Pakistan has experienced worst environmental impacts of heavy rains and flooding during the last decade. These extreme environmental conditions became responsible for the outbreak of many fatal diseases like the sudden outbreak of dengue fever in different cities of Pakistan. The high death toll in Lahore city as a result of dengue fever during the year 2011 became an awakening signal to look into the mysteries and myths behind this disease. The present research intended to study the physical environments that have been responsible to cause the sudden mega outbreak of dengue fever during 2011 in Lahore. The comparison of climatic and social covariates of four selected cities of Pakistan (Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore, and Karachi) has conducted for the years 2009-2012 to analyze the factors that serve and do not serve the spread of dengue fever in urban areas. The reasons and regions of higher risk of dengue fever transmission have been identified by land use classification, processing of digital elevation models, and analyzing the climate and social covariates. Landsat 30 m TM imagery, SPOT 10 m imagery, and SRTM 90 m DEM have been used for the analysis. The Dengue fever case registry, climatic data sets, travelling data, population data, and malaria case registry for the study period have been acquired from respective national departments. The land use 8 classification has done to analyze the change in urbanization over a period of time. DEMs have been processed to identify the drainage patterns and magnitude of drainage density in study areas. The changes in climate covariates like rainfall, temperature, and wind speed; social covariates like population, travelling, change in urbanization, drainage density and patterns have also been analyzed. A macro level study to understand the dengue transmission in urban environmental gradients has conducted comprising the analyses of flow accumulation, drainage pattern, drainage density, change in population, change in urbanization, dengue incidence during 2009-2012, and climate covariates. A micro level study to understand the dengue transmission and identifying the high risk prone localities has conducted comprising the hotspot analysis, outlier analysis, and regression analysis. Furthermore, the relationship of daily dengue fever incidence with climate covariates during the months of July-October for the year 2011 has also analyzed. The aspect of relationship of dengue fever occurrence with other factors and malaria has analyzed to fill the research gap. The relationship between the occurrences of dengue fever and Malaria, dengue fever and flooding, dengue fever and population, and dengue fever and travelling in the study areas for the years 2009-2012 have been taken into account. Linear Regression Model, Generalized Linear Mixed Model (GLM) with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm has computed to see the random effects of different social (population, travelling, and malaria) and climate (minimum- maximum temperature, and rainfall) covariates on dengue fever occurrence. Neural Network with Multilayer Perceptron has used to analyze the normalized importance of different covariates relative to dengue fever occurrence. At the end, the general Dengue prevention and control strategies have been discussed. Results suggest that the low elevation areas with calm winds and higher than the normal minimum temperatures, rapid increase in unplanned urbanization and population, low flow accumulation, and higher drainage density areas favored the dengue fever transmission. The hotspot analysis highlighted the high risk prone urban localities of four cities. Regression model highlighted the risk prone localities and relationship of dengue fever occurrence with population and area of localities. Results show that each dry spell of 2-4 days have provided the suitable conditions for the development and survival of Dengue vector during the wet months of July and August (2011) in the areas of high stream density and population. It has revealed that most of the dengue fever cases reported after the onset of summer monsoon season. Very few cases have been reported in July while higher numbers of cases have reported in the months of August, September, until late October 9 during 2011. Flooding, travelling, population and occurrence of Malaria have significantly affected the occurrence of dengue fever in the study areas. Magnitude of these relationships has also shown by the results of neural network. Change in occurrence of Malaria has affected the occurrence of dengue fever as much as 5.4 times, whereas GLM with MCMC also showed significant random effects of malaria, population and rainfall on the dengue fever occurrence during the studied years (2009-2012). The efficiency of control activities may be improved by highlighting the localities of higher risk within a vulnerable region. Recognizing the high risk areas of dengue fever threat will strengthen the control strategies and support in reducing the impacts for future. Such studies would also be helpful in the decision-making on public health prevention programs. The present study of recent Dengue risk burden and distribution in four major cities of Pakistan will become the basis for future endeavors and help to achieve the goal in mitigation of this dreadly disease.
حکیم محمد صادق سیالکوٹی ؒکی اردو سیرت ’’جمالِ مصطفیﷺ‘‘کا تعارف وجائزہ
ڈاکٹر محمد انصر جاوید گھمن
اردو سیرت کی کتاب "جمالِ مصطفیﷺ"مولاناحکیم محمدصاد ق سیالکوٹی رحمہ اللہ کی ایک مشہور تصنیف ہے ۔ یہ کتاب نعمانی کتب خانہ حق سٹریٹ اردوبازار، لاہورسے چھپی ہے ۔اس کتاب کا سرورق بہت زیادہ خوبصورتی سے مزین کیاگیاہے، جس کی ابتدااللہ تعالیٰ کے ارشادِ پاک "اور ہم نے آپﷺ کو سب جہانوں کے لیے رحمت بناکربھیجاہے۔"کے ساتھ درج ذیل شعر سے کی گئی ہے:
سیلاب رنگ و نور طلوع سحر میں ہے تابندہ کہکشاں تیر گر سفر میں ہے
حکیم صاحب اپنی کتاب کا تعارف ان الفاظ میں کرواتے ہیں:
"اس کتاب میں آرامِ جاں، سکون ایمان، کاشفِ سرکن فکان، دلدارِ مسکان، غم خوارِ عاصیاں، ممدوحِ قُدْسَیاں، سرخیلِ نوریاں، رحمتِ عالمیاں، سید الکونین، سید الثقلین، حبیبِ خدا، اشرف الانبیاء، شافعِ روزِ جزاء، حضرت محمد مصطفیﷺکا حسن صحیح معنوں میں اپنی راعنائیوں کے ساتھ جلوہ بار ہے۔"
مولانا حکیم محمد صادق سیالکوٹی رحمہ اللہ نے حسنِ صورت بھی بیان کیاہے اور حسنِ سیرت بھی بیان کیاہے۔ حکیم صاحب نے مندرجہ بالا القابات جو بیان کیے ہیں در حقیقت یہ رسول اللہﷺ کی سیرت کے مختلف پہلو ہیں جو حکیم صاحب نے بڑے حکیمانہ انداز میں بیان فرمائے ہیں۔ پھرحکیم صاحب نبیﷺ کی سیرت کو اشعارکی صورت میں بیان کرتےہیں اور آفتابِ نبوت میں آفتابِ کردار کو نمایاں کرتے ہیں۔جن میں سے چند حسب ذیل ہیں:
يهدف البحث لبيان تأثير الألوان النفسية ومفعولها الفني في بناء القصيدة المعاصرة عند حازم رشك، بما لها من وسْع تعبيري لا يتوافر في اللغة الإنسانية العادية، تلك التي تبدو قاصرة عن ترجمة الأغوار النفسية، واستكناه عنصر الطبيعة في تناسق ألوانها اللامتناهي الذي يُعدّ مادة خصبة للفيض الفني عند الشعراء المبدعين. ولتثبيت الحقائق سلكت الدراسة منهجاً إحصائياً تحليلياً وروائز علمية كشفت عن ميْل بعضهم في جملة من المواقف الإنسانية إلى تفضيل ألوان معيّنة، كما أكدت الدّراسة أن طغيان استعمال ألوان معيّنة ما هو في الحقيقة إلا ظاهرة فنية عاطفيّة أحسنَ التميمي توظيفها.
Essay writing is one of the basic and most prized competencies in our post-industrial and global world. One of the serious indictments of the traditional teaching approaches to essay writing is their essential inadequacies and incompatibilities with the present-day pedagogical trends. Writing essays in SL is, indeed, one of the most difficult and most significant tasks we engage our students in as human beings. Writing essays can assist us to find out what we think, and consequently, to know who we are. Not only does it help us to interact with others, but also to participate in our discourse community. Moreover, essay writing also requires from a writer to communicate persuasively in a disciplined way. In short, essays entail creativity of ideas and thoughts which reveal the critical perspective of the writer, and a form which is intelligible, logical and free from errors of lexis, syntax, discourse, spelling and punctuation. The following research study was, in fact, conducted to find out how SL teachers teach essay writing to learners to develop communicative/discourse competence in them to enable them to perform in real-life situations. Further, the study was carried out to realize the assessment practices of the teachers in two of the universities of Pakistan. It was, primarily, a mixed method research, utilizing quantitative and qualitative paradigms of research. For this purpose, the researcher made use of the Common European Framework of Reference 2001 (a worldwide renowned document for teaching and testing of English language) for language teaching and testing as a theoretical framework and designed questionnaires, an interview guide and an observation sheet for data collection. These instruments were pilot tested, and their validity and reliability were established thereby. Later, the questionnaires were administered to learners and teachers. Moreover, the researcher conducted interviews of the teachers and made the classroom observations as well. These three different research tools were used to triangulate, compare, contrast, and validate the data. The quantitative data were analyzed through SPSS (version 21), and the qualitative data were analyzed through thematic analysis. The research findings demonstrate that there exist gaps in the teaching and testing practices. Finally, it has been, therefore, recommended that a student-centered, content-based and task-oriented communicative classrooms ought to be created in such a way that the learners’ linguistic needs and content goals along with communicative/discourse competence in essay writing could develop to deal with the real-life challenges.