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Monthly Archive

2008

Welcome to our Archives page. On this page you will find a total of 119 of our articles broken down into Months and Years.
Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
The Fountain
17473

Building Bridges

How can we define The Fountain in a single word? As the editors we have been thinking about this question for a few weeks now, and we have reached a conclusion: “bridge.” What kind of a bridge is The ... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
M. Fethullah Gulen
18861

Language and Thought

Language is one of the fundamental dynamics in the composition of a culture. The power of a nation is directly proportional to the power and richness of its language and thought. A perfect command of ... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
Ali Fethi Toprak
17986

The Cell Bank of Our Body: Stem Cells

Injuries, illnesses and aging are inevitable parts of our lives. The human body can deal with basic injuries and illnesses in daily life by cell regeneration. However, aging and certain injuries have ... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
A. Kadir Yildirim
20704

Islam and Democracy: A Critical Perspective on a Misconstrued Relationship

Nowadays, there is hardly any topic in the field of political science more interesting than the question of the relationship between Islam and democracy: Is Islam compatible with democracy and democra... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
Omur Yilmaz
19253

Blue Light, Daytime Sleep and the Prophetic Tradition

Sleep is a blessing from God. Humans spend around one third of their lives sleeping. Sleep is essential for the performance of important daily acts such as speech, memory, and original or flexible thi... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
Nathan Ruler
16520

What Fuzzy Logic Lets Us Think

Fuzzy logic is a new systemized model which is just as important as the more familiar classical logic because of its successful application to certain technological areas. There are scholars who consi... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
Mirsad Tasmaz
15280

Do Not Underestimate Small Things

Who does not want to know the future? Is it not one of our impossible dreams to obtain advance information about tomorrow? Events developing in time have such a complicated structure that small things... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
Sophia Gallant
21835

Beware of ''Others''

In My Fair Lady, a satirical movie based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Henry Higgins makes a wager with his friend that within six months he can transform a coarse Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doo... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
Mirkena Ozer
17604

Who Wants a Transformer?

He is God, the Creator, the Evolver, the Giver of Forms and Colors. (Hashr 59:24)Halima was making her shopping list when the door bell started ringing wildly like there was a fire somewhere. She drop... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
M. Fethullah Gulen
17628

Halwat and Uzlat (Privacy And Seclusion)

Literally meaning solitude and living alone, halwat and ‘uzlat (privacy and seclusion) within the context of Sufism denote an initiate’s going into retreat to dedicate all of his or her time to worshi... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
Ertan Salik
19070

Peer Instruction: A Better Way to Learn

Teaching and learning are two common human activities. If we need to name a great difference between humans and animals, this is the one. As Nursi points out1 almost from the very moment of birth an a... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
M. Fethullah Gulen
15890

Rainbow

Sky in blue, earth in green, dyes of all shades.Rainbows in all directions across the horizon,Touched by all these dazzling colors, humankind.Angels look on them with praise.Their faces to the ground,... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
Ozgur Yilmaz
14704

Citadel of the Self: Incompleteness Theorem

What is consciousness? Is it established in the brain, or distributed throughout the whole body? Is it physical? Can I jump out of my own consciousness? These are the questions that have occupied the ... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
Alice Bolton
51213

The Construction of Intelligence in Terms of Cultural Differences between East and West

As human beings, we live in societies that create their own systems of meanings through the process known as culture. This system of meanings is encoded in language and other symbols and maintained by... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
Suleyman Candaroglu
15126

Quantum Entanglement: Illusion or Reality?

Science has always influenced philosophy. Trivial and not instantaneous effects of change in scientific thought eventually result in changes in social thought. For example, by the end of the nineteent... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
Ozgur Yilmaz
16528

The Wonderer

When you travel long enough and become a stranger to every land you step on, you stop having a journey, but the journey starts having you. A motorcycle passes by very close with a groovy sound and dis... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
Mark Scheel
19345

A Communitarian Imperative: Fethullah Gulen's Model of Modern Turkey

If there has been one great political lesson the twentieth century has taught us, surely it is the undeniable truth of Lord Acton’s dictum, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolut... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
Seth Mette
14671

Descent from the Ivory Tower

Refugee in a tower of agony Hungry for ceaseless beauty In love with eternity Refugee in a tower of agony In an early, rainy morning When the birds started singing He woke into a vision crying ... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
Kaan Kerem
17285

The Qur'an: A Biography

The Qur’an: A Biography. Such a title would normally suggest a book that deals with the history of the revelation of Qur’anic verses. However, Bruce Lawrence, professor of Islamic Studies at Duke Univ... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
Hikmet Isik
17155

The Relationship between Our Prayers and Deeds

What are the ways of internalizing good ethical conduct and high virtues so as to make them a part of our nature? Virtues such as sincerity (ikhlas1), loyalty, refraining from backbiting or suspicion... read more..

Issue 61 (January - February 2008)
Sophia Gallant
16386

The Nature of the Closeness of God

Is God close to human beings? If so, how close is He? Or is defining Him in terms of His distance from the creation impossible? Perhaps we should question our own remoteness and ask, “Are we close to ... read more..

Issue 62 (March - April 2008)
The Fountain
15180

How Swift Our Minutes Pass!

Great God, how frail a thing is man!How swift his minutes pass!His age contracts within a span;He blooms and dies like grass. Time is ticking “swiftly” away, consuming the “minutes” that have bee read more..

Issue 62 (March - April 2008)
M. Fethullah Gulen
17605

The Souls Besieged by a Life of Transience

Those who perceive the world solely in terms of its transitory face and physical constraints can be seen, in spite of the breadth of the human conscience, to have darkened their lives by having chosen... read more..

Issue 62 (March - April 2008)
Bill Sayoran
17288

Water: The Molecule of Life

The sustenance of all known life-forms relies heavily on water, and almost all living things are mostly composed of water. The chemistry of biological reactions is based on water, which renders condit... read more..

Issue 62 (March - April 2008)
Aydin Kara
26953

Understanding Today's Schools with Chaos Theory

Today’s schools are more complex systems than the one-room schools of the past. However, most of the beliefs and expectations about schools today still remain the same as they were in the olden days. ... read more..

Issue 62 (March - April 2008)
Allen S. Maller
17347

A Reform Rabbi Learns from Muhammad

All Muslims know that the Qur’an often refers to the “people of the book” and their prophets. In addition, there are dozens of hadiths, sayings of the Prophet of Islam, that speak about Jews and Chris... read more..

Issue 62 (March - April 2008)
Mehmet Ozalp
14966

Heroes of Compassion

Once there were model men Roaming in our shining civilization. They breathed life into lost souls, We called them heroes of compassion. How we have missed you, waiting, O heroes of compassion, al... read more..

Issue 62 (March - April 2008)
A. Kadir Yildirim
16186

Economic Development via Human Development

Think about two South African children born on the same day in 2000: Nthabiseng and Pieter. Nthabiseng is born to a black family with no formal education about 400 miles away from Cape Town in a rural... read more..

Issue 62 (March - April 2008)
M. Ali Kaslioglu
15319

Curative Cherries

Fruits of various kinds in abundance, such as dates in sheathed clusters, bananas piled one above another, grapes, olives, figs, pomegranates, and cherries with their abundant blossom and fruit, are m... read more..

Issue 62 (March - April 2008)
Ashley Hatchett
16346

A Personal Pilgrimage

“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must man be of learning from experience.” These words, spoken by George Bernard Shaw, didn’t phase me as I walked into my W... read more..

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