A Closer Look at the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Western Obsession with the Medieval Muslim Theological Obsession with Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism is a topic that has attracted much attention from both medieval Muslim theologians and modern Western scholars. By examining the development of the medieval Muslim Rationalist-Traditionalist discourse surrounding this issue, and Western academic discussions of that discourse, I shall attempt to explain why the issue of anthropomorphism has repeatedly dominated discussions on Islamic theology. I will also attempt to show how various associations made with Muslim Rationalism and Traditionalism have influenced Western perceptions of these movements.     

Social Determinants of Attitudes towards Women’s Premarital Sexuality among Female Turkish University Students

This paper explores the effects of demographic and attitudinal variables on attitudes toward women’s premarital sexuality in a sample of 277 undergraduate female students at Istanbul University, Turkey. The results of the research demonstrated that sexual attitudes best predicted the dependent variable in regression analysis. Once the variable sexual attitudes was excluded from the equation, mother’s education and personal religiosity were the best predictors of attitudes toward women’s premarital sexuality. For a more extensive version of this study, see     

Sexual frustration,religiously forbidden actions and work efficiency—a case study from the Pakistan perspective

A unique dimension of employee efficiency is reported in this paper. Sexuality in the work place, as well as rendezvous and romance in this context, have already received some attention from researchers but the topic is underexplored, most probably due to differences between Western culture and Asian culture. The primary focus of the study was to investigate the role played by religion in determining an employee’s sexual behavior, and in asking them to act within certain limits? The socio-economic circumstances, norms, customs, and obsession with social status that lead to delayed marriages push people into a corner, leaving them with the possible option of religiously forbidden actions where sexual desire is concerned. After indulging in such actions, regret and remorse create sexual frustration in employees, and this sexual frustration compromises their efficiency in the workplace. Ordinal regression and manipulations in syntax of ordinal regression were used to measure this concept. The study revealed that religiously forbidden actions and sexual frustration significantly diminishes the efficiency of some employees, whereas married and female employees are less sexually frustrated and thus are more efficient in the workplace.     

Compatible Dynamical Models of Environmental,Sensory, and Perceptual Systems

ABSTRACT

One of the cornerstones of the ecological stance in psychology is the compatibility, or symmetry, between animal and environment. In this article, it is argued that a first principles reevaluation of the dynamical systems that structure the information signals animals live through is an important step in understanding how compatibility is possible. What is especially important is how environmental properties are encoded by dynamical laws into the information signals of the environment and how these signals can reveal environmental properties. It is argued that that compatibility is not just 2-way compatibility between animal and environment but also 3-way compatibility of environmental, sensory, and perceptual systems. The argument is illustrated using a conceptual exegesis of 2 dynamical systems, Newtonian mechanics and Webster's acoustic horn equation. The discussion of the latter equation is accompanied by the extraction of articulatory information from speech signals of 50 speakers. It is believed that the work presented here further develops the theory of ecological psychology as well as its specific application to speech perception pioneered by Carol Fowler.     

Improving access to psychological treatments: lessons from developing countries

Even though psychological treatments have been advocated as treatments for a range of mental disorders by the WHO for scaling up through primary care globally, the vast majority of potential beneficiaries are unable to access these treatments. Two major barriers impede the path between evidence based treatments and improved access: the lack of skilled human resources and the acceptability of treatments across cultures. This essay synthesizes the experiences of programs which developed and evaluated psychological treatments for depression in three resource poor developing countries. These programs addressed the human resource barrier by training lay or community health workers to deliver the treatments and addressed the acceptability barrier by systematically adapting the treatment to contextual factors. All programs demonstrated significant benefits in recovery rates when compared with usual care demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach. The implications for these experiences to improving access to psychological treatments in the global context are discussed.     

Ibn al-cArab on the Three Conditions of Tawba

Although generally translated as ‘repentance’, tawba, like its Hebrew equivalent, teshuvah, simply means ‘turn’ or ‘return’. It is used in the Qur'an to describe actions of both human beings and God. Even though the idea of tawba subsumes the notion of ‘repentance’ (from the Latin paenitere, ‘to be sorry’, ‘to grieve’, or ‘to regret’), its meaning is not limited to that. The tendency within much of Western scholarship on Islam to understand tawba simply as repentance, and mostly human repentance, may well reflect certain presumptions about repentance and its place in religious life, which, one might argue, are absent in Islam. This article explores the understanding of tawba in the thought of Ibn al-^cArab (1165–1240 CE), whose most extensive reflections on it appear in chapters 74 and 75 of his Meccan Revelations. It focuses on the first of these chapters which concentrates primarily on the conditions set by many of the religious authorities as the fundamental components of human tawba. Ibn al-^cArab's response reflects certain central motifs that permeate his literary oeuvre. These motifs and their wider relation to his views on tawba will be highlighted as our discussion of this important Sufi maqām (station) unfolds.     

The political crowd: Theorizing popular revolt in North Africa

This paper uses an interdisciplinary approach to show why Western social scientific explanations of political crowds in North Africa and the Arab Middle East have failed to provide an understanding of the causes and effects of popular revolt. I trace these misunderstandings to an inherited body of European writings on crowd theory and on Islamic and Muslim political power. Some scholars who have also criticized mainstream analysis of the so-called “Arab Street” are shown as relevant to a new understanding of political crowds.     

Continuance commitment and turnover: Examining the moderating role of negative affectivity and risk aversion

This paper examines the moderating role of negative affectivity and risk aversion in the relationships of two bases of continuance organizational commitment (continuance–sacrifices and continuance–alternatives) to turnover, within a stress–coping perspective. More specifically, we propose that (a) the perspective of leaving is a source of stress for those who stay due to the fear of losing valued advantages (i.e. high continuance–sacrifices commitment) and (b) staying is perceived to be stressful by individuals who remain based on a lack of employment alternatives (i.e. high continuance–alternatives commitment). We argue that these perceptions are magnified by negative affectivity and risk aversion, resulting in individuals who present these traits to use avoidance–withdrawal strategies in coping with these situations. Accordingly, based on a sample of 509 human resource management professionals, we found (a) negative affectivity and risk aversion to strengthen the negative relationship of continuance–sacrifices commitment to turnover and (b) continuance–alternatives commitment to relate positively to turnover among individuals with high negative affectivity. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of how commitment mindsets and personality traits affect turnover decisions.