Polemic Views about the Source of Qur’ān in Medieval Christian Writings with a Reflection upon Contemporary Orientalists: A Critical Review

Before the advent of Islam, there was a strong tradition of polemic writings both among the Jews and the Christians to prove the errors of adversary. But, after the advent of Islam in general, and the conquering of Roman / Byzantine empire by the Muslims in the era of Righteous Califate in specific, due to embracing Islam by a large number of local populace, the flux of Christian polemic writing was directed towards Islam. A number of polemic writings surfaced as a resort to keep their religion alive. These writings tried to belittle all basic concepts, beliefs, and creeds of Islam, and even the personality of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), and the Holy Qur’ān. The contemporary orientalist polemic writers have claimed that there are several accounts originating from Jewish and Christian sources which tried to allegedly prove that the Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) was instructed by Jewish or Christian scholars in the composition of Holy Qur’ān, and to support this claim, they not only point out to certain Jewish or Christian sources, but have parroted their arguments as well, with the similar motives. With this, they have attempted to discredit Islam by raising doubts about the origin of Qur’ān. But despite of their efforts the fact remains firm that the Qur’ān has a Divine origin and was revealed by Allah Ta‘ālā unto Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). In this regard, the purpose of this article is to analyze the medieval polemic writings, their motives, and their rumination by the orientalists of the contemporary age. A critical approach is adopted in this analytical, and historical study, using published authentic data and literature including academic books, research papers, periodicals, dictionaries and reliable web sites also.

A Novel Technique for Finding Rough Set Based Dynamic Reducts

Volumetric increase in data along with the curse of dimensionality has diverted the recent trends of computer science. Processing such a massive amount of data is a computationally expensive job. Feature selection is the process of selecting subset of data from the entire dataset that contains most of the information. The selected subset is called Reduct. Feature selection has materialized the idea of jumbling with attributes. Subset of attributes is favored which bounces the same information as the wide-ranging set of variables. Various dynamic reduct finding algorithms have been proposed. Dynamic reducts is an extension to the idea of reduct extraction based on rough set. Sub-tables are randomly drawn from the original decision table and reducts are extracted from these sub-tables. These reducts are considered to be the stable reducts for complete dataset. However, all the existing dynamic reduct finding algorithms are computationally too expensive to be used for datasets beyond smaller size. In this research, a novel dynamic reduct finding technique based on rough set theory is proposed, where dynamic reducts and relative dependency are the two key notions. Reducts are selected, optimized and further generalized through strenuous Parallel Feature Sampling (PFS) algorithm. In-depth analysis is performed using various benchmark datasets to justify the proposed approach. Results have shown that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing state of the art approaches in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness.