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There has been much controversy, if not dispute, especially among non-Muslims over the attitude of Islam to tourism. One may claim that this debate is mainly due to non-Muslims' misunderstanding of the true nature of the religion and its Shari'a or Islamic law. This chapter attempts to show in some detail tourism from the perspective of the Islamic creed and to demonstrate that the religion does encourage tourism and regards it as legal. To do this the chapter reviews a number of sources including the holy Qur'an.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between Islam and economic underdevelopment that characterizes many Muslim societies. It examines the Weberian thesis regarding Islam and development, assessing the role of Islamic law, in addition to the concepts of rationality and fatalism.

The paper reviews the major theses regarding the link between Islam and development and makes an attempt at explaining economic underdevelopment by engaging the most prominent arguments in this regard.

Lack of development in most Muslim societies is a multidimensional problem, and it would not help to rely on explanations that are culturally deterministic or sociologically reductionist.

Development requires improvements at various regulatory, economic, educational, and social levels. It also requires a significant transformation in people’s value systems that guide their actions. This requires a process of self-examination, not only looking at exogenous factors to explain failures, but also to focus on one’s own responsibility to alleviate crisis situations.

This paper challenges many of the for-granted theses regarding the purported link between Islam and development. While not dispelling the need for internal reflection for Muslim societies, it puts some of the popular arguments regarding this link in proper perspective.

In a constantly changing and increasingly globalized world, religion still plays a significant role in influencing social and consumer behavior. This study will analyze what influence religion and intensity of belief has on attitudes towards the advertising of particular controversial products and services. A questionnaire was distributed to 1,393 people across six different countries and resulting in samples of four main religious groups. The results indicated some statistically significant differences between the groups, which can have important implications for global marketers.

This study provides insight into the proportion of the variation across countries in the desirable outcomes of freedom and peace that can be accounted for using a set of national characteristics which are difficult, if not impossible, to change. The majority of prior studies in this area have utilized bivariate (correlational) analysis. While these studies have made important contributions to the field, they have not been able to disentangle the effects of other important national characteristics from the effect of culture on freedom and peace. Through our multivariate framework, we are able to shed light on the relative importance of these national characteristics in explaining the variation in freedom and peace across countries.

The continued rise of the multinational and debate as to what constitutes global business values is predicated on the UN Declaration and Global Business Compact. This research suggests both documents explicitly exclude the existence of a foundational ethereal power creating morals thereby nullifying two thirds of the general population’s belief system. The authors argue against humanism as a global value beginning and suggest theism as a better origin and use the scientific method to introduce mathematical axioms supporting theism and complimenting humanism. Ontologically, the theist becomes a stronger base for the scientific inquiry into morals, values and business ethics. A comparison of major religious morals revealed eight factors: assurance; candor, fairness and honesty; character, integrity, truthfulness and exacting in truth; charity and compassion; environment; perseverance and tolerance; sacrifice; and seriousness. The research suggests that the UN documents do not adequately reflect these morals suggesting a change for businesses especially in Islamic regions.

A comprehensive review of religious materials emphasizing morals rather than customs, eternal entity description or negative behaviors yielded 1,243 morals and associated synonyms via six religions (Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism) representing 4.5 billion people. All positive morals were cross-referenced and only common items across all six religions were included. With the 29 common morals, the authors completed a word meaning search and did a second comparison that yielded 8 moral factors or constructs.

Eight moral factors were found to be common in all major religions (assurance, fairness/honesty, character/integrity, charity/compassion, environment, tolerance, sacrifice and seriousness). By using the scientific method (Axioms), the authors argue that theism is a better beginning to researching morals and values within business and marketing.

Multinationals should be made aware of the disconnect between the underlying problems of the Global Business Compacts’ values and the global morals identified. The results suggest adopting a codification system based on the pertinent morals as related to economic theories: capitalism, socialism and theism. The use of theism as a base to business and marketing ethics includes billions of customers and employees and their belief systems that should increase the validity and reliability of actions associated with corporate social responsibility, the environment and best practices.

The UN Declaration and subsequent Global Business Compact are argued to be flawed by its exclusion of religious morals and the historical period in which it was created. By using the scientific method and creating two axioms, the base to all business and marketing ethics must shift to the common moral factors identified.

Legal systems govern social behaviour. They attempt to regulate order, collective peace and harmonious developments in society. The external social behaviour that law deals with is also a part of internal human behaviour. This external and internal nature of human behaviour, needs to be consciously studied and interlinked when legal systems desire elements of justice, equality, liberty, fraternity, dignity, integrity and unity for social collectivity. These elements, that legal systems guarantee come from an integration of individual and collective life on matters of social, political, economic etc., of various levels. The individuality and collectivity on these matters and levels are deeply psychological and spirited in sense as human behaviour operates through stimulus from inside to leave external effects outside or vice-versa through a function of thought-emotion-sensation-body complex. Thus, we see, our behaviour gets shaped by a two-way process of inner motivation and outer circumstance, individual and collective dimensions on a given matter and level. At this juncture, a critical study on this two-way relation in human behaviour and a set of unifying values to be identified for progressive intersections seem to be the future of legal systems for achieving greater goals of humanity. Additionally, legal systems that deal with justice are now becoming more than social, economic and political justice as new knowledge is revealing interrelations of spirit-mind-body or thought-emotion-sensation-body complex leaving us to think of new dimensions in justice. Thus, spirituality, as an exercise of human experiment and experience, provides a new scope for legal systems to deal with human and social behaviour to achieve order, peace and development. At this juncture, one even finds another unknown dimension gaining grounds and sinking to integrate or bring holistic responses to human problems and social challenges of the collective is the actual linking of spirituality through or with psychology or vice versa. Law and legalities of the thoughts and norms are interspersed in between these two disciplines. This is indeed a welcome trend as the psychological human and the social collective have become the axis on which every wheel of knowledge is tested and allowed to represent as spokes for inclusive, sustainable and harmonious inter-relational movement of things. One might see, know, feel or even ought to bear this interconnection that very often come in the actual spiritual practices where psychological dimensions emerge leading to wholesome experience of the state of our own individual and socio-collective nature. Among many kinds of spiritual experiences and experiments, two of them stand out for our legal consideration. One, an experience of timeless, space-less and boundless consciousness-awareness beyond life and world with which we witness, observe and understand the movement of things inside life and world, without our participation into them. Two, an experience of consciousness-awareness as power and force operating and animating through thought-emotion-sensation-body complex with our active participation in the movement of life and world. The former experience prepares the ground to remain free from all fetters of self-aggrandizing individualization before wider collectivity and, the latter experience prepares us to re-enter into wider collectivity to contribute with a freed sense of individualization, not imprisoned by its ego-aggrandizement that cuts the individual from the collective. These two spiritual experiences, one of the consciousness-awareness of freedom and, another of the consciousness-awareness with all potentials, when allowed to animate inside the human, it gives crucial understanding of the challenges of life and, pro-activation of solutions for those challenges that are extremely crucial for law and legal systems. A power of understanding the knowledge using spiritual experience of these two states of consciousness-awareness along with rationality, reason and logic, a strength operating through concentration of the energies in body aiding movement of knowledge, a harmony releasing itself through motivating-empathy and mutual-collaboration using knowledge and strength and, finally a near-perfect action operating through strategies, stages and steps in organizing daily life, human capital and all kinds of the systems of the world using knowledge, strength and harmony become our positive tools of empowerment. The combination of these two spiritual experiences of consciousness-awareness is useful to legal systems that look for solutions to human crises using interactive nature of individuality and collectivity on all issues of life, world and society. The chapter attempts to demonstrate that this kind of spirituality and its applied processes thus provide us the clue and strategy to achieve what the human nature and social existences of all kinds all over the world seek and aspire in the form of individual as well as collective peace, joy and compassion. It is also argued that this peace, joy and compassion that is spiritual in nature are in fact the origin and source of inspiration and stimulation for social, political and economic equality, liberty and fraternity in law, and the harmony and perfection of these elements seen as the justice that balances everything. The chapter demonstrates how applied spirituality can be used in law in the sense of law-making, judicial-interpretation, executive-governance, legal profession and finally a grand introduction of spirituality and its values into legal academics and research that are waiting to be liberated from the clutches of mere analytical knowledge of life and world moving towards new enriching powers of radiant collective life and wonderful harmonious world.

This essay argues that the teachings and ethos of Jesus are needed in public administration to address a potentially fatal weakness in modern industrial republics. The latter are increasingly prone to domestic tyranny and international imperialism, because the values that once constrained them, and which once were thought to be self-evident, have been traced to Christian doctrines discredited by science. The first half of the essay chronicles the failure of the West either to live well without these values, or to find an alternative foundation for them. The second half of the essay shows that this dilemma can be overcome by differentiating the teachings of Jesus from the doctrines of Christianity

The first amendment, a crucial component of American constitutional law, is under attack from various groups advocating for censorship in universities and public schools. The censors assert that restrictive speech codes preventing anyone from engaging in any expression deemed hateful, offensive, defamatory, insulting, or critical of sacred religious or political beliefs and values are necessary in a multicultural society. These speech codes restrict critical comments about race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, physical characteristics, and other traits in the name of tolerance, sensitivity, and respect. Many hate speech codes are a violation of the first amendment and have been struck down by federal and state courts. They persist in jurisdictions where they have been ruled unconstitutional; most universities and public schools have speech codes. This assault on the first amendment might be a concern to all citizens, especially university professors and social studies educators responsible for teaching students about the democratic ideals enshrined in our constitution. Teachers should resist unconstitutional speech codes and teach their students that the purpose of the first amendment is to protect radical, offensive, critical, and controversial speech.