Islam's Modern Day Ibn Battutas: Gülen teachers journeying towards the divine

There is a longstanding debate on whether Muslims can be modern. Some argue that they can only be so if they forsake their traditions and embrace rationalism. In this article I argue that the Gülen Movement, a transnational Turkish Muslim educational activist network has found a middle ground by blending religious traditions with modern day realities. Drawing on interviews from the movement's teachers and graduates of its schools, from Turkey, Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, I explore, through the prism of al-riḥla fī ṭalab al-ʿilm (travel in search of knowledge), their maintenance of the longstanding Islamic ritual of travel as a means of excelling both professionally and religiously. In turn, I demonstrate how the movement, on a number of levels, effectively reconciles the spiritual and the everyday through updating Islamic practices to better integrate themselves and other Muslims into a globalised world.

From ancient Chinese sages to modern people management practices

This chapter reviews the legacy of several ancient Chinese sages (i.e. Guanzi, Hanfeizi, Shangyang, Xunzi, and Yanzi) and explores their thinking of ruling the state and managing the people. The thoughts of the old are compared with those known in the mainstream Western management texts. Striking similarities in thoughts and key organization and management issues of old and new are identified. For contemporary organizations to be successful, essential people-management principles must be espoused to sustain organizations for a long term as to preserve ancient states. Nonetheless, the world is in ceaseless change, dynasties and nations rise and fall as organizations acquire, merge, die, or emerge as new. Despite perpetual principles, management techniques require constant adaptation to meet modern challenges.

Modeling and analysis on the propagation dynamics of modern email malware

Due to the critical security threats imposed by email-based malware in recent years, modeling the propagation dynamics of email malware becomes a fundamental technique for predicting its potential damages and developing effective countermeasures. Compared to earlier versions of email malware, modern email malware exhibits two new features, reinfection and self-start. Reinfection refers to the malware behavior that modern email malware sends out malware copies whenever any healthy or infected recipients open the malicious attachment. Self-start refers to the behavior that malware starts to spread whenever compromised computers restart or certain files are visited. In the literature, several models are proposed for email malware propagation, but they did not take into account the above two features and cannot accurately model the propagation dynamics of modern email malware. To address this problem, we derive a novel difference equation based analytical model by introducing a new concept of virtual infected user. The proposed model can precisely present the repetitious spreading process caused by reinfection and self-start and effectively overcome the associated computational challenges. We perform comprehensive empirical and theoretical study to validate the proposed analytical model. The results show our model greatly outperforms previous models in terms of estimation accuracy. © 2013 IEEE.

Trust and technology in modern inter-organisational relationships: a study in the petrochemical industry

 This research provided fresh insights into the role of trust and technology in modern inter-organisational relationships (IORs). The study highlighted the importance and contribution of various aspects of IORs in the petrochemical industry; however, it emphasised the role of trust and technology as pivotal to business success. The study was undertaken in Iran, where the petrochemical industry faces a great many sociopolitical and economic challenges, where the situation is volatile, and where the lack of trust and shortage of suitable technology to support global trade, accentuate the intricate web of dependencies between those aspects influencing the development and maintenance of business-to-business (B2B) relationships.

Hard times and the "fact" and "fancy" of modern labour management

Dickens believed that, played out in practical terms, the pursuit of a totally rationalised society devoid of ‘Fancy’ only served to benefit those in power to the impoverishment of those in their charge. He was appalled by a selfish and self-interested philosophy that combined with laissez-faire capitalism to reduce human effort to mere numbers for the sole purpose of determining its monetary worth. His story thus provides a rebuke to the dehumanising effects of utilitarianism and the way it is used to calculate workers in the manner of machines; reducing them to little more than a resource that is no more or less important any other resource used in industrial enterprise. Their modern-day counterparts live in similar Hard Times in being in the grip of laissez-fair economics of global proportions, which visits upon them similar conceptions of their worth, as evidenced by the current precariousness of their employment and their present exposure to the vicissitudes of arbitrary power exercised by managements still wedded to utilitarian principles. As a result, the ‘light of Fancy’ that at one time would periodically burst through in earnest storms of protest, is now refracted into cynical asides directed at rational systems that continue to standardise and homogenise all that ‘counts’ in working life.

Investigating the development of traditional and modern housing design in Libyan architecture

The design of housing is one of the most difficult tasks in the field of architecture. Housing meets people’s functional, social and spiritual needs. The fundamental task of this study has been to investigate the features of traditional and contemporary housing making it possible to describe them and then use this comparison to understand the differences between them