9. Al-Tawbah/The Immunity
I seek Allah’s protection
from the satanic, the accursed and evil forces within the human soul and social environment.
09:01
a. This is a declaration of immunity from Allah and HIS Messenger to those of the polytheists with whom you have a treaty.
09:02
O the polytheists!
You can move about freely in the land for the next four months,
but know that you can never escape the Power of Allah,
and that Allah can always humble those who will dishonor this treaty.
09:03
Here is a proclamation from Allah and HIS Messenger to all people gathered on this Great Day of the Hajj -
that Allah is not bound by any treaty with the polytheists, and so is HIS Messenger.
So, if you would only repent of disbelief, it will be better for you,
but if you turn away, then know that you can never escape the Power of Allah.
So give the good news to those who insist on disbelief of an awful punishment.
09:04
However, the exception is for those of the polytheists with whom you have a treaty,
and they have
neither failed you in anything,
nor assisted anyone against you.
So as for those who fulfill your treaty/obligations and comply with them to the end of their term of the treaty.
Indeed, Allah loves those who are mindful of their obligations in complying with the foregoing Injunctions.
09:05
But once these four sacred months of truce are over,
then slay the polytheists wherever you find them, and
arrest them, and
besiege them in their settlements, and
ambush them at every likely place of ambush.
However,...
Stunning is the process of rendering animals immobile or unconscious, with or without killing the animal, when or immediately prior to slaughtering them for food. In modern slaughterhouses a variety of stunning methods are used on livestock. Methods include: Electrical stunning, Gas stunning, Percussive stunning. There are three opinions of Islamic scholars about stunning. Those scholars; who do not allow stunning at all; are of the view that the method of rendering animals unconscious before slaughter is against the shairah method and Sunnah, and it is Makrooh e Teḥreemi. Before slaughtering, if an animal died due to stunning, then that animal is carcass and is not allowed to be eaten. But, if before slaughter, ḥayat e Mustaqirrah is present in animal and it is slaughtered in that condition then it is permissible to eat it. Certain scholars allow stunning in certain situations with some terms and conditions. The decisions of Mjam e Faqhiyyah of modern age are also based on conditional permission. Moreover, Mufti Muḥammad Taqi Usmani, Dr. Wahabah Zoḥaili and Abdul Aziz Bin Baaz agree with conditional permission, while some other scholars allow all types of stunning without any condition; Mufti Muḥammad Abduho and his pupil Allamah Rasheed Raza Miṣri agree with later opinion.
Human stress is a serious concern in this era of an ever-increasing number of challenges. Stress causes detrimental effects on the health of an individual and imparts a heavy financial burden on society. Stress can be a forebringer to reduced working ability, a weak immune system, anxiety, depression, blood pressure and cardiovascular diseases. Traditional psychological methods to measure stress require trained experts and human intervention. In developing countries, there is a shortage of health facilities especially, related to mental health. A large number of stress patients remain undiagnosed due to a shortage of health facilities and stigma associated with a mental checkup. With the advancement of brain-computer interfaces, it is possible to make an objective measure of stress using electroencephalography (EEG). Machine learning and statistical methods have been successfully used for the quantification and analysis of human stress. Conventionally, EEG analysis is performed using a clinical dense electrode system, which could consist of up to 132-channels and difficult to wear and operate. This thesis presents methods for quantification and analysis of human stress from EEG recordings using commercially available EEG headsets, which are cost-effective, wearable and provide good temporal resolution. Three different sets of experiments are conducted to acquire EEG datasets using three different commercially available EEG headsets. The first study uses a classification and regression model to identify the longterm stress and its key neural oscillatory features using a single-channel EEG headset. Perceived stress scale (PSS) scores are used for labelling participants into stress and control group. The Naïve Bayes algorithm classifies chronic stress with an accuracy of 71.4% using the single-channel EEG headset. Computation time is reduced by a factor of 7% when the low beta is used as a sole significant feature, which is selected by multiple linear regression. The correlation-based feature subset selection method selected three features low beta, high beta and low gamma oscillations and improved the classification accuracy up to 78.59% using a support vector machine algorithm. The second study assesses the long-term stress level with multiple machine learning algorithms using the five channel EMOTIV Insight headset. A dataset consisting of EEG, PSS scores and expert’s evaluation of stress is collected. In the multichannel analysis, overall alpha asymmetry, beta and low gamma in the frontal region are selected as statistically significant features by using Student’s t-test over forty-five different features. Only four active electrodes are required for the classification of human stress with 85% accuracy using the sole feature of overall alpha asymmetry. The third study utilizes the identified feature of overall alpha asymmetry for expertnovice classification of a video game player. Only a single feature of overall alpha asymmetry classifies expertise level of a game player with an accuracy of 82.35%. It verifies the applicability of identified features to a stimulus-based scenario such as video game playing. For further improvement of classification results, the temporal, frontal and overall alpha asymmetries are used as features. With only four electrodes, the expertise level of a game player is classified with an accuracy of 94.1% and it proved to be better than the accuracy of 14- and 4-channel classifications. This points to the fact that stress research has potential applications, where cognitive aspects of an individual are considered for performance improvement as stress based features are used In the future, the daylong monitoring of stress using EEG in an out-of-lab environment will be considered. More participants will be employed for long-term stress monitoring to generalize results. Video game stimulus will be compared with standard stress- inducing tasks like a mental arithmetic task to get a detailed insight regarding stress assessment.