Today, society needs students whose capacity extend beyond simple know how of doing things well to the recognition of right things to do and to the execution of tasks in a planned manner. Such student capacity necessitates the development of student leadership at the school level to be cultivated through different activities being embodied in school culture, rules, and school development plan. Importantly, the head teachers and teachers’ beliefs that students possess potentials to grow and enact their roles as leaders along with learning counts, if student leadership is to grow. To develop student leadership, the school needs to provide opportunities closest to students’ interest and level aligning academic activities with social, spiritual, and contextual needs, which call for participatory approach practices in the school. Cognizant of the fact, this study explores opportunities for students to develop their leadership skills in two public sector secondary schools in Shigar district of Gilgit-Baltistan. The study employed qualitative research method multiple-case study design and data were collected through semi-structured interviews, focused group discussion, analysis of relevant documents, and field notes. The head teacher of both schools, one teacher, and four students from each school were research participants. The findings revealed two types of opportunities: formal and informal. The formal opportunities such as head boy, class representatives, boy scouts, events planning, competitions, and membership of different committees were provided to students given space in school development plan. While, the informal opportunities such as unplanned events, social interactions, morning assembly, playground time, peer groups, and disagreement of ideas etc. are illustrated through data, which are more important to make an individual socialized, civilized, and useful citizen and also develop their leadership skills. It is important to channelize these opportunities as part of the curricular activities and align with written rules of the school, which is found lacking in both cases. There exist barriers in the development of student leadership such as socio-cultural beliefs that support teachers’ supremacy, no argumentation with teachers, and less exposure. Thus, the study recommends that students must be encouraged to work autonomously, appreciated for their work, and be involved in the decision-making, so that they can become future leaders.
Establishment of khilafah and tamkeen fil ‘ard means supremacy of the dictates of shari‘ah and socio-political justice on earth. This is one of the basic objectives and prominent messages of the Holy Quran and Seerah of Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w). About khilafah and tamkeen fil ‘ard the Holy Quran expresses as: -وَعَدَ اللَّهُ الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا مِنكُمْ وَعَمِلُوا الصَّالِحَاتِ لَيَسْتَخْلِفَنَّهُم فِي الأَرْضِ … -الَّذِينَ إِن مَّكَّنَّاهُمْ فِي الأَرْضِ أَقَامُوا الصَّلاَةَ وَآتَوُا الزَّكَاةَ وَأَمَرُوا بِالمَعْرُوفِ وَنَهَوْا عَنِ المُنكَرِ وَلِلَّهِ عَاقِبَةُ الأُمُورِ. -هُوَ الَّذِي أَرْسَلَ رَسُولَهُ بِالْهُدَى وَدِينِ الْحَقِّ لِيُظْهِرَهُ عَلَى الدِّينِ كُلِّهِ وَكَفَى بِاللَّهِ شَهِيداً. Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w) proclaims: - وَاَللَّهِ لَوْ وَضَعُوا الشَّمْسَ فِي يَمِينِي وَالْقَمَرَ فِي يَسَارِي عَلَى أَنْ أَتْرُكَ هَذَا الْأَمْرَ حَتَّى يُظْهِرَهُ اللَّهُ أَوْ أَهْلِكَ فِيهِ مَا تَرَكْتُهُ. The Holy Quran and the Seerah refer to some underlying milestones on the way of religious nations to status of khalafah and tamkeen fin ‘ard. These milestones may be expressed in an order as: da‘wah [preaching], deen [practices of prophetic teachings], hijrah [migration], ma‘iyyat-ul-Allah [companionship of Allah], qital [wars], nusrat-ul-Allah [divine aid], izhar-ud-deen [domination of deen] and khilafah [inheritance of authority]. This is noteworthy that journey of khalafah and tamkeen fin ‘ard begins with da‘wah [preaching towards deen] and passing through various milestones ends up again at da‘wah, as obvious from ayat-ul-istakhlaf quoted above. Therefore, the seekers of khilafah and tamkeen fil ‘ard should strive hard and keep struggling with the work of da‘wah with dedication in all circumstances and all means as per time and place requirements in lined with the modus operandi of Prophets, particularly Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w), instead of awaiting the status of khilafah and tamkeen fil ‘ard as prerequisite to start with the work of da‘wah and establishment of deen. This paper primarily aims to elaborate the milestones of Muslim Ummah to reach to the status of khilafah and tamkeen fil ‘ard. It also cast light on the objectives of khilafah and tamkeen fil ‘ard. This work provides useful guidance to Muslim Ummah in general and Ahlud da‘wah in particular about milestones and objectives of khilafah and tamkeen fil ‘ard.
Image processing is being successfully applied in many areas medical research such as computer aided diagnosis, tumor imaging and treatment, angiography, and carotid artery plaque detection. For medical image analysis, segmentation is an intermediate step to segregate region of interest from the background. The ultimate goal of segmentation is to identify the part of the data array that makes up an object in the real world. Many imaging modalities are in practice for disease diagnosis. Among those, owing to noninvasive nature, ultrasound imaging provides an invaluable tool for disease diagnosis. Major limitations faced by ultrasound imaging modality include low quality, inherent noise, and wave interferences. Consequently, a substantial effort from radiologists is required to extract constructive information about a particular disease. In this regard, an efficient and accurate computer aided diagnostic system for ultrasound images is highly desirable for disease (plaque) diagnosis. Carotid arteries are vital arteries that supply oxygen rich blood to the brain. Carotid artery stenosis is the process of narrowing the carotid artery due to the presence of atherosclerosis. The plaque may partially or fully block the blood flow to the brain and the probability of cerebrovascular stroke becomes high. Ultrasound imaging is used for detection of plaque in carotid artery. Due to lower quality and other degradations, segmentation of carotid arteries ultrasound images becomes a challenging task. In this thesis, several segmentation techniques are proposed, which successfully segment the carotid artery ultrasound images. Firstly, we have proposed spatial fuzzy c-means modified (sFCMM) clustering technique and also investigated effectiveness of ensemble clustering. The proposed sFCMM technique assigns weight to each pixel in a sub-window according to the pixel’s contribution. The proposed scheme required image pre-processing for noise reduction and hence segmentation has been performed on filtered image. In another approach, we propose information gain based fuzzy c-means clustering (IGFCM) algorithm that avoids the preprocessing step and still yields better results compared to sFCMM technique. The IGFCM approach exploits the concept of information gain to automatically update the xvii fuzzy membership function and cluster centeriods. However, from IGFCM segmented images, it has been observed that some of the pixels of arterial walls are mislabeled by IGFCM. In order to overcome this problem, a semi-supervised clustering approach named robust segmentation and classification of ultrasound images (RSC-US) has been proposed to segment carotid artery ultrasound images. The RSC-US approach is composed of three phases. In the first phase, the fuzzy inference system (FIS) is generated. In second phase, carotid artery ultrasound images are segmented based on the generated FIS. Finally, a decision making system has been designed to segregate the segmented images into normal or abnormal subjects. The RSC-US approach did not utilize the spatial information of pixel’s which plays a vital role in segmentation. Consequently, the spatial information has also been explored and a new approach named robust fuzzy radial basis function networks (RFRBFN) has been proposed to segment carotid artery ultrasound images. The RFRBFN segments the carotid artery ultrasound images with high precision. Due to the Lagrange function and a smoothing parameter, the RFRBFN might be computationally expensive. Finally, an automatic active contour based segmentation technique for carotid artery ultrasound images is proposed. This technique can successfully segment natural scene as well as medical images.