In _Knowing God_, Ismail Lala investigates the nature of God and whether we can truly know Him according to the influential mystic, Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn ʿArabī, and his disciple, ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Qāshānī.

South Korea created miracles out of a mess in the second half of the twentieth century. They have built an industrial production and export giant called Han Miracle and a democratic culture. They also began to create a cultural fever worldwide called the Korean Wave. However, what makes the Korean modernisation story unique compared to other development experiences in Asia is neither its industrial development nor its democratisation. The rapid Christianisation, especially the Protestantisation of Korea, which walks alongside modernisation, is (...) what makes this story special. Catholics entered Korea first, but they failed due to various reasons. Then, a peasant movement called Tonghak, which is organised around a syncretic religion named Cheondogyo, began to rise. They even started a nationwide uprising and gained massive supporters, but they could not succeed in expanding aggressively after the Japanese occupation. The latest comers, the Protestants, eventually became the largest religious group in South Korea. The Protestants studied the Catholics’ failure and the Tonghak movement’s success well and created a syncretic folk religion that did not exclude local religious elements. This syncretism was the key to their mind-blowing success in South Korea. (shrink)

This paper discusses the contribution of a prolific author and an Egyptian scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and his hermeneutical approach to the Qur’an. The article argues that Abu Zayd is a Muslim reformer of the twentieth century through his takwil. His hermeneutical concept is questioning the “an-nash ” tradition of the Qur’an and the transformation of Arab culture from oral to text-oriented culture in the earliest history of the Qur’an. He differentiates between tanzil to takwil. This article further argues (...) that Abu Zayd’s hermeneutical concept should be understood from the history of revelation which speaks to a particular community and respond to a particular situation. Thus, the Qur’an itself is a living phenomenon and open for interpretation, rather than a closed corpus. (shrink)

Over the past years, Massive Open Online Courses have emerged as new competitive advantages in the digital economy of higher education globally. Accordingly, an increasing number of individuals are attracted to these new learning environments for developing their knowledge and skills in a variety of subject areas. Despite these developments, research on linguistic features of MOOCs lectures as the main mediums for delivering the course contents remained limited. To address this gap, the present study analyzed a corpus of MOOCs lectures (...) with around 4.45 million words to determine the size of vocabulary knowledge needed for 95 and 98% coverages. The findings revealed that sufficient coverage of the course contents requires knowledge of the 5,000 most frequent words in English. Nonetheless, achieving adequate coverage level requires a much larger vocabulary size of around 9,000 most frequent words in English. The study also found that widely used word lists for general and academic vocabulary fail to support MOOCs learners with sufficient vocabulary knowledge for adequate lexical coverage. Based on these findings, the study draws a number of implications for preparing non-native English speakers to use MOOCs effectively and setting research-informed vocabulary learning goals in instructional programs and materials. (shrink)

Modern philosophy; philosophical terms; scienctific terms; Turkish language; Turkey; history.

The current study explored the effects of using digital flashcards and mobile devices on learning academic vocabulary. The participants were 86 university students majoring in Psychology in two experimental conditions and one control group. A list of 361 core academic words frequently used in Psychology was taught to the participants using different materials, and the learning outcomes were compared across the three groups. Accordingly, the participants in the experimental group 1 used a DF application, participants in the experimental group 2 (...) used traditional materials, and those in the control group were given a list of target words with their definitions. Receptive knowledge of the target words was tested before and after the treatment, and the learning outcomes were compared across the groups using one-way between-groups ANOVA. The findings of the study indicated that using DFs enhanced students’ engagement with learning their discipline-specific academic vocabulary and that experimental group 1 outperformed those participants in other learning conditions. The findings add to the existing literature on mobile-assisted vocabulary learning and provide empirical support for the effectiveness of such platforms for learning academic vocabulary. The implications of the study were discussed in terms of the affordances provided by DFs on mobile devices and corpus-based word lists for informing vocabulary learning components in teaching English for Academic Purposes. (shrink)

Beheld in terms of international law, its subjects such as states, governments or international organizations always communicate with each other based on the spirit of the provisions of the field of international law.In the framework of the breaches, respectively the deliberate violation of these provisions, is the case of the so-called "Gulenists", where all the links of the system under which the extradition matter is built upon, are exempted.Our country will keep this stain for a long time, while in the (...) archives of justice it will be treated as a case that should not have happened, always based on the commitment to the strict implementation of the provisions of the field of international law that our state has always had. At least they should have been held accountable, even criminally; hence, such cases to have never been repeated in our country.The lack of criminal accountability of the actors-senior state officials directly implicated in this case has left scars in our system, which at that moment is widely considered as a delayed system, while at an instant the whole commitment in this direction is shaken.This stain could have been avoided post festum - even in the circumstances when it happened, that is, even in the situation when all the political actors had been implicated in this case.In this regard, whilst analyzing the provisions we can assume that despite the deficiencies and continuously looking at the volume of legal provisions of this law, yet, we can consider that our system in this area has advanced and has ongoing initiatives to improve this system to the extent that could meet the requirements in relation to the dynamics of social and international relations. (shrink)

Al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān, The Disagreements of the Jurists: A Manual of Islamic Legal Theory. Edited and translated by Devin J. Stewart. Library of Arabic Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Pp. xxxviii + 405. $40.

This paper discussed the life background of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and the hermeneutical method used to the interpretation of the Qur’an. Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was among productive Muslim scientists. He wrote over twenty-nine works from 1964 to 1999. His works included books and articles. Nasr’sthought was a product of his educational background and religious thought. An interesting discussion of Nasr’s thought was the conceptual discourse. In the historical trajectory of the Arabic world, the text had a crucial position, (...) especially when we saw the development of Islamic literature from pre-Islamic to the Islamic era. The oral tradition was deeply rooted. The text was ultimately believed to have a major influence in the formation of civilization through a hermeneutical approach, developed by modernists such as Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, which became an attempt to develop an approaching understanding the Qur’an which had been widely opposed among Muslims. Because there was a very basic difference between hermeneutics on the other hand, and tafsir-takwil on the other hand, so it is considered inappropriate to be used to study the Qur’an. Therefore, this paper will discuss the concept of the hermeneutical method of the Qur’an by Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd as a repertoire of Islamic studies. (shrink)

Esta antologia reúne uma reflexão sobre o cinema, revelando a diversidade de análises que têm marcado o pensamento sobre a experiência cinematográfica. O livro trata de grandes temas e de questões técnicas específicas - desde as explicações básicas dos cineastas do princípio do século até as sínteses e propostas estéticas do pensamento contemporâneo. Os textos são de expressivos pensadores do fenômeno cinematográfico do mundo inteiro como - Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Buñuel, Jean Epstein e Jean-Louis Baudry, entre outros.

This study aims to investigate the experiences and problems of foreign nationals in Turkey, concerning microaggressions. Thus, it was aimed to find out which types of microaggressions -and at what frequency- are experienced by people who come to Turkey for different reasons like education, pursuit of a better life or escaping from war. The study was conducted in five different cities of Turkey. Students from primary school to university, teachers, parents and doctors took part in the study. The participants were (...) asked the single question “Do you ever experience deliberate or undeliberate insults, whether verbal or behavioral, targeting your ethnic identity and diversity in Turkey?” The results of the study show that microaggression is a very serious problem in Turkey. It can be gathered from the findings that Turkish people are not as tolerant to foreign people as they used to be. Behaviors that make people of foreign origin feel like second-class citizens and alienated take place quite often. Foreigners are usually connected with negative occurrences and they are reminded that they are not welcome in this country. These people are also accused of causing many misfortunes in the country. The study also exhibits that foreign nationals suffer greatly from prejudices about their cultures and they become the target of explicit and direct insults particularly regarding their race. (shrink)

Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ‘Arabī (d. 638/1240) is regarded as one of the foremost mystical thinkers in Islam. This paper explores the ways in which he and his followers distinguish between the reality of Muḥammad (al-ḥaqīqa al-Muḥammadiyya) or the light of Muḥammad (al-nūr al-Muḥammadī), as the metaphysical reality of Muḥammad, and his metahistorical manifestation as Muḥammad Ibn ‘Abd Allāh. In his metaphysical reality, Muḥammad is the manifestation of the qur’ān, which ‘brings together’ the divine and His creation. Muḥammad’s metaphysical reality, as (...) the primary recipient of the divine outpouring, enables further differentiations of the divine to emerge in the form of the universe, and establishes his connection to the divine. Yet the Qur’an is also temporal in terms of being an historical act of revelation. Likewise, Muḥammad Ibn ‘Abd Allāh, in terms of his physical reality, was temporally circumscribed. It is in these ways, argues Ibn ‘Arabī and his acolytes, that Muḥammad, as reality and personality, brings together the divine and the temporal, in the same manner as the qur’ān/Qur’an respectively. (shrink)

Modern insan eleştiriyi, neredeyse hava kadar, su kadar yaşamsal saymaktadır. Daha iyi bir dünyada yaşama isteği, verili olanlarla yetinmemeyi, gelenekleri, yerleşik değerleri sorgulamayı beraberinde getirmektedir. Felsefi eleştiri, sadece belli bir görüşe itiraz etmekle sınırlı bir tutum değildir; o aynı zamanda kendi dayanaklarının sağlamlığı ile de ilgilidir. Bilimlerde sıklıkla karşılaşılan yapıcı ya da olumlu eleştiri, başta felsefe olmak üzere sosyal bilimlerde yıkıcı bir niteliğe bürünmektedir. Felsefi eleştirinin yıkıcılığının nihilizmle sonuçlanmaması için bu eleştiri türünün de yapıcı bir nitelikle donatılması gerekir. Bu çalışmada (...) felsefi eleştirinin normları olabileceği öne sürülmektedir. Bu normlardan en bilinen ve kabul gören üç ilke tespit edilerek bu ilkelerin felsefi eleştirinin temellendirilmesinde oynadıkları rolün gösterilmesi amaçlanmaktadır. Böylelikle felsefenin de tıpkı bilimler gibi siyasal iktidarların hizmetinde olmak yerine, gerçeğin peşinden gidebileceğinin olası olduğu gösterilecektir. (shrink)

We consider a chain of metabolic reactions catalyzed by enzymes, of reversible Michaelis-Menten type with full dynamics, i.e. not reduced with any quasi-steady state approximations. We study the corresponding dynamical system and show its global stability if the equilibrium exists. If the system is open, the equilibrium may not exist. The main tool is monotone systems theory. Finally we study the implications of these results for the study of coupled genetic-metabolic systems.

: Ethnicity is a complex concept which is easily taken as a primordialnotion inherited from previous generations. This primordial understanding ofethnicity continues to dominate post-independence Malaysian authority andeveryday actors based on two factors. First, the lack of any critical historicalanalysis for understanding the present situation. Second, there are social,economic and political needs for maintaining the separation of ethnicitieswhich consequently maintain the imperial and colonial epistemologicalunderstanding of ‘race’ in the present State ethnic bureaucratic system. Themain objective of this article is to (...) present a sociological review of the longtermeffects of imperialism and colonialism on the formation and developmentof the two principal Malaysian ethnic groups – Malays and Chinese – throughselected major phases in Malaysia’s history. The outcomes suggest that theethnic boundaries of Malaysian Malays and Chinese were gradually built,institutionalized and intensified over time rather than being primordiallyinherited from their ancestors. (shrink)

This book offers a critical survey of the origins of liberalism. It challenges the widely-held belief among philosophers that liberalism developed in opposition to religion. Beginning with the Protestant Reformation, it illustrates how Christian thinkers reinterpreted Christianity and used a set of biblical presuppositions from their reinterpretations to develop the first liberal ideas, starting a process that culminates in the birth of the first systematic liberal political philosophy in the writings of a Christian philosopher, John Locke. -/- Foreworded by Michael (...) A. Gillespie, the author of The Theological Origins of Modernity, this book explains how the Protestant Reformation, covenant theology, anti-trinitarianism, and medieval Christian natural law theories formed the foundations of liberalism. Thus, the main argument of this book is that liberalism is better understood as a socio-political project of theistic rationalism, a radical reinterpretation of Christianity that emerged in the post-Reformation and early modern period. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze the factors that influence the occurrence of the criminal offense of theft as well as the roles of all parties involved in its preventive activities. Ownership creates rights and obligations, and it should serve the well-being of the individual and the community. No one can be deprived of, nor limited from property and the rights deriving from it, except when it comes to the public interest determined by law. Belongings can be movable (...) and real estate. The subject of the criminal offense of theft can be only related to movable items that have economic value and serve to human needs and not in cases when they are abandoned. In the process of preventive fight against crime, it is of great importance to define explicitly and concretely the roles, the tasks, and the goals of certain subjects of preventive activities. (shrink)

Kadim bir dil olan Arapça, İslamiyet’in gelişiyle birlikte kutsal bir kitap olan Kur’an-ı Kerim’in dili olmuş, günümüze kadar varlığını ve önemini korumuştur. Anadili Arapça olmayanlara bu dilin öğretilmesi için farklı coğrafya ve farklı dönemlerde medreselerde veya devletin resmi eğitim kurumlarında Arapça dersleri verilmiştir. Verilen Arapça eğitimlerinde nahiv ve sarf temelli bir eğitim uygulanmıştır. Gramere dayalı bu dil eğitimi İlahiyat veya İslami İlimler fakültelerinde verilen eğitimlerle daha ileri bir seviyeye taşınmaya çalışılmıştır. İlahiyat veya İslami İlimler fakültelerinde verilen Arapça eğitimleri temelde dört (...) beceriyi kazandırma odaklı hazırlanmıştır. Ancak gramer odaklı verilmeye çalışılan Arapça eğitimlerinde hedeflenen başarı elde edilememektedir. Bu araştırmanın konusu, İlahiyat veya İslami İlimler fakültelerinde okutulan Arapça hazırlık eğitiminin değerlendirilmesi ve bu eğitimin kalitesinin arttırılması için yapılması gerekenlerdir. Bu doğrultuda bu çalışmada Bitlis Eren Üniversitesi İslami İlimler Fakültesi %30 Zorunlu Arapça Hazırlık Sınıflarının 2018-2019 Eğitim ve Öğretim Yılında aldıkları Arapça eğitimi model alınmıştır. Hazırlık Sınıflarında Arapça eğitimi alan 90 öğrenciye 33 sorudan oluşan anket uygulanmıştır. Anket sonuçları değerlendirilmiş ve verilen Arapça eğitiminin kalitesi ortaya konulmuştur. Elde edilen sonuçlardan hareketle, verilen eğitimde eksik ve hatalı durumlar tespit edilerek, eğitimin daha kaliteli bir düzeye ulaştırılması için önerilerde bulunulmuştur. Giriş bölümünde İlahiyat veya İslami İlimler fakültelerindeki Arapça eğitimi hakkında bilgiler verilmiştir. Sonrasında çalışmanın amacı, önemi, sınırlılıkları, problemi ve örneklem ortaya konulmuştur. Fakültede uygulanan Arapça hazırlık eğitimi hakkında bilgiler verilmiş ve uygulanan anket çalışmaya eklenmiştir. Son olarak bulgular ve yorumlar verilerek çalışma sonuç ve öneriler ile sonlandırılmıştır. (shrink)

Karl Popper’s critique of idealism manifests itself with the application of his method, falsificationism, to metaphysics, epistemology, and social and political philosophy. According to Popper, who identifies himself as a philosophical realist, idealism has emerged as a result of the idea that reality cannot be known by reason and of the search for certainty which is erroneous, and it has begotten two mistaken and detrimental views. These views are historicism, the notion that history has an irresistible course, and holism, the (...) notion that social wholes are organic structures that amount to more than the individuals constituting them. Historicism and holism have become the philosophical underpinnings of closed societies throughout history, such as the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Therefore, with a practical leaning, Popper actually takes aim at these pernicious consequences of idealism while criticizing it. In this study, idealism and the contours of Popper’s philosophy are examined, and then Popper’s metaphysical, epistemological, social, and political critiques against idealism are investigated. Keywords: Karl Popper, idealism, historicism, holism, falsificationism. (shrink)