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Summary Background National levels of personal health-care access and quality can be approximated by measuring mortality rates from causes that should not be fatal in the presence of effective medical care (ie, amenable mortality). Previous analyses of mortality amenable to health care only focused on high-income countries and faced several methodological challenges. In the present analysis, we use the highly standardised cause of death and risk factor estimates generated through the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) to improve and expand the quantification of personal health-care access and quality for 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2015. Methods We mapped the most widely used list of causes amenable to personal health care developed by Nolte and McKee to 32 GBD causes. We accounted for variations in cause of death certification and misclassifications through the extensive data standardisation processes and redistribution algorithms developed for GBD. To isolate the effects of personal health-care access and quality, we risk-standardised cause-specific mortality rates for each geography-year by removing the joint effects of local environmental and behavioural risks, and adding back the global levels of risk exposure as estimated for GBD 2015. We employed principal component analysis to create a single, interpretable summary measure–the Healthcare Quality and Access (HAQ) Index–on a scale of 0 to 100. The HAQ Index showed strong convergence validity as compared with other health-system indicators, including health expenditure per capita (r=0·88), an index of 11 universal health coverage interventions ( r =0·83), and human resources for health per 1000 ( r =0·77). We used free disposal hull analysis with bootstrapping to produce a frontier based on the relationship between the HAQ Index and the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a measure of overall development consisting of income per capita, average years of education, and total fertility rates. This frontier allowed us to better quantify the maximum levels of personal health-care access and quality achieved across the development spectrum, and pinpoint geographies where gaps between observed and potential levels have narrowed or widened over time. Findings Between 1990 and 2015, nearly all countries and territories saw their HAQ Index values improve; nonetheless, the difference between the highest and lowest observed HAQ Index was larger in 2015 than in 1990, ranging from 28·6 to 94·6. Of 195 geographies, 167 had statistically significant increases in HAQ Index levels since 1990, with South Korea, Turkey, Peru, China, and the Maldives recording among the largest gains by 2015. Performance on the HAQ Index and individual causes showed distinct patterns by region and level of development, yet substantial heterogeneities emerged for several causes, including cancers in highest-SDI countries; chronic kidney disease, diabetes, diarrhoeal diseases, and lower respiratory infections among middle-SDI countries; and measles and tetanus among lowest-SDI countries. While the global HAQ Index average rose from 40·7 (95% uncertainty interval, 39·0–42·8) in 1990 to 53·7 (52·2–55·4) in 2015, far less progress occurred in narrowing the gap between observed HAQ Index values and maximum levels achieved; at the global level, the difference between the observed and frontier HAQ Index only decreased from 21·2 in 1990 to 20·1 in 2015. If every country and territory had achieved the highest observed HAQ Index by their corresponding level of SDI, the global average would have been 73·8 in 2015. Several countries, particularly in eastern and western sub-Saharan Africa, reached HAQ Index values similar to or beyond their development levels, whereas others, namely in southern sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and south Asia, lagged behind what geographies of similar development attained between 1990 and 2015. Interpretation This novel extension of the GBD Study shows the untapped potential for personal health-care access and quality improvement across the development spectrum. Amid substantive advances in personal health care at the national level, heterogeneous patterns for individual causes in given countries or territories suggest that few places have consistently achieved optimal health-care access and quality across health-system functions and therapeutic areas. This is especially evident in middle-SDI countries, many of which have recently undergone or are currently experiencing epidemiological transitions. The HAQ Index, if paired with other measures of health-system characteristics such as intervention coverage, could provide a robust avenue for tracking progress on universal health coverage and identifying local priorities for strengthening personal health-care quality and access throughout the world. Funding Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Foundations of Arabic Linguistics, IV, contains sixteen studies on grammatical theories from the earliest period of Arabic grammar (end 8th century C.E.) and the evolution of theory by later grammarians.

In 1779 the sultan of Morocco, Muḥammad bin ʿAbdallah (Muḥammad III, r. 1757–90), sent an ambassadorial delegation to Spain to ransom Ottoman-Algerian prisoners. The delegation was led by Muḥammad bin ʿUthman al-Miknāsī (d. 1799), who left a detailed account of the mission in his extant text Al-Iksīr fī fikāk al-asīr (The Elixir That Will Liberate the Prisoner). When juxtaposed on the historical record, al-Miknāsī's travelogue illustrates how Muḥammad III and the Moroccan religio-political elite navigated the complex Mediterranean web of religious identity, political allegiance, and ethnicity. Positing a division between “temporal” and “spiritual” sovereignty increases our understanding of how Muḥammad III substantiated his authority on multiple levels in relation to Spain, Ottoman-Algeria, and the Sublime Porte in Istanbul. While previous scholarship has focused on a religio-political aggression against the Christian Europeans, this article employs al-Miknāsī's travelogue to demonstrate how Muḥammad III halted religio-political aggression against Dār al-Ḥarb (Abode of War) and questioned the unity within Dār al-Islām (Abode of Islam).

In this biography Nico J.G. Kaptein studies the life and times of Sayyid ʿUthman (1822-1914), the most prominent Muslim scholar of his time in the Netherlands East Indies.

The book description for \"Peter the Venerable and Islam\" is currently unavailable.

One mission of Ibn Kathir's Kitab al-Bidaya wa-l-Nihaya fi al-Taʾrikh (The Book of the Beginning and the End in History) is to provide a Sunni answer to a generally ʿAlid-legitimizing corpus of early Islamic historical accounts. Part of the 13th- and 14th-century movement that sought to rehabilitate the image of Syria and the otherwise reviled Umayyad dynasty (r. 661–750), Ibn Kathir's grand work of history cleverly reframes the early Islamic narrative to fit into what he considers a more “properly” Sunni framework than his sources provided. This article focuses on Ibn Kathir's presentation of the shūrā, the council appointed by ʿUmar and charged with choosing from among its six members his successor. It identifies the literary tools Ibn Kathir employed and offers a framework for his strategy of employing them. Whether through narrative aside or criticism of other historians, Ibn Kathir's recasting of a pro-ʿAlid grudge story as an Umayyad apologetic highlights moments of sectarian contention and emphasizes the evolution of Sunni opinion on ʿAli and ʿUthman.

The present study aims to contribute to the quest for the origins of belief in the eschatological figure of the Sufyānī, a matter of hot debate since the late nineteenth century. To this end, three different bodies of evidence are produced and analysed: reports indicating that the Sufyānī was, indeed, thought of as a redemptive personality in some Syrian quarters, traditions on him in the Muslim endtimes literature that contain an ex eventu pronouncement, and reports concerning the propaganda activities of the first Sufyānī claimant, Abū Muḥammad Ziyād ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Yazīd “al-Sufyānī”, in the historical record. Making use of hitherto unavailable sources and looking afresh at the previously studied sources, it is argued that the myth of the Sufyānī emerged during the counterrevolutionary revolt of Abū Muḥammad al-Sufyānī in 132 ah, with vague residues of it traceable to his earlier military activities, against the Umayyad caliph Yazīd III, in 126 ah.

In the fourth/tenth century a great number of new intellectual centers appeared in the Islamic world, and an increase in the number of persons involved in production of written works on mathematics and astronomy took place. One such new center was Aleppo under the Ḥamdanid ruler Sayf al-Dawla. According to al-Qabīṣī the generosity of Sayf al-Dawla led to the situation that ignorant people pretended to be astronomers or astrologer. Therefore, al-Qabīṣī argued, exams should be established for testing the level of competence and the completeness of knowledge of a candidate. Al-Qabīṣī was engaged in teaching by giving lectures based on a textbook, the Fuṣūl of al-Farghānī. This was a novelty in teaching astronomy, since before memorizing didactic poems and operating with astronomical instruments was the preferred method. While al-Qabīṣī’s aim in teaching astronomy was to train future professional astronomers and astrologers, in other contexts astronomy was a propaedeutic subject as part of the quadrivium. The philosopher Muḥammad Ibn al-Haytham (not to be confused with the mathematician al-Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham) wrote a commentary of the Almagest, in which his intention was “to elucidate subtle ideas for the benefit of students”, and not to go into technical details of calculation. Obviously his aim was to educate future philosophers in the “philosophical sciences” (mathematics, natural sciences and metaphysics). Some generations earlier, al-Fārābī wrote a commentary on the Almagest with similar intentions. His preferred subject was the geometric proof, while observations and calculations were of little interest. Astronomy was incorporated into a curriculum of general scientific knowledge, – similar to the curriculum of the Alexandrian schools in late antiquity –, and ancient Greek texts on astronomy were preferred. This development was indeed a renaissance in the sense Jacob Burckhardt used the term.