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The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the university's role in developing the skills of the students "knowledge economy by surveying the students" opinions on this subject. Therefore, a questionnaire was designed as a tool for study. We based this research study on the assumption that the university had a role in providing the students with additional knowledge which was different from the one that he/she took from either his/her previous education or from other cultural settings. Therefore, this study assumed that, if the university had an active role in the acquisition of these skills, fourth-year students, for example, would have accumulated clearly more knowledge and different skills of the knowledge economy than either first-, second-, or third-year students. If the skills of the higher year students are equal to the skills of the new students, this means that the university's role is weak in acquiring these skills. The study population consisted of 2645 male and female students enrolled on the bachelor program during the first semester of the 2018/2019 academic year. The sample consisted of 344 male and female students representing 13% of the study population. The study's results show that there are no statistically significant differences between the students' academic years. This indicates that the university does not provide an effective addition to the students' fields of study. Based on these results, we recommend that the university's academic members develop educational plans that improve the students' abilities to develop their skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the contestation over the meaning and uses of shari’a (Islamic Law) in South Sulawesi Indonesia. Its purpose is to shed light upon the importance and limits of shari’a discursive argumentation in Muslim life, and to examine how shari’a is used in contemporary sociocultural and political processes. The escalation of shari’a formalisation after democratization in Indonesia has widely gained scholarly attention. While the existing literature largely focuses on shari’a politics and the shari’a of the elites, this article focuses on the anthropology of the shari’a politics and the varied usage of shari’a in sociocultural processes across different social assemblages. The research was conducted in Bulukumba, a district divided by the initiative for the formalisation of shari’a at district level. The study reveals that Muslims engage and imagine the shari’a in strikingly different ways, many of which are not at all discursive in a manner consistent with fiqh or scholarly legal commentaries. Discursive argumentation is not the only source of authority in Islamic community. It is a point in a vast network of relationships. The experiences of ordinary Muslims in South Sulawesi illuminate that discursive argumentation can be a less direct and less explicit tool than ritualisation to resist shari’ahisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is the first attempt (in the field of Law and Economics) to apply economic analysis to shari'a or Islamic criminal law, in particular, that aspect of the law pertaining to theft. Shari'a imposes two main punishments for theft; hadd, a fixed penalty of amputation of the offender's right hand under certain conditions and ta'zir, a discretionary punishment, less severe than hadd. From the viewpoint of marginal deterrence and multiplier principles, lesser crimes with low social harm are punished more severely with hadd whereas crimes with high social harm are punished with ta'zir. Moreover, as the probability of detection and sanction is less in those crimes of high social harm, criminals would have more incentive to commit them. Consequently, if Islamic criminal law is to be applied in its current form, crimes of high social cost are likely to become more frequent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been an increase in the adoption of Shari'a in Europe and North America as an arbitration protocol for the resolution of potential contractual disputes. In a largely secular Western business environment, this reality raises corporate policy implications for business organizations. In particular, questions are raised about whether Shari'a is by nature too unpredictable-and too dismissive of women's rights-to be properly and ethically permitted by Western companies as a possible dispute resolution alternative. This article examines the dynamics and factors that are involved as corporate managers decide whether Shari'a arbitration ought to be banned entirely from contractual negotiations. Arguments for and against the inclusion of a Shari'a arbitration clauses in commercial contracts and contract negotiations are presented. The article concludes that while managers should exercise great prudence and consider the moral implications of negotiating arbitration clauses, an organizational ban of the use of faith-informed arbitration generally, or Shari'a in particular, would be neither morally required nor optimally serve the interests of the organization or its stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the absence of clear-cut guidance from the primary sources of the shari'a, how do Muslim scholars derive a workable religious praxis in changing circumstances and which authorities do they invoke in the process? This article explores possible answers to these questions by conducting a detailed analysis of a debate between two groups of Deobandi scholars in Britain over establishing the correct time for the commencement of morning (Fajr) and the onset of fasting for Ramadan. I argue that besides the primary sources, these Deobandi scholars invoke alternate forms of extra-scriptural authority such as the weight of precedence deriving from the akabir (elders) of the Deobandi tradition, as also their reliance on modern scientific knowledge. The article highlights the complex interplay of factors which determines the way that Muslims in Britain negotiate the practice of their religion in new sociocultural milieu and the way they attempt to incorporate these changes within the parameters of an established religious discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, several Muslim countries have ratified new constitutions. In this paper, we ask two questions: first, whether Muslim influence has a discernible impact on the content of such constitutions and, second, whether it has an impact on constitutional reality. More precisely, we are interested in the consequences of Islam for institutions securing the rule of law, while taking competing socioeconomic, geographic, and historical explanations explicitly into account. To this end, we construct a new Islamic State Index to measure the influence that Islam has on a society and its political and legal system. We find that Muslim influence is in conflict with the independence of the judiciary and nondiscriminatory legal institutions with respect to gender. Yet, parliamentary power as well as the protection of property rights and religious minorities are not significantly more constrained in Islamic states after we control for alternative explanations. Competing explanations such as the size of oil rents fare rather poorly in explaining differences in important aspects of the rule of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the concept of (public) sin as well as efforts to counteract sin from the perspective of Islam. The understanding that hisba, the prohibition of vice and enjoining of virtues, are a responsibility of both the state and the community is common in historical and contemporary Muslim societies. Where the state cannot or does not provide means for countering (public) sin, the perception for some Muslims is that the responsibility on the community and individuals to do so increases. Based on ethnographic research in Britain, Nigeria, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, the paper highlights examples of how sin has been defined amongst Muslim communities as well as the methods and rationales given to justify the forbidding of sin as a collective and communal public obligation. As the world becomes more integrated, there is growing concern amongst Muslim communities that sin is becoming the norm, leading society to degeneracy, that people who would not have otherwise sinned are influenced to do so. Common features in forbidding sin across Muslim communities have appeared, often focusing on what are seen as moral issues such as dress codes, music, gambling, alcohol, smoking, and the mixing of men and women in public. The forbidding of sin has resulted in attempts to introduce ' Shari'a Zones' in some predominantly Muslim areas of London, whilst in Indonesia, this has given rise to the Islamic Defenders Front and in some Northern Nigerian states to the reintroduction of the criminal codes of the Shari'a. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the relationship between Islamic constitutionalism and rule of law. Al Azhar, one of the most respected Sunni religious institutions in the world, developed a model of an Islamic constitution. This study uses Al-Azhar's constitution as a model of Islamic constitutionalism and examines its stance in regard to the rule of law. We find the Al-Azhar's constitution to be incompatible with essential concepts of rule of law. For example, the powers vested in the head of the Islamic state are enormous, making the executive branch of government far superior to the legislative and judicial branches. Women and non-Muslims are explicitly discriminated against throughout the constitution. Moreover, laws stemming from this constitution are not stable since many differences exist among schools of Islamic jurisprudence ( fiqh). Consequently, we show that state-of-the-art Islamic constitutionalism lacks essential components needed in any constitution based on rule of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opinion on criminal sentencing and aims of punishment has been surveyed mostly in Western countries. In non-Western countries, especially Islamic societies, little has been published, at least in Western journals, on these issues. In fact, no published study examining public views toward criminal sentences and the aims of punishments in Islamic societies may be located in any major database of Western literature. As a result many questions like the relationship between perceived purpose of criminal punishment and its severity and the interactions between the belief in Islam and its Shari’a (Islamic culture) and punitive attitude to criminality have remained unasked. Therefore, the meaning and motive behind the death penalty and other severe forms of punishment in Islamic countries remains unknown to scholars, whether within or outside these countries. This paper introduces, first, Shari’a sentencing laws and practices in some Islamic societies and then, by drawing on a survey administered in Iran in 2008, tries to show and explain the variations in attitudes to Shari’a criminal laws and different forms of punishment, mostly based on Shari’a, across different genders and professions (judges, lawyers, students, Tulab and police). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study design included participant observation in an all female University and University housing. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with second-generation expatriates and Omani students. Physical control of expatriates not only occurs through the Gulf practice of sponsorship (The Kafeel System) but through the local cultural and Islamic related controls intertwined with the Arab code of honor. Subjects living in the University ladies hostel expressed a hidden transcript in the privacy of their own group, expressed disguised resistance in public and occasionally directly confronted the Qatari. Omani students in the hostel disguised their resistance by spreading gossip, nick-naming homosexual Qatari students at the University or by acting out a skit depicting their exclusion from Qatari privilege. This study is part of a larger study which found that blaming oppression of the expatriate worker on globalization is a simplistic view of oppression in the Gulf and ignores complex issues within Qatari society and other Gulf States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]