Islam Is Not a “Religion” – Global Religious History and Early Twentieth-Century Debates in British Malaya

Lately, Islamicists have called to discard “religion” as a conceptual tool and/or to use the “Qurʾānic term” dīn instead, arguing that “religion” entails Eurocentric bias. Analyzing how Fazl-ur-Rahman Ansari conceptualized Islam and religion in the late 1930s and early 1940s, this article presents a threefold argument. Firstly, I argue that a global history approach which examines in a poststructuralist framework how “Islam” and “religion” are used in concrete contexts is better suited to address the problem of Eurocentrism in both Religious Studies and Islamic Studies. Secondly, I challenge the scholarly thesis that twentieth-century Southeast Asian intellectual debates which referred to Islam as religion were mere emulators of debates conducted in the “West.” Instead of assuming isolated histories and ignoring Southeast Asian debates, I contend that the current use of and debates about conceptualizations of Islam as/and religion are the product of one and the same discourse – a result of global negotiation processes in which Europeans were as involved as Southeast Asia-based non-Europeans, even if they did not speak from the same position of power. Finally, I submit that the approach of global religious history opens new perspectives on contemporary Malaysian politics.

Negotiating the Self and the Other in Times of Globalization: Unveiling Afghan Lives through Select Novels of Khaled Hosseini

Globalization has brought about an unprecedented interconnectedness between people, made possible a neoliberal economy, and has challenged the citizens of the world with a clash between multiple cultures across the continents. The ecumene of the planet is home to myriad peoples with maverick cultures, languages, etc., scattered throughout on its plane. Scientific or technological achievements have helped us as the citizens of this globalized world, to come closer physically but not without some effet de bord. Xenophobia, racial violence, the clash between different civilizations, etc., are the challenges that accompany globalization. The arguments here exude the colossal responsibility that lies presently on the shoulder of a writer to connect peoples internally or psychologically by exposing them to different cultures, peoples, etc., and facilitate a global negotiation between diverse people. In this time of globalization, we can't be truly globalized unless we lend our ears patiently to the writers across the globe. With such standpoints, the paper argues how Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan-American writer, has enlightened the global audience about Afghanistan through his novels. The paper examines two novels of Hosseini and tries to evaluate their contribution towards familiarizing the Afghan ways of life by suggesting Hosseini as a communication bridge between the people of Afghanistan and beyond.

BEST PRACTICE IN GLOBAL NEGOTIATION STRATEGIES FOR LEADERS AND MANAGERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

This research article examines various types of negotiations and negotiation styles and best practice in global negotiations, which may be adopted by leaders and entrepreneurs under different conditions and cultural milieus to reach an agreement while conducting business across the globe.

Enabling Local Risk Assessment to Support Global Collaboration in a Distributed Environment

Risk is a crucial criterion for decision making among multiple stakeholders negotiating for an agreement in a distributed environment. The challenge here is that risk may have different meanings and implications to different stakeholders, and this creates considerable barriers to effective negotiation and coordination in collaborative design. Our goal is to 1) capture the heterogeneous risk information at intra- and inter- stakeholder levels, 2) represent them using a uniform structure based on a function-failure relationship, and 3) enable the negotiation of the risk information among the multiple stakeholders through this uniform structure. Though a significant number of existing methods for risk analysis and management have been developed, these methods mainly focus on the local domain of a certain single stakeholder, and few have considered the possible influence and variations related to global aspects that is important for negotiation among multiple, distributed stakeholders. This work develops intra-level risk property tables to capture and represent the various risk evaluations from individual members in a single stakeholder; and then inter-level risk property tables are formed based on the synthesis of the various intra-level risk properties into a group representation for the single stakeholder, which is directly used in global negotiation and coordination with other stakeholders. An adjustable approach is used in our work to enable the adjustability of the intra- and inter- level risk evaluations via negotiation. An example problem from a NSF/NEES-sponsored research collaborative network is used to demonstrate the use of this method. The preliminary results show that this method has potential in enabling local risk assessment to support global negotiation and coordination in a distributed, collaborative environment.