Tafsir and Istifsar in the Qur'an

The more emphatic the authority of a sacred Scripture the more crucial the exegesis it receives. Yet no text is able to rise from the page and say: ‘I have been misread’. Hence the basic power of the interpreter. Tafsir or ‘interpretation’, has always been a vital task vis‐à‐vis the Qur'an. Urgent questions attend on it—who is qualified? By what skills? What range of questions will they admit? Are these circumscribed to, for example, grammar? Earlier margins? Are there excluded concerns? How far will contemporary ones be admissible? All these might be said to constitute istifsar or ‘Asking tafsir’ to be comprehensively pursued. After examining traditional techniques the article reviews ‘contextuality’, ‘abrogation’, metaphor, tadabbur (or ‘reflection') and finally, some profound implications of the Qur'an's own self‐division into Meccan and Medinan elements and how this might bear on a de‐politicization of Islamic religion in response to contemporary necessities, as faced by Islam in minority situations in many countries.     

Motivation to Report Sensitive Behaviors on Surveys: Evidence From a Bogus Pipeline Experiment1

We examined the effects of a procedure designed to increase motivation to give accurate reports of socially sensitive behaviors frequently collected in surveys. Respondents were assigned at random to a bogus pipeline condition, in which they were told that inaccurate answers could be detected by a physiological recording device, or to a control condition. Respondents in both conditions were interviewed with a questionnaire that contained 19 items ranging from smoking and exercise frequency to number of sexual partners and illicit drug use. While the bogus pipeline procedure generally increased the reporting of sensitive behavior, in one instance it reduced the proportion of respondents who reported a socially desirable behavior (exercising), indicating that respondents were motivated to respond accurately and not just to report more occurrences.     

Effects of cold and mental stress on finger temperature in vasospastics and normal Ss

The present experiment studied the effects of mental and cold stress on finger temperature in 9 females suffering from peripheral vasospastic attacks (Raynaud's disease; RD group) and 9 female controls. Each S sat in a 0°C cold-storage room for 15 min, on 2 separate days. In one condition they were required to count backwards aloud under threat of electric shock to the hand. Finger temperature, pulse rate and subjective ratings of stress were recorded. A significant interaction with time and mental stress was observed only for the Control group with decreased finger temperature late in the session. Pulse rate was significantly elevated during the cold + mental-stress condition compared to the cold-only condition in the Control group, but not in the RD group. Subjective ratings of stress increased for both groups during the cold + mental-stress condition, with no significant difference between the groups.     

Division of attention: Age differences on a visually presented memory task

Young and old adults were compared in their efficiency of remembering concurrently presented series of letters and digits in three separate experiments. Instructions and payoffs to vary attentional emphasis across the two types of material in different conditions allowed the examination of attention-operating characteristics in the two age groups. Strategy-independent measures derived from these attention-operating characteristics revealed that older adults exhibited greater performance deficits than young adults when dividing their attention between the two tasks, even though dual-task difficulty was individually adjusted for each subject. It was concluded that either the total amount of attention available for distribution or the efficiency of its allocation decreased with age even though the ability to vary one’s attention between concurrent tasks in response to instructions and payoffs remained intact.     

Ivan Pavlov on communist dogmatism and the autonomy of science in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s

On 25 September, 1923, two days before his 74th birthday, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov stood before a class of medical students assembled in the auditorium of his Alma Mater, the Military Medical Academy in Leningrad. Pavlov, the recipient of the Nobel prize in medicine in 1904 for his work in physiology, was about to address his first class of the new academic year, and, as was his custom, he had prepared his first lecture on a general theme. This was an especially significant address, however, for in it Pavlov reviewed the impressions he had gathered during his travels in Western Europe and the United States in the summer of 1923, and he criticised the prevailing ideology of Soviet communism by attacking the ideas of Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, then the leading expositor of Bolshevik Marxism. An English translation of the lecture is printed below. This article was originally published inMinerva, vol. 29, no. 4 (Winter 1991). Published by permission ofMinerva: A Review of Science, Learning and Policy, 19 Nottingham Road, London SW17 7EA, and by permission of the Rockeller Archive Center, North Tarrytown, N.Y.     

Test anxiety and reaction time for matching decisions

Subjects selected by test-anxiety level were presented pairs of words and asked to make judgments of physical identity, acoustic matching, or taxonomic category membership. Experiment 1 varied type of judgment between subjects; in Experiments 2 and 3, each subject made all three decisions. There was no consistent support for the hypothesis that, relative to low-anxiety subjects, high-anxiety subjects would show a more pronounced decrement in reaction times for semantic decisions than for nonsemantic decisions.