Conflicting Images of Muslims in Post-9 11 American Literature

Since the advent of Islam, Muslims have never ceased to be important for the West and have been variously depicted in English literature from time to time. However, after the tragic incidents of 11th September, 2001, there has been a dramatic change in the world's focus on them, both in nature and in magnitude. Both as Ummah—the formal Arabic word for the global community of Muslims —and as individuals, they have suddenly found themselves among the protagonists of English literature in general, and that produced in the North American Continent in particular. This paper aims at discussing the different images of Muslims and Islam in the English literature of North America, focusing on their nature, types, causes, consequences and the way they differ from the depiction of Muslims and Islam before the drastic disaster of nine-eleven. It also intends to contrast the literature authored by Muslim Americans about themselves with that written by non-Muslim Americans about them during the period in focus.

Power Digraphs in Number Theory

The modular exponentiation is considered to be one of the renowned problems in number theory and is of paramount importance in the field of cryptography. Now a days many security systems are based on powerful cryptographic algorithms. Most of them are designed by using the exponentiation x k ≡ y (mod n) as in RSA, Diffie- Hellman key exchange, Pseudo-random number generators etc. For the last two decades, this problem is being studied by associating the power digraphs with modular exponentiation. For the fixed values of n and k, a power digraph G(n, k) is formed by taking Z n as the set of vertices and the directed edges (x, y) from x to y if x k ≡ y (mod n) for the vertices x and y. These digraphs make a novel connection between three disciplines of discrete mathematics namely number theory, graph theory and cryptography. The objective of this dissertation is to generalize the results on symmetry, heights, isolated fixed points, the number of components of a power digraph and the primality of Fermat numbers. To obtain the desired goal, a power digraph is decomposed into the direct product of smaller power digraphs by using the Chinese Remainder Theorem. The method of elimination is adopted to discard those values of n and k which do not provide desired results. During the entire course of research, the Carmichael lambda-function λ(n) is used for developing the relations between the properties of a power digraph and the parameters n, k. For any prime divisor p of n, the concept of equivalence classes has been used to discuss the symmetry of order p of G(n, k). The general rules to determine the heights are formulated by comparing the prime factorizations of k, λ(n) and the orders of vertices. Some necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of symmetric power digraphs G(n, k), where n = p α q 1 q 2 · · · q m such that p, q i are distinct primes and α > 1, of order p are established. Explicit formulae for the determination of the heights of the vertices and components of a power digraph in terms of n, k, λ(n) and the orders of vertices are formulated. An expression for the number of vertices at a specific height is established. The power digraphs in which each vertex of indegree 0 of a certain subdigraph is at height q ≥ 1 are characterized. The necessary and sufficient conditions on n and k for a digraph to have at least one isolated fixed point are obtained. The work ends with the complete classification of the power digraphs with exactly two components.