Held in trust : Waqf in the Islamic world
Waqfs (pious endowments) long held a crucial place in the political, economic, and social life of the Islamic world. Waqfs were major sources of education, health care, and employment; they shaped the city and contributed to the upkeep of religious edifices. They constituted a major resource, and their status was at stake in repeated struggles to impose competing definitions of legitimacy and community. Closer examination of the diverse legal, institutional, and practical aspects of waqfs in different regions and communities is necessary to a deeper understanding of their dynamism and resilience. This volume, which evolved from papers delivered at the 2005 American University in Cairo Annual History Seminar, offers a meticulous set of studies that fills a gap in our knowledge of waqf and its uses.
Confronting Climate Change and Fostering Islamic Economic Development Through Awqāf
The modern world’s ecological and economic crises result from its reductionist, mechanistic, and materialistic worldview. This study of Islamic economics – based on its metaphysical and cosmological sciences – reveals a path to economic justice and ecological equilibrium that requires recovering the Islamic intellectual heritage and establishing corresponding Islamic scientific, technological, economic, and other social structures for spiritually meaningful work and integral development; a role awqāf traditionally played in Islamic civilization that needs to be recovered today. This path, which was lost during the colonial period, requires integrating the findings of modern science into higher orders of knowledge, allowing man to live in harmony with himself, his community, and nature. This achieves both “vertical” and “horizontal” equilibrium, the intersection of which symbolizes the integration of all of life around a sacred center. This can also increase the number and vitality of contemporary awqāf, which Syed Khalid Rashid so rightly calls for in his lead article (Rashid, 2018).
Points of strong summability of Fourier series
In this paper we present a new solution of Hardy and Littlewood's problem concerning strong summability of Fourier series; we also present a property of points of strong summability.