Sustainability - Resource Security & Management

The threat of climate change and the need for energy security pose serious challenges for policymakers. Part of the strategy to tackle these issues rests on multilateral initiatives increasing the momentum of global environmental governance efforts. Nevertheless, these problems create a further dilemma for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. On the one hand, the impact of climate change will heavily affect these countries and thus requires their active participation in mitigation efforts.

The term "martyr" has meant many different things to many people of different faiths throughout history. "Martyr" derives from the Greek word for "witness".

From the 1970s to the 1990s, the number of mosques established in America increased considerably, partly due to conversion for which the dominant number of converts are African-Americans, but also due to the influence of settlement patterns resulting from immigration. There are now more than 1500 mosques, compared to 600 in 1980, 230 in 1960 and 19 in 1930.

The world has made notable progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the rate of extreme poverty (from 43 per cent in 1990 to about 17 per cent in 2011) before 2015. Nevertheless, about 1 billion people are still under the poverty line. Despite the progress at the global level, poverty prevails with different intensity in different parts of the world.

Conventional (commercial) insurance involves an intolerable magnitude of gharar (uncertainty), and hence its prohibition in Shariah. In order to Islamize insurance, it needs to be reconstructed on different basis so that the inherent uncertainty associated with the concept of insurance will not invalidate its contracts.