The Qur’anic Idea of Peace

Peace is a chief social value, which the Qur’an appreciates, along with social justice, and submission to God and worshiping Him. War is initially an implausible situation, which should be invoked only when necessary. Hence, the rule is peace, and war is the exception. Using Muhammad Hussein Tabatabai’s methodology in the interpretation of the Qur'an and his Qur’anic views regarding war and peace, this paper will attempt to show that the Qur’anic picture of war and peace is different from what is commonly supposed by non-Muslims. This paper will argue that since disagreement on the truth of religion is inevitable and perpetual; since imposition of religion is inconceivable; since the faithful have no responsibility for disbelievers’ choice except clearly delivering God’s Messages to them, and since the faithful are obliged to offer absolute respect to their disputants on the truth of religion, the reasonable way of managing disputes on religion is peaceful interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims. It will be further argued that in addition to the moral principle of peace, there is another ground on the basis of which Muslims are advised to establish peaceful relations with non-Muslims; that is, through making peace contracts. In this way, the principle of peace is reinforced by the duty of respecting peace contracts

An empirical analysis of controlled risk and investment performance using risk measures: a study of risk controlled environment

In this thesis, I study the performance behaviour of hedge funds and mutual funds. I study a basket of various risk statistics that are widely used to measure the fluctuation of asset prices. Those risk statistics are used to rank the performance of the assets. The linear dependence relation of these risk measures in ranking assets is investigated and the set of risk measures is reduced by excluding risk measures that produce linearly dependent ranking vectors to other risk measures. The ranks within each of the selected remaining risk statistics are standardised and then linearly transformed into a new set of linearly independent factors where principal component analysis is carried out as a variable reduction technique to remove the noise while preserve the main variation of the original data. The transformed factors are sorted in descending order according to their contribution to the variation of the original data. The factor loadings of the first two principal components PC1 and PC2 are reviewed and interpreted as styles (PC1 as consistency and PC2 as aggression). The universe of a set of hedge funds is classified according to these styles as BL=(low consistency, low aggression), BR=(high consistency, low aggression), TL=(low consistency, high aggression) and TR=(high consistency, high aggression). I examine the performance behaviour of the four different classified classes whereby this classification method provides an indication on returns and management styles of hedge funds. A three-factor prediction model for asset returns is introduced by regressing 12 weeks’ forward rank of return on the historical ranks of risk statistics. The first few principal components, which explain the main variation of information captured by risk statistics, are used in the prediction model. The robustness of the model is tested by applying the model to the following 12-week period using the set of independent factors. An investment strategy is constructed based on the prediction model using the set of independent factors. I discover high evidence of predictability and I test for out-of-sample forecasting performance. I then examine the use of subsets of risk statistics from the basket rather than using the set of all risk statistics. I further study the use of the so-called σ2/μ risk measure in predicting the market “turning point” of performance of a portfolio of hedge funds. Risk measure quantity σ2/μ replaces the traditional variance σ2 in the Black-Scholes option valuation formula when it is evaluated for hedge funds

The effect of de Sitter like background on increasing the zero point budget of dark energy

During this work, using subtraction renormalization mechanism, zero point quantum fluctuations for bosonic scalar fields in a de-Sitter like background are investigated. By virtue of the observed value for spectral index, $n_s(k)$, for massive scalar field the best value for the first slow roll parameter, $\epsilon$, is achieved. In addition the energy density of vacuum quantum fluctuations for massless scalar field is obtained. The effects of these fluctuations on other components of the Universe are studied. By solving the conservation equation, for some different examples, the energy density for different components of the Universe are obtained. In the case which, all components of the Universe are in an interaction, the different dissipation functions, $\tilde{Q}_{i}$, are considered. The time evolution of ${\rho_{DE}(z)}/{\rho_{cri}(z)}$ shows that $\tilde{Q}=3 \gamma H(t) \rho_{m}$ has best agreement in comparison to observational data including CMB, BAO and SNeIa data set.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure