CIS Faculty

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.

This chapter focuses upon labour migration to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, since the massive incomes to these countries, particularly from the oil price increase in the 1970s, resulted in one of the great migration stories of the twentieth century. Still significant, today labour migration to the GCC accounts for over 10 per cent of all migrants globally.

The paper aims to highlight the challenges facing Islamic finance industry and outline the prospectus of what constitutes a sound Islamic banking product in terms of both its Shariah control and product development methodology. The paper analytically addresses the internal challenges facing Islamic finance industry by highlighting, first, the deficiencies in the existing Shariah supervisory work and, then, the deficiencies in the product development methodology followed in Islamic banks. Islamic banking and finance is facing some internal challenges which require immediate action.

This paper investigates the predictive power of global geopolitical risks (GPR) index on daily returns and price volatility of Bitcoin over the period July 18, 2010–May 31, 2018. Considering Bayesian Graphical Structural Vector Autoregressive (BSGVAR) technique, we find that GPR has a predictive power on both returns and volatility of Bitcoin. The results of the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimations show that price volatility and returns of Bitcoin are positively and negatively related to the GPR, respectively.

The paper is an attempt to identify the continuities and discontinuities between the religious Islamic notion and practice of 

Migration and Islamic Ethics, Issues of Residence, Naturalization and Citizenship addresses how Islamic ethical and legal traditions can contribute to current global debates on migration and displacement; how Islamic ethics of muʾakha, ḍiyāfa, ijāra, amān, jiwār, sutra, kafāla, among others, may provide common ethical grounds for a new paradigm of social and political virtues applicable to all humanity, not only Muslims.

The power of biomedical technology lies not only in treating diseases and relieving pain, but also in intervening in our bodies at the molecular level in a way that makes us wonder if this is (re)shaping our very human nature. This technology raises ethical, philosophical and religious questions related to understanding and identifying our essential humanity, that which is “uniquely human” in us, and how far genetic interventions in our human bodies may affect all this.

When the Human Genome Project (HGP) took off in 1990, experts in the field were aware of the fact that this scientific megaproject would generate ethical questions and conundrums that should be taken seriously.2 So, an ethical arm for the HGP was established, namely the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) program. Five percent of the total HGP budget was dedicated to the ELSI program, making the project one of the largest-ever investments in bioethics research.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, it became clear that the ramifications of the breathtaking biomedical advancements and associated technologies will not remain within the confines of scientific and clinical practices. The complex questions and challenges raised by these advancements and technologies also necessitated profound ethical considerations.

Islamic Perspectives on the Principles of Biomedical Ethics presents results from a pioneering seminar in 2013 between