Theological Foundations for Interfaith Dialogue in Islam

According to Qur’an, the difference of opinion among peoples of the world is natural and something that will always be there. However, in order to stop the difference from becoming a conflict, people should hold dialogue. The significance of dialogue in Islam is well understood by the fact that God chose to hold dialogue with angels concerning the creation of man. Furthermore, the Qur’an declares dialogue the greater jihad and arrangement of a successful dialogue is considered as a manifest victory In order to arrange a successful dialogue, Qur’an lays out a number of principles: 1- Dialogue should be held in such a nice way that it may lead the opponent to get a close friend. For this it is necessary to speak mildly and the dialogue must be based on wisdom and sincerity. 2- Dialogue should rest on the principle of mutual respect and should not contain any kind of abusive and taunting language. 3- Dialogue must not override the principle of justice and equality and must not be affected by the past experiences or personal grievances towards the opponent. 4- Dialogue should not address the issue of pulling everyone together, e.g. The opponent (for example a nation) should not be blamed for the evil deeds of few. 5- Dialogue should be held with an attitude that is characterized by patience and tolerance and efforts must be made to keep the vicious elements out from harming the process. 6- Both parties should openly acknowledge and recognize the mutually positive attributes. 7- Imposing one’s opinions upon the opponent must not be the objective of dialogue. 8- Both parties should, despite the inherent difference of opinion, pursue to find practical solutions by striving towards finding a common ground.

Relationship Between Self-Concept and Academic Achievement of Female Bachelor Degree Students

Self-concept as the core of human personality refers to the sum total of people’s perceptions about their physical, social and academic competence. It is the view that one has of oneself. It is the set of perceptions that the person has about himself, the set of characteristics, attributes, qualities and deficiencies, capacities and limits, values and relationships that the subject knows to be descriptive of him. The study was designed to investigate relationship between self-concept and academic achievement of female bachelor degree students. The objectives of the study were (1) to explore by measurement the areas of physical, social and academic self-concept of students, (2) to obtain a measure of academic achievement, (3) to relate the areas of physical, social and academic self- concept of students to their academic achievement, (4) to discuss possible ways to enhance aspects of the self-concepts of students The population of the study was comprised of all bachelor degree female students of 27 graduate and post graduate women colleges located in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Sample of the study consisted of 1,500 students randomly chosen from 15 selected colleges with 100 students of 3 rd and 4 th year from each college. To measure self-concept, Self-Description Questionnaire III constructed by Marsh (1985) was used after modifying and translating in Urdu. Marks obtained by the students in recently held previous exams were acquired from college records as an indicator of their academic achievement. Two approaches were used for data analysis. in the first approach, collected data were scored and raw scores on each variable were summarized by using xdescriptive statistics such as means, standard deviation. In order to infer mean and standard deviation of the population self-concept scores, standard error of mean, standard error of standard deviation were calculated. The correlation coefficient among the study variables was calculated by using Pearson ‘r’. To determine the degree of relationship between three dimensions of self-concept and academic achievement, technique of probable error of a coefficient (PEr) was applied. An alternative factor analysis approach was also used for the data analysis and Kendall’s Tau-b was employed to correlate the responses obtained on each of the 60 items of the questionnaire with the academic achievement scores. Looking at the results as obtained through two approaches, it was found that week though real relationship existed between the academic self-concept and academic achievement. No relationship was however found between physical self-concept and academic achievement as well between social self-concept and academic achievement.