Tourist destinations with cultural heritage have arisen as a prominent issue in tourism literature. Creating a positive image of the destination can influence tourists’ satisfaction and willingness to return. The goal of this research is to investigate the relationship between destination image formation (DIF), tourist satisfaction (TS), and tourist trust (TT). As a result, the structural relationships between local community participation (LCP), authenticity (A), access to local products (ALP), TS, and TT were investigated in this study. This study used a (...) quantitative approach based on a survey of 644 domestic and foreign tourists visiting the Guangdong cities of Guangzhou, Foshan, and Shenzhen. The statistical software SmartPLS 3.3.3 was used to determine the relationship between variables in the research model using structural equation modeling. The outcomes show a positive correlation between LCP, A, and ALP, which led to tourist satisfaction and, eventually, tourist trust. It is concluded that the DIF and TS may result in increased tourist trust. There is also a discussion of additional theoretical contributions, practical implications, and limitations. The outcomes of this study will help to shed light on the variables that encourage and promote tourism in developing countries. (shrink)

For a graph G, its variable sum exdeg index is defined as SEI a G = ∑ x y ∈ E G a d x + a d y, where a is a real number other than 1 and d x is the degree of a vertex x. In this paper, we characterize all trees on n vertices with first three maximum and first three minimum values of the SEI a index. Also, we determine all the trees of order n (...) with given diameter d and having first three largest values of the SEI a index. (shrink)

This book reflects upon the political philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, a towering intellectual figure in South Asian history, revered by many for his poetry and his thought. He lived in India in the twilight years of the British Empire and, apart from a short but significant period studying in the West, he remained in Punjab until his death in 1938. The book studies Iqbal's critique of nationalist ideology and his attempts to chart a path for the development of (...) the 'nation' by liberating it from the centralizing and homogenizing tendencies of the modern state structure. Iqbal frequently clashed with his contemporaries over his view of nationalism as 'the greatest enemy of Islam'. He constructed his own particular interpretation of Islam - forged through an interaction with Muslim thinkers and Western intellectual traditions - that was ahead of its time, and since his death both modernists and Islamists have continued to champion his legacy. (shrink)

_The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam_ is Muhammad Iqbal's major philosophic work: a series of profound reflections on the perennial conflict among science, religion, and philosophy, culminating in new visions of the unity of human knowledge, of the human spirit, and of God. Iqbal's thought contributed significantly to the establishment of Pakistan, to the religious and political ideals of the Iranian Revolution, and to the survival of Muslim identity in parts of the former USSR. It now serves (...) as new bridge between East and West and between Islam and the other Religions of the Book. With a new Introduction by Javed Majeed, this edition of _The Reconstruction_ opens the teachings of Iqbal to the modern, Western reader. It will be essential reading for all those interested in Islamic intellectual history, the renewal of Islam in the modern world, and political theory of Islam's relationship to the West. (shrink)

How the colonial photograph revolutionized the very nature of perception.

This paper applies an Islamic perspective to understand the lack of business responsibility witnessed in recent times. A link is developed between the dominant materialistic-secular worldview and lack of business responsibility. The paper argues that a materialistic-secular worldview tends to disconnect economics from ethics, gives privilege to economic values over spiritual values, and confers primacy to legal/bureaucratic mechanisms over ethical and spiritual mechanisms for ensuring compliance to business responsibilities. It suggests that these orientations could account for the weak sense of (...) business responsibility and unethical behaviours reported in earlier works. To remedy this, the paper proposes the broadening of problem-solving methodologies so that both material and ethical/spiritual dimensions of business responsibility are given due consideration. In addition, the paper offers four suggestions, derived from religious traditions, for nurturing the spirit and letter of business responsibility. (shrink)

This essay analyzes a silent short film portraying an urban canoeist. The film suggests that it is possible to make conscious choices about one’s means of conveyance through the city. Using a critical theoretical framework to unpack the implications of the film, this paper argues for the need to imagine unconventional modes of transportation and examine the power structures of automotive hegemony.

Includes an introd. of 49 p. by S. G. Abbas.

This article aims to improve the understanding of corporate governance and environmental reporting literature by analyzing the impact of board gender diversity (BGD) on environmental performance, environmental disclosure, and greenwashing behavior. The panel regression estimation technique with fixed effects was applied to Chinese firm data. As a result, it was found that more women who served on corporate boards enhanced the company's environmental performance and disclosures while limiting greenwashing behavior. The result indicated that women in top management play a constructive (...) role in establishing firms' active environmental initiatives. Furthermore, this relationship was nonlinear and exponentially increased when women's representation reached the threshold of 33.5% representation on board or higher. Based on the findings, no internal bias was found even after other governance and firm-level control factors and probable endogenies were considered and variable biases were omitted. Notably, the results present important implications for regulators and policymakers by highlighting the influential role of BGD in promoting environmentally responsible practices and reducing greenwashing. (shrink)

Nowadays, mobile telephony interruptions in our daily life activities are common because of the inappropriate ringing notifications of incoming phone calls in different contexts. Such interruptions may impact on the work attention not only for the mobile phone owners, but also for the surrounding people. Decision tree is the most popular machine-learning classification technique that is used in existing context-aware mobile intelligent interruption management model to overcome such issues. However, a single-decision tree-based context-aware model may cause over-fitting problem and thus (...) decrease the prediction accuracy of the inferred model. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an ensemble machine-learning-based context-aware mobile telephony model for the purpose of intelligent interruption management by taking into account multi-dimensional contexts and name it “E-MIIM”. The experimental results on individuals’ real-life mobile telephony data sets show that our E-MIIM model is more effective and outperforms existing MIIM model for predicting and managing individual’s mobile telephony interruptions based on their relevant contextual information. (shrink)

The objective of this study is to examine the contemporary approaches to Da'wah methodology in Malaysia. This study undertook an examination of the impact of social media platforms on conversion rates within the context of the Da'wah methodology. The use of a quantitative approach is implemented through the application of a cross-sectional research design. A questionnaire survey was devised to gather data from Islamic scholars residing in Malaysia. Questionnaires were disseminated to Islamic scholars using social media platforms. A total of (...) 155 valid responses were collected to investigate the impact of social media on conversion rates. The study focused on various factors including content type, frequency of exposure, duration of exposure, and follow-up interactions. The findings obtained from the application of Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) indicate that social media platforms play a significant role in increasing the conversion rate of individuals from different religious backgrounds to Islam. The impact of social media on content type, frequency of exposure, duration of exposure, and follow-up interactions is generally perceived as positive, as it tends to enhance the likelihood of conversion rates. This research holds practical significance for Islamic scholars seeking to enhance conversion rates using diverse social media platforms. (shrink)

When there is a demand among the population, the methods of conducting social surveys, such as drawing up questionnaires and conducting surveys, have been used for many decades. At the same time, there are certain limitations in the application of these methods in sociological science. In recent decades, the emergence of social networks, activities of young people and middle-aged people in society, mainly from these platforms, have not been completely destroyed by questionnaires and surveys. On the contrary, the same format (...) is used in questionnaire surveys conducted in some media channels. Although questionnaires and surveys used in sociological research are an important instrument of understanding, perception and understanding of social processes occurring in society, the results obtained cannot be considered completely accurate, error-free and objective. But the information received as a source is very valuable and relevant from the point of view of understanding events and relationships in society. (shrink)

This essay analyzes a silent short film portraying an urban canoeist. The film suggests that it is possible to make conscious choices about one’s means of conveyance through the city. Using a critical theoretical framework to unpack the implications of the film, this paper argues for the need to imagine unconventional modes of transportation and examine the power structures of automotive hegemony.

The study is based on validating and exploring the effects of a mega project plan on infrastructure development and Sustainable Project Management. The CPEC has great importance to infrastructure development and economy-boosting. The current study's primary aim is to deal with environmental protection, economic boost up, international relations influencing to the Project's success. The paper also addressed project management as a moderator between environmental protection, economic boost up, international relations, and the CPEC project's success. The primary data has been gathered (...) by using questionnaires, and PLS-SEM has been employed for the analysis. The results revealed that environmental protection, economy boost up, and international relations have a positive association with the success of CPEC. The outcomes also exposed that project management moderating among the nexus of economy boosts up the international relations and success of CPEC. The present study results guided how Pakistan and China make the CPEC project stronger with the efficient implementation of practices required for protecting the environment, with the economic growth and boost up, and good strong relations with foreign countries. This study was an attempt to validate the different factors to check their association with each other in a new environment, resulting in a leading edge for the success of mega projects that influence project management. (shrink)

In lattice theory the two well known equational class of lattices are the distributive lattices and the modular lattices. All distributive lattices are modular however a modular lattice in general is not distributive. In this book, new classes of lattices called supermodular lattices and semi-supermodular lattices are introduced and characterized.

A personalized recommender system is broadly accepted as a helpful tool to handle the information overload issue while recommending a related piece of information. This work proposes a hybrid personalized recommender system based on affinity propagation, namely, APHPRS. Affinity propagation is a semisupervised machine learning algorithm used to cluster items based on similarities among them. In our approach, we first calculate the cluster quality and density and then combine their outputs to generate a new ranking score among clusters for the (...) personalized recommendation. In the first phase, user preferences are collected and normalized as items rating matrix. This generated matrix is then clustered offline using affinity propagation and kept in a database for future recommendations. In the second phase, online recommendations are generated by applying the offline model. Negative Euclidian similarity and the quality of clusters are used together to select the best clusters for recommendations. The proposed APHPRS system alleviates problems such as sparsity and cold-start problems. The use of affinity propagation and the hybrid recommendation technique used in the proposed approach helps in improving results against sparsity. Experiments reveal that the proposed APHPRS performs better than most of the existing recommender systems. (shrink)

Karachi is considered the economic hub of Pakistan, but it lacks a systematized public transport service. Although the demand-supply gap in the transport sector and the poor quality of this deregulated service affects everyone, it wreaks havoc for women, manifesting in the form of social exclusion. Men can benefit from alternative, private modes of transport such as motorbikes, which are socially discouraged for women, making them dependent on their male counterparts. Despite the seriousness of this issue, there is little literature (...) showing how women are differentially deprived of their agency due to gender disparity in society. To better understand this issue, the aim of this paper is to study the cultural foundations of transport poverty to assess their impact on women’s life opportunities. For this purpose, the experiences of women while using public transport have been analysed. The study has identified a variety of reasons why women curtail their mobility. It concludes that the social exclusion of women motivates a greater concern for their freedom of movement and that their needs be adequately reflected in transportation policies. (shrink)

Drawing from conservation of resources theory, this study investigates the interactive effect of employees’ family-to-work conflict and Islamic work ethic on their helping behavior, theorizing that the negative relationship between family-to-work conflict and helping behavior is buffered by Islamic ethical values. Data from Pakistan reveal empirical support for this effect. Organizations whose employees suffer resource depletion at work because of family obligations can still enjoy productive helping behaviors within their ranks, to the extent that they support relevant work ethics.

The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930) is Muhammad Iqbal's major philosophic work: a series of profound reflections on the perennial conflict among science, religion, and philosophy, culminating in new visions of the unity of human knowledge, of the human spirit, and of God. Iqbal's thought contributed significantly to the establishment of Pakistan, to the religious and political ideals of the Iranian Revolution, and to the survival of Muslim identity in parts of the former USSR. It now (...) serves as new bridge between East and West and between Islam and the other Religions of the Book. With a new Introduction by Javed Majeed, this edition of The Reconstruction opens the teachings of Iqbal to the modern, Western reader. It will be essential reading for all those interested in Islamic intellectual history, the renewal of Islam in the modern world, and political theory of Islam's relationship to the West. (shrink)

Accession Number: ATLA0001712108; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 71-86.; Language(s): English; General Note: Bibliography: p 86.; Rev from an article in The Islamic quarterly.; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

Traditionally, mainstream psychology mostly presented religion in a negative light. However, recent years have witnessed a growing realization that religion has a substantial role to play in improving physical and mental health. Given the importance of religion, the American Psychological Association has division 36 “Psychology of religion.” But the perspective of mainstream psychology does not acknowledge the spiritual nature of human beings and their connection to God. Islamic psychology is one of the religion-based perspectives which acknowledges it. This perspective has (...) also attracted the attention of Western psychologists. Three different trends have been identified in this area: the Islamic filter approach, the comparison approach, and the Islamic psychology approach. However, despite more than 40 years of work, there is a considerable lack of progress in the development of this paradigm. The present article discussed the emergence and challenges in the development of this new perspective. Moreover, we suggest that the research paradigms of Western social and behavioral sciences are useful for developing Islamic psychology. (shrink)

Although education means evolving or transforming, every individual is the subject of education between the first breath and the last. The individual's relationship with the objects of existence, combined with his uniqueness, constitutes the subject of education on the time-space plane. The individual's relationship with himself and his environment can be associated with education. Since Sufi education adopts a disciplinary structure that aims to enable the individual to know himself first, the individual acquires knowledge from his Lord in his essence (...) and from the elements that teach him in his environment. Depending on the principle of obtaining knowledge from the closest, the individual obtains the educational activity starting from family members based on the principle of trust. Public institutions implementing curricula have also been other structures that nurture the individual. Due to the nature of education, different applications have emerged over time. As a matter of fact, the learner-teacher relationship has been an obstacle to spatial and temporal unity in the course of life, and as a result of this situation, the concept of distance education has emerged. While the letter tradition used in Sufi education, which is a method of distance education, has been practiced for centuries, the modern world met this concept as an educational method only in the 18th century through correspondence. The concept of distance education, which has taken on much newer forms with today's information technologies, will ultimately continue to support the human relationship with knowledge. In this study, it has been tried to understand the common points, characteristics and contributions to education of distance education, which is one of the educational practices in the historical process, and the letter tradition, which is a method of Sufi education.Individualization of education by taking into account the individual characteristics of each of the students, who constitute the focal point of education, is one of the indispensable elements of Sufi education. The murshid, who gets to know his disciple closely during the training process, sees his disciple's strengths and weaknesses, his character structure and his potential that he can maximize with training. The application of education on an individual basis offers an opportunity to maximize the gains in distance education as in Sufi education. The adoption of the principle of gradualism in educational programs and processes is another of the foundations on which Sufi education is based. According to this principle, education has a gradual structure, and this structure can be envisioned as multiple layers that constitute the basis of each other. In the journey of blending the education system and reaching the ideal form over the centuries, distance education systems have also been able to find a field of action in line with this principle. On the other hand, when we look at another characteristic of Sufi education, we encounter a structured and predetermined framework in education. The processes in education in which objectives, boundaries, expectations and achievements are structured and activities are expected to be carried out within a certain program are also predictable for distance education. It is seen that the teacher-student relationship in Sufi education is far from a formal structure and contains the warmth of the education that takes place in the family in the first years of education. Considering how important the first years of education are in terms of leaving a mark and permanence, it is quite remarkable that this principle comes to life in Sufi education platforms, which can also be considered as a prophetic method, by returning to this subjective structure in education.Today, it has become easier for individuals to structure themselves in the areas they need through distance education, and the educational processes that were carried out through correspondence in the past as a necessity for the health and survival of Sufi education have turned into a preference or alternative rather than an obligation. In this study, the aspects and common denominators of Sufi education, which is a Prophetic method, and the tradition of correspondence, which can contribute to distance education and set an example, have been evaluated together with the characteristics of Sufi education. In the study, firstly, the tradition of letter correspondence as a method of Sufi education is examined historically and educationally, and then distance education, which is seen as an outcome of the modern education system, is evaluated conceptually and historically. In the last part of the study, the common denominators of the letter tradition and distance education practice in Sufi education have been tried to be unearthed on the basis of Sufi education methods. (shrink)

The constitution of Pakistan contains wide range of provisions for the protection of labour rights. Pakistan has been bestowed with 70 labour laws along with 90 rules and regulations thereunder. In spite of these labour laws along with rules and regulations, labour force is facing multifarious challenges that posit direct threat to their legal recognised rights. In this regard this study was carried out to study the main hurdles that labour rights encountered in historical perspective. Moreover, in the wake of (...) devolution plan through 18th amendment to the constitution of Pakistan, what problems in respect of enforceability and legality have arisen? Labour laws promulgated in various Pakistani regimes have been discussed to figure out what really prevented successive governments to ensure minimum protection to labour strata of the nations. The article concludes with some recommendation that are sin-qua-non in current globalization where rights have emerged as the most sacred instruments in the hands of weaker portion of a society. (shrink)

Studies have revealed that emotion-based learning outcomes are scarce when teachers’ competence and creative performance are neglected, further university performance in relation to teachers’ emotion-based learning outcomes is disregarded in literature so far. Based on the Attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion, the purpose of this empirical study is to investigate the effects of Emotional Intelligence on learning outcomes of academicians in Pakistan’s higher education institutions. This study also examines the mediating role of teacher competence and creative performance in (...) a relationship between EI and learning outcomes. Furthermore, this study ascertained the relationship between learning outcomes and organizational performance of HEIs. This study used a sample frame of 237 academic professionals from Pakistani HEIs, the hypothesized associations were ascertained using the partial least squares structural equation modeling method. The findings disclose that EI has a positive and significant influence on learning outcomes. Furthermore, an indirect relation between EI and learning outcomes is established through teacher competence and creative performance while the relationship between learning outcomes and OP is established also. Results of the considered study reinforce the academic understanding of EI and propose how academicians of HEIs can value their competence and creative performance which in turn enhances learning outcomes and OP. There is a lack of studies in HEIs that investigate the relationship between EI, teacher competence, creative performance, learning outcomes, and OP. This is one of the initial researches that not only empirically examine the interface of EI, learning outcomes, and OP of HEIs’ academicians but also enlightens comprehensions into the prevailing literature by immediate investigation of the mediating role of teacher competence and creative performance in fundamental association. (shrink)

Our examination of Javanese Islam has attempted 1) to assess aesthetics as a major component of religious revelation, 2) to establish aesthetic elements as major factors in motivating religious conversion into Islam for the Javanese (or others), and 3) to delineate aesthetic elements as stimulants to subsequent spiritual growth for the born-Muslims. We attempt to describe a highly sophisticated sensitivity to aesthetic elements within their religious rites and rituals among the village Javanese, along with sometimes eloquent expressions of these understandings. (...) Hopefully, our results will serve to inspire further studies of aesthetic rather than theological validation of Revealed or Prophetic Knowledge, a form of cognition and knowledge long familiar to traditional religious cultures that is now coming to be considered a valid form of reality even in the western world, by such influential scholars as Leo Strauss. (shrink)

Presently, there is armed conflict in Darfur, Sudan. Armed conflict has adversely affected the social, economic and educational development of Darfur, Sudan. Purpose of this study is to know the impact of armed conflict on managerial behavior of the principals of secondary schools in Darfur, Sudan. In this study, the impact of armed conflict on performance of the secondary school principals was analyzed in perspective of their managerial behavior. Based on the findings of the study significant impact of armed conflict (...) was found on the managerial behavior of the principals. It was found that principals coordinated with the staff in activities of the school but were frightened and unable to perform their administrative and managerial duties freely and independently. There was communication gap between the principals, teachers and parents. The principals did not possess the skills to maintain school budget & finance properly. It was concluded that the principals need administrative and managerial training. Government of Sudan may establish academies of Educational Administration & Management to impart training to the principals of secondary schools and to take steps to control the existing armed conflict. (shrink)