The Philosophical Perspective in Case of Jihad

Here are two opposing views of scholars and different religions regarding the permission or non-permission of war on the basis of honor and lawfulness of human life. The Hindus and Jews legalize war, whereas the Buddhists and Christians consider it illegal. Islam follows the middle path and attributes the legality of war to its purpose because only the purpose tells the righteousness or wrongfulness of any deed. Islam has prevented from all those purposes that eliminate the cause of Allah Almighty from war. Islam does not legalize war for any worldly purpose so the pursuit of fame, kingship, booty, conquering another land or national or personal revenge is not legal. Jihad has been enjoined for the elimination of hurdles in the path of Allah. It clarifies the policy of Islam that war is not an end but it is a means to an end. Today the west is doing propaganda against Islam that Islam spread through sword and the concept of jihad is being related to terrorism. The purposes of jihad should be kept in mind in order to understand the philosophy of jihad. The aim of this paper is to highlight the purposes of jihad and its importance. Views of various scholars have been observed in this study along with references from Quran and Hadith.

Analyzing English Language Teaching and Testing Praxis in Developing Discourse Competence in Eassy Writing

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.