Bücher von Mohammad Ashraf

Dr. Mahathir, Father of Modern Malaysia, is a juggernaut in the modern history of Malaysia of which economic progress has been considered a showcase of socioeconomic development and the ability to increasingly bring about equitable distribution of income to its citizens, in an environment of high growth and general price stability, can only be matched by few countries. During the global recession of 1981-82, Dr. Mahathir assumed his leadership in the government. He managed to create an entrepreneurial revolution especially enhancing small business by providing easy microcredit in order to eradicate hardcore rural- urban poverty in Malaysia. Amanah Ikhtiar Malaysia (AIM) is that sort of institution which was welcomed by Dr. Mahathir''s government in 1987 as a full-fledged microfinance institution. This organization is the oldest replications in Asia with some Islamic adjustments of the Grameen Bank model that was initiated in 1983 by Nobel winner Dr. Yunus. However, the present study pregnant with empirical evidence suggests that poverty alleviation in Malaysia is not the outcome of microfinance scheme but of some other strategies articulated by far-sighted statesman Dr. Mahathir.

This book primarily attempts to detect the trend in the present upshots of global warming temperature data. It has been done through the estimation of the long memory fractional parameter, using simulation technique. The study also investigates empirically the impact of global warming on global agricultural production. The simulation-result exhibits a non-trend behavior of global warming that produces a contradictory outcome of profound uncertainties against the case of true world temperature data trend. The results of empirical investigations assert that in the late 21st century unabated global warming would have a negative impact on global agricultural production in the aggregate and the impact could be severe if carbon fertilization benefits do not materialize, especially if water scarcity limits irrigation. In addition, if warming would not halt in the 2080s, but would continue on a path toward still higher global temperatures in the 22nd century, agricultural damage could be more severe. The study also shows that the composition of agricultural effects is likely to be seriously unfavorable to developing countries with the most severe losses in Africa, Latin America and India.

The idea of ¿microfinance'' is, in fact, the brainchild of Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Laureate (2006) Economics Professor of the University of Chittagong in Bangladesh, who materialized his idea into a project initiated in the village compound of ¿Jobra'' closed to that university in 1976. In 1983, the project was transformed into a full-fledged microfinance institute named as Grameen Bank (GB). Until today the age of GB is more than 30 years, but how far has the poverty been eradicated from the society is an empirical question. No long-term study has, however, found how often borrowers graduate to the status of non-poor. The present study based on empirical analysis shows that GB''s microfinance program has no statistically significant impact on increasing income of the rural poor. Based on the outcomes of other studies, it is observed that GB is no more a conduit of alleviating rural poverty, rather it appears to have a devastating negative impact on the status of the rural poor that is termed by the experts as a ¿debt trap'' or a ¿death trap'' for the rural destitute in Bangladesh.

Conflict of civilizations will be the latest phase in the evolution of the conflict of the modern world,says Samuel Huntington in his The Clash of Civilizations, but Huntington is blatantly wrong. The clash of civilizations is the genesis of the history of mankind. All the prophetic missions were ascribed to teach people to differentiate between truth and false and Islam is the youngest among them revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (pbh) in the 7th century (CE) which is thus proclaimed in the Holy Qur''an as Noor i.e. light and all other paths of life are curtailed as Jaheliyah i.e. darkness. The whole of the Democratic past and present of the West is myopic and is reduced to the status of a heinous instrument decorated with the Machiavellian political grammar and set with unscrupulous hypocrisy, fathomless hoax and abysmal fraud. Islamic politics is completely free of all those odious attributes rather full of moral values and justice. Thus, it is important to realize that the clash between Islam and the West (adorned by Democracy) is nothing but the conflict of cultures which are not compatible rather more importantly mutually exclusive.