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Breast milk has been hypothesized to be a source of bacteria for the infant gut. This paper aims to search for probiotic bacteria among 415 isolates belonging to the Enterococcus, Lactobacillus, Streptococcus and Bifidobacterium genera recovered from breast milk of 50 lactating mothers and their respective infant stools, and then, determine whether their levels in stools vary with different modalities of breast feeding.

To prove that the isolates were probable probiotics, subtractive screening was done using three major selection criteria, namely, resistance to low pH, tolerance against bile salts and testing for their antimicrobial activity.

The three criteria were fulfilled by 31.7 and 31 per cent of the isolates recovered from mothers’ breast milk and infants’ stool specimens, respectively. The majority of probiotic strains, isolated from milk and infants’ stools were phenotypically identical, suggesting breast milk as their probable source. Moreover, there was a positive correlation between exclusive breast milk feeding and the number of probiotics in the infants’ stools.

Viable bacteria could be retrieved from breast milk of healthy women, not suffering from mastitis, by using different types of media and different cultivation conditions. Up to five different species belonging to the same genus could be isolated in the same specimen of whether milk or stools. Breast milk could be a source of probiotic bacteria for intestinal microflora of infants, which help improvement of infants’ gut and growth.

This paper aims to clarify the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims in human society, based on the concept of muwālāt (commonly translated as “loyalty”) in the Qurʾān.

The present study follows a contextual and analytical methodology.

This paper concludes that muwālāt is not only ideological but can be contractual too. A historical study of the Prophet’s (PBUH) interaction with non-Muslims in Mecca and Medina illustrates that as long as non-Muslims did not behave treacherously or turn to violence, a peaceful relationship was established and alliances and coalitions were formed. And this paper concludes that the categorisation of previous Muslim scholars, which was is in terms of prohibited and permitted, is inappropriate.

This paper clarifies that the categorisation of previous Muslim scholars, which was in terms of prohibited and permitted, is inappropriate, and muwālāt is not only belongs to faith.

This study aims to address the social, cultural, financial and psychological obstacles these women face in preserving their living arrangements and in parenting as well as the coping mechanisms women adopt to overcome everyday challenges. Researchers used qualitative methodology and interviews to fulfill the aims.

Researchers used qualitative methodology and interviews to fulfill the aims. The sample consists of 20 Syrians living in Jordan’s Amman, Irbid and Al Ramtha in specially designed compounds for them (14 widows and 6 divorcees).

This study’s findings demonstrate that social and cultural norms existing in Jordan and Syria are generally similar, in which women view the males in the family as a source of socioeconomic and emotional stability for them. Widows and divorcees face serious sociocultural, financial and psychological challenges in maintaining their living conditions and the integration process as well as performing single parenting. Faith and social connections represent an important part of coping with the situation in the short term; nevertheless, financial and psychological support seems a vital component in the long term. Research on the conditions of widows and divorcees provides evidence to comprehensively approach the issue of “vulnerabilities” in the humanitarian-policy programming targeting refugees. Theoretically, the findings may provide empirical insights for discussions around women’s changing identities through displacement, agency and empowerment in relation to parenting experiences.

The lived experience of widowhood and divorce among Syrian is understudied, while their resilience strategies are less known. To fill these gaps, this study focuses on Syrian refugee widows and divorcees who are raising their children in specially designated compounds in Jordan and the difficulties they face on social, economic and emotional levels. Besides its originality in providing empirical material about challenges Syrian women faced, our study contributes to better understand women's claims for agency and empowerment as a part of identity changes.

Based on the authors’ study, the main purpose of this paper is to ascertain a systematic long-term solution for the corruption problem in the Indonesian public sector from the knowledge management perspective. To achieve its objectives, this paper applies multiple perspectives and theories of corruption and knowledge management on the corruption problem in Indonesia.

This paper is based on the authors’ study to assess the corruption problem in the Indonesian public sector in the past decade through the examination of reports from various institutions and other relevant documents to highlight various behavioral issues in knowledge management in the Indonesian public sector and how they relate to corruption.

The authors establish that a major factor behind corruption’s ability to regenerate over time in the Indonesian public sector is the fact that it has become part of knowledge conversion in Indonesian public institutions for so long that removing it would be a very challenging task. To remove corruption from Indonesian public institutions is to remove it from the existing knowledge conversion spiral within these institutions by means of organizational unlearning and re-learning. The primary focus of the unlearning and re-learning process should be to eliminate the knowledge of corruption, in both tacit and explicit forms, and replace it with the knowledge of good governance, accountability and integrity. Through systematic organizational unlearning and re-learning along with other more repressive measures, the risk of corruption in public institutions in Indonesia will gradually diminish over time.

This study is relying on documentary analysis to highlight the trend in behavioral problems in relation to knowledge conversion in the Indonesian public sector. Future studies should incorporate interviews with corruption offenders and local leaders to gain a more accurate view of how knowledge conversion plays its role in the growth and regeneration of corruption in the Indonesian public sector.

This paper contributes to the development of corruption eradication strategy by proposing a framework for systematically removing corruption knowledge from an organization. With this, framework resources can be allocated more effectively and efficiently to achieve the objectives of corruption prevention.

This paper highlights the importance of behavior-oriented approaches in mitigating corruption in the Indonesian public sector.

Islam plays a powerful symbolic and cultural role in the constitution of consumer preferences, especially in Muslim countries. To quantitatively study this role in the consumption patterns of Muslim consumers we need a suitable scale for religiosity. However, the existing scales of religiosity have been developed primarily for Christian/Jewish respondents and cannot provide valid results for Muslim consumers. This study aims to address these challenges by re-conceptualizing the religiosity construct for Muslims and conducting an exploratory study to generate an initial scale.

This paper initialized the scale development exercise with a systematic review of the existing Islamic literature to ensure that we use Islamic categories to build the scale. Once the authors had a large pool of items, they consulted experts on Shariah (Islamic law) to evaluate these items for clarity, face and content validity. Next, they conducted five focus groups to (a) determine if they had covered the full terrain of Muslim religiosity; (b) identify if the items correspond with the actual experiences of the target respondents; and (c) ensure linguistic compatibility. This was followed by administering an exploratory survey designed to test psychometric properties of the new scale and to analyze the underlying dimensionality of the inventory of items.

To extract a manageable number of latent dimensions in the survey data, an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) procedure was conducted. This resulted in the extraction of five different factors which were named as Mu’amalat_societal ethics, Roshan Khayali (enlightened moderation), Ibadaat (prayers), Mu’amalat_societal laws, Azeemat (a state exhibiting scrupulous faithfulness) and Mu’amalat_business dealings. There is a divide between Ibadaat (individual and collective worship) and Muamlaat (social relations) that emerged in the data from the cluster analysis procedure.

Religion can be an important part of decision-making of a typical consumer. This paper proposes a new scale for Muslims to tap into their religiosity, as existing scales are not embedded in the Islamic literature. This study also distinguishes Muslim religiosity from its Western counterpart and thus helps in clarifying the Muslim religiosity construct.

The authors examine the impacts of corporate announcements on stock returns during the pandemic stress.

The authors employ the event study methodology with the market model on a sample of 90 events (announcement and ex-date).

The authors find that all the corporate announcements do not impact the stock returns in a similar pattern. While the bonus announcement, ex-bonus and ex-split events led to positive significant abnormal returns on the event date, the rights issue and stock-split announcements failed to influence the stock returns. The findings suggest that before making such announcements, the corporates should wait until the market recovers because even the positively impacting events result in negative market responses during pandemic stress.

This study will guide the policymakers to stimulate share prices during such pandemics with the help of various corporate announcements. The investors will be assisted in understanding the stock market mechanism and making wise decisions before reacting to corporate actions during a pandemic or emergency period. While the policymakers are concerned with influencing the share prices, the investors are concerned with the composition of the risk-return parameters in their portfolio. This study will act as an essential investment tool for both.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the authors conduct the first-ever study to examine the impacts of corporate announcements during a pandemic stress period that significantly contributes to the literature. The authors examine the announcement effects in India and accurately anticipate that this study will be a pioneer in this field. This study also paves the way for future researches in this area.