پروفیسر قمر رئیس مرحوم
پروفیسر قمر رئیس بھی اپریل کی آخری تاریخوں میں اس دنیا سے رخصت ہوگئے، ایک مہینہ پہلے ’’ایوان اردو‘‘ کے خصوصی اداریہ میں جب انہوں نے چند جانے والوں، خاص طور پر فضا ابن فیضی کا ماتم کرتے ہوئے تمنا ظاہر کی تھی کہ اگر موت ایک ماندگی کا وقفہ ہے تو کاش یہ دینوی اور علامتی طور پر سچ ہوتی لیکن اردو کے درد و بام پر سوگ کا عالم طاری دیکھ کر بڑی حسرت سے کہا کہ یقین نہیں آتا کہ جانے والوں کی رحلت محض ایک ماندگی کا وقفہ ہے، افسوس یہ ماتم کرنے ولا چند دنوں بعد اسی کاروان رفتگان کا حصہ بن کر اردو دنیا کو ایک دیدہ ور صاحب دانش سے محرومی کا کرب دے گیا۔
ان کا وطن شاہ جہاں پور اور نام مصاحب علی خاں ہے لیکن قمر رئیس کی شہرت کی چمک میں اصل نام و وطن چھپ کر رہ گئے، علی گڑھ میں تعلیمی مراحل سے گزرکر تدریسی منزلیں طے کرتے رہے، اس راہ میں تاشقند و سمرقند سے بھی گزر ہوا لیکن شہرت کو بال و پروان کے قلم نے عطا کیے، ۱۹۳۲ء میں جب وہ پیدا ہوئے تو اردو کے ترقی پسندوں کی تحریک صرف ذہنوں میں تھی لیکن قمر رئیس کا عالم شباب آیا تو ترقی پسند تحریک کی مقبولیت بھی شباب پر آئی اور فطری طور پر عہد شباب کی بعض بے اعتدالیاں بھی ساتھ لائی، یہ کہنا بے احتیاطی نہیں کہ قمر رئیس کے ذہن کی سلامتی نے ان کو اس فکر سے محفوظ رکھا کہ ترقی پسند ادب کو قدیم ادب اور اس کی بہترین روایات کا منکر ہونا چاہئے، انہوں نے اردو تنقید کو اپنا موضوع بنایا تو اس اقرار کے ساتھ کہ تلاش و تفحص کا جذبہ ہی تنقید کا نقطہ آغاز ہے اور...
Human cloning has emerged as a new and innovative technology in the reproductive and therapeutic science in the recent past. So far it has not been practiced over human beings but owing to its huge potential and possible scope, it has attracted the attention of not only the masses (particularly the infertile couples and LGBTQs etc) but the other stakeholders including the religious scholars from worlds’ prominent religions have given their views on this technology in order to guide their followers. This paper examines and reviews the religious points of view on human cloning. For this purpose, three Semitic religions in the world i-e Judaism, Christianity, and Islām have been examined. As far as Islam is concerned, this portion has been divided into two broad sections elaborating the Shī‘ah and Sunnī schools’ opinions. Being an innovative topic, the religious teachings do not address it directly hence the injunctions related to the reproduction are most relevant to it. Three Semitic religions have been examined from the perspective of admissibility or non-admissibility of human cloning, the rationale behind the verdict on human cloning and the possible solutions to the issues and problems faced by the followers in the case of acceptance or rejection of this biomedical technology. Most of the religions emphasize over adaptability of the natural mode of reproduction only, where male and female genders contribute to the reproductive cycle. The Semitic religions reject the reproductive cloning generally. The religious experts need to conduct more focused and updated research before coming to any conclusion about the permissibility or non-permissibility of this technique.
Face recognition, as an active research area over the past three decades, still poses many challenges. Recognition of age-separated face images (age invariant face recognition) based on facial asymmetry is one of such challenges. Successful solutions to this recognition paradigm would allow the facial photographs to be matched against face images with temporal variations. Facial asymmetry, which refers to non-correspondence in shape, size, and arrangement of facial landmarks on both sides of the face, is an intrinsic recognition-specific facial feature used for face recognition task. The contributions of this dissertation are focused on recognition of age-separated face images using facial asymmetry. We introduce to use a feature description scheme suitable to represent facial asymmetry. The introduced feature description is adaptable to recognize age-separated face images and extract demographic information such as age group, gender, and race from a given face image. Based on the introduced feature description, this dissertation offers the following three main contributions to recognize age-separated face images. The first contribution is a matching-scores space based approach to recognize age separated face images. In the proposed framework, matching scores of holistic, local, and asymmetric facial features are combined in a matching-score space (MSS) with Support Vector Machine (SVM) as a classifier to separate genuine and imposter classes. Experimental results on three publically available benchmark facial aging databases show the efficacy of proposed approach compared to some existing state-of-the-art approaches. The second contribution is focused on the role of facial asymmetry based age group estimation in recognizing age-separated face images. We provide a hierarchical approach to perform age group estimation task. The role of various asymmetric facial regions in recognizing age-separated face images of different age groups is investigated. We integrate the knowledge learned from age group estimation into face recognition algorithm to enhance the recognition performance of age-separated face images. The viability of this approach is demonstrated on two benchmark facial aging databases. The experimental results suggest that integration of age group estimates into face recognition algorithm enhances the recognition performance of age separated face images, considerably. The third contribution is examination of the role of facial asymmetry in demographic estimation (i.e. age group, gender, and race) of a query face image in a face recognition system. The role of different asymmetric facial regions in recognizing face images with different demographic attributes is presented. We integrate the demographic estimates into a face recognition algorithm to enhance the recognition accuracy of age-separated face images. Experiments are conducted on benchmark facial aging databases to validate the performance of proposed approach. The experimental results suggest that proposed approach is more adaptable to recognize age-separated face images compared to some existing state-of-the-art methods.