A prototype system for handwritten sub-word recognition: Toward Arabic-manuscript transliteration

A prototype system for the transliteration of diacritics-less Arabic manuscripts at the sub-word or part of Arabic word (PAW) level is developed. The system is able to read sub-words of the input manuscript using a set of skeleton-based features. A variation of the system is also developed which reads archigraphemic Arabic manuscripts, which are dot-less, into archigraphemes transliteration. In order to reduce the complexity of the original highly multiclass problem of sub-word recognition, it is redefined into a set of binary descriptor classifiers. The outputs of trained binary classifiers are combined to generate the sequence of sub-word letters. SVMs are used to learn the binary classifiers. Two specific Arabic databases have been developed to train and test the system. One of them is a database of the Naskh style. The initial results are promising. The systems could be trained on other scripts found in Arabic manuscripts.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, 6 table

Notes on Avicenna's Concept of Thingness (ŠAY’IYYA)

In an article published in 1984, Jean Jolivet suggested that the origins of Avicenna’s distinction between essence and existence lay not in ancient Greek philosophy, as has generally been supposed, but in early Islamic dogmatic theology (kal®m), and specifically in the ninth- and tenth-century-CE debates between Muslim dogmatists (mutakallim‚n) over how the terms “thing” (say’) and “existent” (mawgud) relate to each other. The present article provides evidence that gives qualified support to Jolivet’s hypothesis.[...

One Aspect of the Avicennian Turn in Sunni Theology

Most scholars of Islamic intellectual history now agree on the distortedness of the traditional Western portrayal of al-G~ aza¯lı¯ (d. 1111) as the defender of Muslim orthodoxy whose Incoherence of the Philosophers (Taha¯ fut al-fala¯ sifa) was such a powerful critique that it caused the annihilation of philosophical activity in Islamic civilization. Some in fact are coming to the conclusion that al-G~ aza¯lı¯’s importance in the history of Islamic philosophy and theology derives as much from his assiduous incorporation of basic metaphysical ideas into central doctrines of Sunnı¯ kala¯m, as from his far more celebrated bashing of the fala¯ sifa.[...