling the vibration behavior, along with offering good mechanical properties. This study provides a review of the fundamentals of vibration with an emphasis on the isolation structures, like the porous materials (PM) and mechanical metamaterials, specifically periodic cellular structures (PCS) or lattice cellular structure (LCS). An overview, modeling, mechanical properties, and vibration methods of each material are discussed. In this regard, thorough explanation for damping enhancement using metamaterials is provided. Besides, the paper presents separate sections to shed the light on single and 3D bandgap structures. This study also highlights the advantage of metamaterials over the porous ones, thereby showing the future of using the metamaterials as isolators. In addition, theoretical works and other aspects of metamaterials are illustrated. To this end, remarks are explained and farther studies are proposed for researchers as future investigations in the vibration field to cover the weaknesses and gaps left in the literature

The clash of civilizations thesis and Muslims: the search for an alternative paradigm

The clash of civilizations thesis, first formulated by Bernard Lewis and popularized by Samuel Huntington in the 1990s was, in the course of time, embraced by President George W. Bush for execution, virtually making it the cornerstone of US foreign policy during the early years of the 21st century. The situation thus created has pushed the Muslim world to the centre-stage of international politics. An in-depth analysis, however, finds the thesis to be seriously flawed. Despite differences, Islamic and Western transparency and freedom of choice. The idea of a clash between these two civilizations appears to be based on misapprehension of certain events in history and its implications for world peace are simply horrendous. Luckily there are indications that the new American administration under President Obama seems to have realized the essential flaw of the clash civilizations thesis. The present article ventures to explore the outlines of an alternative paradigm that might pave the ground for peaceful civilizational co-existence

An experimental study of iconicity in the Arabic vocabulary of the Qur’an

This thesis begins with two interests: a personal desire to expand upon and apply modern scientific linguistic study to Muslim holy writ, and a more general desire to work with and study the growing field of iconicity in applied linguistics. As a Muslim, the Qur'an is a book close to my heart, and so, initially, when beginning, I had wished to complete a comprehensive series of iconicity experiments, studying large swathes of the Qur'an, utilising this Qur'anic stimuli for participant studies, administering entire verses of the Holy Book to non-Arabic speakers and analyzing their perception of linguistic iconicity from said verses. As the thesis moved along, it became clear even with a word limit of 40,000, this was impossible, thus, the paper focuses on not the entirety of the Qur'an, or even complete chapters or verses, but 100 words. The Qur'an is used as a text of study, but also a platform from which we compiled the stimuli for experimental work on, fundamentally, words from (Classical) Arabic, as they are found in the Qur'an from the 7th Century. That is the brief summary of how the thesis sculpted itself into what it is today, with a very specific substrate of stimuli studied. But now with this general outline in place, the questions remain, why the Qur'an? And equally saliently, what is iconicity? The Qur'an is the Muslim Holy book, and the most memorized book in the modern world (Graham, 1993:80). What is perhaps more striking, and attractive for linguistic and philological study, is that the vast majority of people who have memorized the Qur'an are not fluent in Arabic, let alone the classical language that the text employs (Ariffin et al., 2000, 2015). The average Muslim who typically does not understand Arabic will attain proficiency in rote reading/reciting of the Qur'an in absence of semantic comprehension (Riddel et al., 1997). Despite the above, studies indicate the Qur'anic script is largely memorized with ease (Boyle, 2000; Slamet, 2019; Yusuf, 2010), with a number of studies finding the meaning vivid and easy to visualize for non-native speakers and readers (Boyle, 2006; Nawaz & Jahangir, 2015). Additionally, the Qur'an itself claims uniqueness in its stylistic marvel, its eloquence and its brevity (Armstrong, 1999; Lings & Barrett, 1983; Versteegh, 2014). There have been countless studies of the Qur'an in multiple languages, but what has not been done completely, is to apply modern applied linguistic methodology to the lexis that comprise the book. And so, whilst the idea of Qur'anic memorization or visuality will not be the focus of this paper, the ultimate goal of this thesis is to connect the Qur'an with one potential cause of these phenomena and its claimed linguistic marvel: iconicity. In linguistics, broadly speaking, iconicity is the understanding that a word can ‘sound like what it means’, or more specifically that the form of a word can in some way resemble its meaning (Dingemanse et al., 2015; Perniss & Vigliocco, 2014; see Chapter 1.1 for a detailed definition). As such, the current paper is centred around the Qur'an and iconicity. Does iconicity, a concept that has been studied in Japanese, Korean, English, Dutch and other languages, exist in Classical Arabic? If so, to what extent? And how can iconicity in the Qur'an benefit the ones learning the Qur'an, or perhaps learning Arabic as a whole? These are the main questions that this paper asks and aims to address, namely through drawing on previous studies in linguistic studies of sound-symbolism, and motivated by the Qur'an, taking words from the Qur'an and placing them under the microscope for thorough linguistic analysis. It should be clear now that the Qur'an is the subject of analysis insofar as iconicity research as modern empirical methods of iconicity research have not been applied to the Qur'an whatsoever. We will therefore learn something about this text first and foremost, but can then extend the findings to make comparisons between parts of speech and second-language vs native-speaker perceptions of iconicity. We see how different groups gauge iconicity in the Qur'an, and this then leads us to isolate specific words that are more iconic than others, which in turn can be tuned for language-learning of Arabic later down the line. The motivation to link these is that it allows for an objective analysis of some Qur'anic linguistic traits while also providing practical benefit to language-learners. Chapter 1 will discuss previous literature in regards to iconicity as a phenomenon, with the aim of building a case for the existence of iconicity in the Muslim holy book. Chapter 2 and 3 will then move on to exploring a combined task-set constituting the present study of Qur'anic words: a pair of mixed-method experiments examining the extent to which iconicity is perceived by different groups of participants when present with Qur'anic words. The paper will conclude with Chapter 4, tying together how findings may be considered in light of other literature and how the study may inform our current understanding of both iconicity, iconicity testing, and the Qur'an

Role of Nawab Salimullah for the Foundation of AIML

In this article an attempt has been made to remark upon the role of Nawab Salimullah for the foundation of All-Indian Muslim League that is the first and only national Muslim political party in the British India. The Nawab of Dhaka was one of the sole organizers of Muslim League. This article took an attempt to shed light on his number of successive political stances with appreciating contemporary nature of politics in India that eventually gravitated him towards forming of Muslim League. Firstly he launched modern regional politics favoring the partition of Bengal and founded a political association in Bengal, then stepped forward to organize a national political body for the Muslims in India. In this stage, Nawab took remarkable responsibilities like making approach to the Muslim people about urgency of political association, apprehending Hindu communal politics against Muslim, publication of Circular Letter, patronizing the Educational Conference at Dhaka, move for Resolution of AIML pertaining to establishment of League. All of these initiatives have been analyzed by an integrated study to find out the notable contributions of Nawab Salimullah towards forming AIML along with development of Muslim politics in India necessarily. The article also afforded Nawab’s other visionary relevant works in order to consolidate an advancement of Muslim League transcending banality and mendacity of everyday life in every arena fulfilling the desired dreams of the cornered Muslims.  Keywords: nature of politics, nature, political association, Muslim politics, partition of Bengal, Hindu communal politics, Circular Lette

Consequences of local social norms: A review of the literature in accounting, finance, and corporate governance

We synthesise the empirical archival research on the consequences of local social norms on accounting, finance, and corporate governance outcomes in an international setting. The literature reviewed is premised on the theory that corporations do not make decisions, but managers do, and managers are likely to be influenced by the socioeconomic environment of the region in which they operate and/or by the people with whom they interact. To provide a structure to our review, we identify social capital, religiosity, gambling norms, and corruption culture, as four constructs of local social norms and link these with financial reporting and external auditing, financial, investment, and dividend decisions, capital market consequences and finally, corporate governance and corporate social responsibility behaviour of firms. We highlight some limitations of the existing research and offer some suggestions for future research

In silico data mining of large-scale databases for the virtual screening of human interleukin-2 inhibitors

Interleukin-2 (IL-2) is involved in the activation and differentiation of T-helper cells. Uncontrolled activated T cells play a key role in the pathophysiology by stimulating inflammation and autoimmune diseases like arthritis, psoriasis and Crohn’s disease. T cells activation can be suppressed either by preventing IL-2 production or blocking the IL-2 interaction with its receptor. Hence, IL-2 is now emerging as a target for novel therapeutic approaches in several autoimmune disorders. This study was carried out to set up an effective virtual screening (VS) pipeline for IL-2. Four docking/scoring approaches (FRED, MOE, GOLD and Surflex-Dock) were compared in the re-docking process to test their performance in producing correct binding modes of IL-2 inhibitors. Surflex-Dock and FRED were the best in predicting the native pose in its top-ranking position. Shapegauss and CGO scoring functions identified the known inhibitors of IL-2 in top 1, 5 and 10 % of library and differentiated binders from non-binders efficiently with average AUC of > 0.9 and > 0.7, resp. The applied docking protocol served as a basis for the VS of a large database that will lead to the identification of more active compounds against IL-2