"Islam exists in global history with its richly variegated cultural and social realities. When these specific cultural contexts are marginalized, Islam is reduced to an ahistorical religion without the ability to contribute to humanity. This limited understanding of Islam has been a contributing factor in many of the violent conflicts in the present day. Reflecting on Islam in Indonesia, the wo…
Statistics is interesting and useful because it provides strategies and tools for using data to gain insight into real problems. As the continuing revolution in computing automates most of the tiresome details, an emphasis on statistical concepts and on insight from data becomes both more practical for students and teachers and more important for users who must supply what is not automated. No …
The knowledge that the African continent gave civilization the Arts and Sciences, Religion and Philosophy is des- tined to produce a change in the mentality both of the White and Black people. 2. There are three persons in the drama of Greek philosophy: (a) Alexander the Great; (b) Aristotle's School and; (c) The Ancient Roman Government who are responsible for a false tradition about Africa an…
Should we talk? This book treats this question, and many others, as beingempirical in nature: if we were to live through a given situation in 1000 par-allel lives, where in one half we talked and in the other half we didn’t talk,in which of the halves would we fare better?The results of such a thought experiment vary betweenRachel,Dimitri,andSteve– or any other conversation that we may ex…
‘The music industry’ is commonly understood as a singular entity that is often portrayed as a place of shared concerns and goals. However, as many observers and academics have pointed out, this singular term is misleading and the very idea of a united place belies the reality which is ridden with tension and full of competing interests and industries (see Sterne, 2014). It is withi…
We don’t usually think of speaking as similar to chewing, licking and sucking, but, like speaking, all of these actions involve movements of the mouth, tongue and lips in some kind of controlled way. So, perhaps this connection is not as improbable as it first sounds. It is an example of the type of observation that can lead to interesting speculations about the origins of spoken language. Th…
In response to the decline in the coffee industry in the late 1980’s and 1990’s the Coffee Research Institute (CRI) developed a number of ‘strategies’ to address the fall-off and compiled The PNG Coffee Handbook with a view to providing coffee growers and processors with the latest technical information generated by its research activities. The Handbook was produced as a loose leaf boo…
Allah alone, the All-Merciful, deserves all praise and thanks, Lord of the universe, its Creator and Sustainer. Blessings and peace be upon the last of the prophets and messengers, Muhammad, his family and Companions and all those who follow in his footsteps till the end of time. Polygamy in Islam is a favourite topic for the critics of Islam and its message. The so-called secular and We…
In 1948 an animated public information film called Your Very Good Health explained the benefits of Britain’s soon-to-be-introduced National Health Service (NHS).1 It portrayed two different categories of hospital patient. The central character, Charley, says he is ‘on the panel’ as he cycles through an optimistic impression of a new town.2The narrator asks him to imagine that he fell off …
This equation suggests that if relationships 1 and 2 are opposedin type, then relationships 3 and 4 will be similarly opposed.A similarity in type between 1 and 2, or 3 and 4, though allowedby the formula, is taken to be a very rare occurrence. IndeedL6vi -Strauss suggests that this latter type of structure couldwell be expected to break down or at lea…