الشعر في ميزان القرآن الحكيم

The Holy Qur’ān is said to be a book neither in poetry nor in prose; yet it has a unique rhyme with a metrical system peculiar to it. The science of prosody and metrics, which is linked directly to poetry with its two characteristics of meter and rhyme, is based on the inductive study of the formal qualities of the Arabic poetry. The Holy Qur’ān, though not a book of poetry, is far away from the stylistics of prosaic speech in the sense since the terminal-end points of the ayaths (verses) of its each and every surah are rhythmic and follow a metrical system of its own, which phenomenon is significant from the view- point of the science of prosody and metrics. Given this, each and every Surah of Qur’ān has a distinct quality whereby it can be recognized and differentiated from every other surah. Both Islam and the Qur’ān have abstained from going to the extent of putting an end to poetic genius; rather they have encouraged it differentiating good poetry meant for the cause of spreading Islamic message from the bad one that stands against the message of Islam.  As regards the Qur’ān, its each and every Surah is dominated by multi-dimensional musical rhythms in synchrony with the total climate of its verses, which makes the listener spell-bound, and which plays an essential function so characteristic of the science of eloquent rhetoric.

Role of Culture and Macroeconomic Shocks in Driving Herding Behavior: Evidence from Developed, Emerging and Frontier Stock Markets

The basic purpose of this research is to investigate herding behavior, the role of culture, the effect of macroeconomic shocks on herding behavior, and the existence of contagion of herding due to the crisis and extreme shocks in the market. This study investigates the herding behavior towards market consensus in a set of Developed, Emerging and Frontier Markets of Asia, Asia Pacific and Europe. For the identification of herding behavior towards market consensus this study employs return dispersion models and the state space model. The time variation in herding behavior is identified by estimating return dispersion model through Kalman filter estimation. One of the main objective of this research is to determine the role of culture in driving herding behavior. This study employs Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions of culture and introduces them as an explanatory variable in the return dispersion model. This study utilizes ARIMA residuals of macroeconomic variables and introduce them in state space model to figure out the effect of unexpected shocks of this variable on investor herding behavior. This study focuses on behavioral link namely contagion of herding (pure contagion) in a given set of market and determines the cross country linkages of each market with a global leader (US) through extreme shocks in macroeconomic components or crisis. For the said purpose conditional correlation between herding measures is generated through diagonal VECH bivariate GARCH (1,1) model. The major findings of the study report significant effect of herding behavior in the majority of the markets. state space model measure provide better results for all measure. Culture play a significant role in the determination of herding behavior. The presence of cultural dimensions changes the magnitude of the herding behavior in sample countries. The herding behavior of investor is affected by some macroeconomic shocks hitting the specific market. But macroeconomic shocks do not seem to play a major role in defining herding behavior in most of the markets. Majority of the markets exhibit a strong correlation with US market which is seen as turning points of herding measure during a global financial crisis of 2007-2009. This correlation also increased due to some specific macroeconomic shocks. This study provides a complete analytical framework in developed emerging and frontier markets of Asia, Asia Pacific and Europe, where economic, cultural, behavioral and external factors are simultaneously integrated to provide a better explanation of herding behavior. Therefore, in its unique design, this research is an attempt towards bridging a gap between, cultural finance, behavioral finance, and standard finance.