The study, Patterns of HIV infection among native and refugee Afghans, was aimed at characterising and comparing the HIV epidemics prevailing among the Afghan refugees in Pakistan and the native Afghans in Kabul.

It was conducted by the Department of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Aga Khan University (AKU); Department of Microbiology, Dow University of Health Sciences, and Nursing and Midwifery, Aga Khan University Programme, Kabul. It was published in a research journal, AIDS.

Read more at Dawn com

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This House has no confidence in Bahrain’s promise to reform

Bahrain’s ruling family was dealt a blow after an audience made up of mainly young Arabs used a globally televised debate to say the monarchy was unlikely to make good their promise of reform.

The motion was passed by a resounding 78% in favour and 22% against -  a slap in the face for a government promising its people long-awaited political reform.
The session, part of the eighth series of the award-winning Doha Debates, a leading platform for free speech in the Arab world, comes just weeks after an official investigation found that Bahraini government security forces had used excessive force and widespread torture against anti-government protesters earlier in the year.

Tens of thousands of mainly Shiites took to the streets in Bahrain in February and March demanding political reform and better rights, with some calling for the downfall of the Al Khalifa monarchy. The uprising was brutally crushed by the regime and thousands were arrested and sacked from public and private sector jobs.
A government-sponsored inquiry into the unrest, led by respected Egyptian-born human rights lawyer Cherif Bassiouni, made a series of recommendations, which a special commission in Bahrain is studying. King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa has promised reform.

In often sharp exchanges between panellists and audience members, Nabeel Rajab, President of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and Christopher Davidson, a Reader of Middle East Politics at Durham University in the UK consistently argued that Bahrain’s monarchy were not interested in taking the country forward.

Rajab accused the government of repeated human rights violations against its people, while Davidson said the recent Bassiouni report amounted to the government “papering over cracks”.

“This is yet more window dressing – short- term measures rather than genuine reform,” he said.

Arguing against the motion, Abdulla Alderazi a lecturer at the University of Bahrain and Khaled Almaeena, Editor-at-Large of Arab News, an English language newspaper in Saudi Arabia, said Bahrain could and should reform. “For any government, reform is a necessity; it’s not an option or a choice,” Almaeena said. 
At one point, Ala’a Shehabi, a Bahraini, whose husband has been a political prisoner for 8 months, stood up in the audience and said: “I don’t want to live off a whim of a king that decides to jail people.”

Saudi Arabia, which helped Bahrain put down the protest movement, had become the “counter revolutionary force” in the Arab Spring, Davidson said. “I think one of the most dangerous things in the Arab Spring are the Saudis,” added Rajab.
Asked a straight question Alderazi, who said he had confidence in Bahrain’s promise of reform, nevertheless called for the prime minister to resign after more than 40 years in office. The kingdom, he said repeatedly, needed to move forward.

Source: The Real News com

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 The ego is always trying to dupe us we need to crush it before humanity. Paulo Coelho is always my favorite writer and an inspirational figure. This is a must read story and don’t underestimate your comments after reading it. Thank you Paulo for your contribution to the world of mutual understanding. God Bless you!

Abrazo

Nooru

Por Rosa Montero

We are at the restaurant of a German University. A red haired student, and undeniably German takes her tray and sits down at her table. She then realizes she has forgotten her cutlery and gets up again to pick it up.(…)

Read more at Nooru wordpress com

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By Lillian Aluanga

A group of students from Kenyan schools will be Africa’s representatives to one of the world’s most prestigous Mathematics tournaments, scheduled for next month.

The Harvard-MIT Mathematics Tournament is an annual competition for high school students held at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This year’s event will be held on February 11 at Harvard, and will have participants from North America, Europe and Asia, with countries like Canada, USA, China, India, and South Korea represented.

Kenya is the only country from Africa participating in the tournament, which will have about 900 students tested in various topics, including Algebra and Geometrics. A team comprises of between six and eight students, with countries allowed to enter a maximum of three teams. (,,,)
 

Read more at The Standard media co Kenya

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Fullscreen (28 Mb)

Med-res (15 Mb)

View of the Galaxy

12/29/2009

Our Sun is just one out of over 200 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The Sun is located in the Orion arm of our galaxy about 25,000 light years from the center of the Galaxy. Kepler will be examining over 100,000 stars in our neighborhood of our galaxy in the Cygnus and Lyra constellations. Most of these stars will be somewhere between 500 and 3,000 light years from our solar system.
Credit: NASA Kepler Mission/Dana Berry

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NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered 11 new planetary systems hosting 26 confirmed planets. These discoveries nearly double the number of verified planets and triple the number of stars known to have more than one planet that transits, or passes in front of, the star. Such systems will help astronomers better understand how planets form….

“Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky,” said Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Now, in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates. This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits.”

The artist’s rendering depicts the multiple planet systems discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission. Out of hundreds of candidate planetary systems, scientists had previously verified six systems with multiple transiting planets (denoted here in red).  Now, Kepler observations have verified planets (shown here in green) in 11 new planetary systems.  Many of these systems contain additional planet candidates that are yet to be verified (shown here in dark purple). For reference, the eight planets of the solar system are shown in blue. Credit: NASA Ames/Jason Steffen, Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics

Each of the planetary systems contains two to five closely spaced transiting planets. In tightly packed planetary systems, the gravitational pull of the planets on each other causes some planets to accelerate and some to decelerate along their orbits. The acceleration causes the orbital period of each planet to change. Kepler detects this effect by measuring the change, or so-called Transit Timing Variations (TTVs).
Planetary systems with TTVs can be verified without requiring extensive ground-based observations, accelerating confirmation of planet candidates. The TTV detection technique also increases Kepler’s ability to confirm planetary systems around fainter and more distant stars
Five of the systems (Kepler-25, Kepler-27, Kepler-30, Kepler-31 and Kepler-33) contain a pair of planets where the inner planet orbits the star twice during each orbit of the outer planet. Four of the systems (Kepler-23, Kepler-24, Kepler-28 and Kepler-32) contain a pairing where the outer planet circles the star twice for every three times the inner planet orbits its star.
“These configurations help to amplify the gravitational interactions between the planets, similar to how my sons kick their legs on a swing at the right time to go higher,” said Jason Steffen, the Brinson postdoctoral fellow at Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics in Batavia, Ill., and lead author of a paper confirming four of the systems.
“The approach used to verify the Kepler-33 planets shows the overall reliability is quite high,” said Jack Lissauer, planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., and lead author of the paper on Kepler-33. “This is a validation by multiplicity.”

Click to Read,view and watch video at Kepler NASA

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IYA KeplerA Short BiographyA List of Kepler’s FirstsKepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion People and Events Contemporary to Kepler (1571-1630) Articles about Kepler Biographies and books on Kepler Links to Other Sites about Johannes Kepler (music, drama, animations, lectures, museums, sites with biographies)

(Picture courtesy of Sternwarte Kremsmünster, Upper-Austria) 

Johannes Kepler was born about 1 PM on December 27, 1571, in Weil der Stadt, Württemberg, in the Holy Roman Empire of German Nationality. He was a sickly child and his parents were poor. But his evident intelligence earned him a scholarship to the University of Tübingen to study for the Lutheran ministry. There he was introduced to the ideas of Copernicus and delighted in them. In 1596, while a mathematics teacher in Graz, he wrote the first outspoken defense of the Copernican system, the Mysterium Cosmographicum.

Read more http://kepler.nasa.gov/Mission/JohannesKepler/

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Germany’s first Centre of Islamic Theology was recently opened at the University of Tübingen. The head of the centre is the Koranic expert Omar Hamdan, who so far is the only professor teaching at the centre. Arnfrid Schenk spoke to the professor about his work and the degree course he is teaching

The smell of paint lingers in the air, the walls are pristine white and there are no nameplates on the doors. With one exception: on the door of an office on the first floor hangs the nameplate “Prof. Omar Hamdan, Head of the Centre of Islamic Theology”. Inside, a man is sitting at his desk, holding a number of folders in his hands. His sleeves have been rolled up; he looks pretty exhausted.

“So many appointments,” says Omar Hamdan as he welcomes me, “so many mails: one hundred every day from students, academics, journalists and politicians.” Yesterday he attended a meeting in Stuttgart entitled “Round Table Islam” that was organized by the Social Democrat Minister for Integration in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, Bilkay Öney. He tells me that he still has to get used to the interest in his person and in his new post; after all, he adds, all he really wants to be is a theologian.

Since October, Hamdan has been head of the new Centre of Islamic Theology at the University of Tübingen. The centre is the first of its kind in Germany. Two years ago, the German Council of Science and Humanities recommended that faith-led Islamic Theology be introduced as an academic subject at German universities, a centre that would be comparable with Protestant and Catholic faculties.

First past the post

The intention is that religion school teachers for Islam and imams could be trained in Germany with the support of funding from the German government. In addition to Tübingen, other centres of Islamic Studies are being set up at the following locations in Germany: Münster/Osnabrück, Erlangen/Nuremberg and Frankfurt/Gießen. Tübingen, however, was first past the post. It was a close shave, however. The first of the six chairs that are planned for the centre was only filled a few weeks before the start of the semester.

Teaching a version of Islam that is rooted in a European context: Prof. Omar Hamdan; the Minister for Integration in the state of Baden-Württemberg, Bilkay Öney; and the Federal Minister of Education and Research, Annette Schavan, at the official ceremony marking the opening of the Centre of Islamic Theology in Tübingen

This is Hamdan’s private library; he put it at the disposal of the institute to ensure that the course gets off to the smoothest possible start. There are no less than 3,073 volumes down here. Hamdan, who specializes in Koranic research, is quite sure of the number. After all, he bought every single one of them over the course of his academic career. Knowing exactly where to find what, he seems to be very familiar with them all.

Omar Hamdan is 47 years old. A Palestinian Sunni with an Israeli passport, he was born in Tira, a city only a few kilometres to the north of Tel Aviv. He studied Islamic Studies at the Hebrew University in Tel Aviv. In the 1990s, he came to Tübingen, studied Comparative Religious Studies and wrote his doctoral thesis under the supervision of Josef van Ess, one of the greats in the field. Hamdan’s previous post saw him conducting research into the commonalities between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity in the Middle Ages at the Free University of Berlin.

Searching for academic personnel

When Hamdan found out that Tübingen had been chosen by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research as one of the centres for Islamic Studies, he immediately submitted an application. It is not surprising that he was selected. Academics and theologians who have his qualifications and can also teach in German are a rare breed. After all, how could it be otherwise? The discipline has to train its academic personnel itself. Until then, the University of Tübingen will – like the other universities – bridge the gap with guest professors.

Working for an open-minded Islam: Omar Hamdan aims to make the sources of Islamic theology accessible to Muslims

 A total of 36 students have enrolled for the course in Tübingen; the majority of them are women. Graduates of the Bachelor’s degree course will also be able to work as imams. Hamdan places considerable emphasis on the word “also”. Graduates will not receive certificates stating that they have successfully completed an imam training course.

Nevertheless, a number of corresponding seminars are being planned. An imam in Germany has to be capable of more than just talking about the Middle Ages or Muslim countries, he explains, they must above all address issues that relate to life in Germany. This, he adds, also involves everyday life in schools. An imam, says Hamdan, must find a path between tradition and the modern age.

A lot of catching up to do

There is a lot of catching up to do: so far, most of the 2,000 imams in Germany speak hardly any German and know little about the country in which they are supposed to be working. The majority of them are sent to Germany by the Turkish state as “imported imams” and are recalled after four years.

Hamdan’s graduates will also be able to work as religion teachers. Islam as a school subject is currently at the drawing board stage in Germany. Although there are about 750,000 Muslim pupils in German schools, only some of them can attend Islamic religion classes as part of model test projects.

Such test projects are currently being run at about 20 primary schools and a handful of secondary schools in the state of Baden-Württemberg. Should the subject be introduced in all federal states, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research estimates that about 2,000 teachers will be needed to cope with demand.

Omar Hamdan was somewhat taken aback by the political nature of building up Islamic theology in Germany. Because Islam is not a single Church, the universities rely on co-operation with the various Islamic associations, which are linked to the degree courses by means of advisory councils. However, the associations often have very orthodox views. Some academics fear that they may interfere, behaviour that would not be compatible with freedom in teaching.

A total of 23 women and 13 men began the four-year Bachelor’s degree course in Islamic Theology at the University of Tübingen in October 2011

In Tübingen, on the other hand, explains Hamdan, the advisory council only has a say on faith-related matters, not on the actual course content. In his personal experience, he adds, cooperation has so far been unproblematic. He then rolls up his sleeves, which he rolled down at the start of our conversation, and says: “anyway, I am a theologian, not a politician.”

Access to the sources of Islamic theology

Hamdan would like to teach a version of Islam that is rooted in a European context. That being said, he also wants to make the sources of Islamic theology, such as the Koran, accessible. This is important to him because he feels that many Muslims have incorrect ideas about the fundamental principles of Islam. He uses an image from the modern world to illustrate his point: a person who has no knowledge of the sources is like someone who has no Internet access: they are cut off.

I ask Hamdan what he considers to be the essence of Islam. His answer, which comes swiftly, is very open: “A way of life that opens up a very broad horizon.”

It is almost 5 p.m. The professor points to his smartphone, which alerts him to prayer times. He would like to end the conversation at this point so that he can do his duty as a devout Muslim, before going home to his family, to his wife and three sons.

That leaves time for just one more question. Could the version of Islam that is developing in Germany also one day have an effect on Islamic countries? Hamdan says that he does not want to look that far into the future. His priority, he says, is what is happening right outside his front door. “Muslims here want to participate in the society in which they live,” he says. For them, it is about equality; about the feeling of being at home here. “A Centre of Islamic Theology is a major step forward in this respect.”

Arnfrid Schenk

Source: © DIE ZEIT/Qantara.de 2012

Translated from the German by Aingeal Flanagan

Editor: Lewis Gropp/Qantara.de

More on this topic

• Post-graduate Programme on Islamic Theology: ”Muslim Theologians are Instigators of Change”
• First Centre for Islamic Theology: Opening a New Chapter for Islam in Germany
• Mathias Rohe on Islamic Theology in Germany: Triggering Global Debates

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His Highness the Aga Khan to Speak at 2012 Europe Annual Conference

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Link to Academies Homepage

The Sources of Ismaili Law

Professor Wilferd Madelung

This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies 35 No.1, University of Chicago Press, 1976, pp 29-40.

Abstract

This paper was delivered at the Congress of the American Oriental Society in Santa Barbara in March 1974. In it, Wilferd Madelung presents his exhaustive research into the origins and sources of a monumental document that was considered lost to history; the Kitab al-idah, Qadi al-Nu‘man’s first legal work – a vast collection of legal traditions transmitted from the family of the Prophet (ahl al-bayt), indicating their points of consensus (ijma‘) and conflict (ikhtilaf) and elucidating what was firmly established doctrine in them with evidence and proofs. This article provides an invaluable resource for academics and students of Islamic studies and related fields.

Key words:

Isma‘ili Law, Tayyibi, Zaydi, Imami, Fatimids, Qadi al-Nu‘man, Da‘a’im al-Islam, Kitab al-idah, isnad, hadith, ahl al-bayt, Imam Ja‘far al-Sadiq, Imam Muhammad al-Baqir.

Download this article in PDF format (245 KB)

Last updated: 27/01/2012 14:24 

Source: IIS UK

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Renowned for finding musical common ground across a seemingly limitless expanse of cultures and traditions, Grammy-winners and Lively Arts favorites the Kronos Quartet return for a solo set and a joint performance with Azerbaijan’s revered Alim Qasimov Ensemble—a magically cohesive partnership heard on Kronos’ recent albums Floodplain (2009) and Rainbow (2010). A member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble and winner of the prestigious IMC-UNESCO International Music Prize, Qasimov is one of the greatest living masters of mugham, a classical Azerbaijani vocal tradition. Kronos founder/violinist David Harrington said he was “magnetized” upon first hearing Qasimov sing, adding, “His voice drew me so close that it has become part of my own inner singing.”

PROGRAM

Jahangirov, J: Köhlen Atim; Rustamov, S.: Getme, Getme; additional works TBA

Generously supported by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and by the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University.

When:

Sunday, February 12, 2012. 7:00 PM.

Where:

Dinkelspiel Auditorium (Map)

Audience:

General Public
Faculty/Staff
Students
Alumni/Friends

Tags:

Arts
Performance
Music

Sponsor:

Stanford Lively Arts

Contact:

650-725-ARTS (2787)
livelyarts@stanford.edu

Admission:

Reserved Seating $44/50

Permalink:

http://events.stanford.edu/events/284/28493

More info…

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