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This paper looks at mainstream lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual (LGBTQIA+) support services in Aotearoa New Zealand, which predominantly center white queer voices and services and fail to account for the intersectional identities of young ethnic queers.

This exploratory, qualitative study investigated the social and professional support experienced and responded to by 43 young ethnic queers living in Aotearoa New Zealand, who were between 18 and 35 years of age. Participants identified as queer, non-binary, gay, pansexual, demisexual, gender fluid, non-binary and trans among others and held ethnic heritage from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas. Persadie and Narain's Mash Up methodological approach (2022) was used to analyze the data. Mash Up allowed us to understand the intersectional spaces of queer ethnic lives in white-dominated spaces, the ways in which young ethnic queers resisted the marginalization of their racialized being and took agency to counter actions and decisions that negated their presence and intersectional identities.

The findings from the study showed that young ethnic queers responded to the lack of adequate support services by establishing their own voluntary organizations and support networks. The study revealed that ethnic queer young people were critical of the white-dominated LGBTQIA+ support organizations; they created their own transformative spaces where they found “family” and community where they could be open about their queerness without the fear of rejection and stigma, while still advocating for equitable resources and an intersectional approach in queer mainstream services.

This paper provides valuable information on the lack of support for queer ethnic young people in Aotearoa New Zealand. The absence of information on the needs of this group poses a challenge to government departments, which rely on data to inform policy and allocate resources. The limited research and knowledge of this community make them less visible and, consequently, less likely to be given resources. It also means that harmful practices and behaviors toward queer ethnic young people by families and communities are more likely to go unnoticed and unaddressed. The paper also shows that the agency of young ethnic queers to create their own transformative spaces and to challenge the white-centric spaces, which have failed to consider their intersectional identities, has been instrumental to their well-being.

In this chapter, I uncover the jail diaries of a revolutionary woman of the 20th century Pakistan, Akhtar Baloch. Although feminism in Pakistan has oscillated between liberal and postcolonial camps, through reading Akhtar's diaries, compiled as Prison Narratives (2017), I center Akhtar's own struggles for Sindh, along with the resistance of the women she met in the prison convicted for the murders of their husbands, to better theorize Marxist Feminism in Pakistan that overturns the structures that commodify women through love and revolution. My article will show the commodification of women's bodies; the “sale” of women through marriage as the goal of this commodification; the lovelessness and alienation women experience in commodified marriages; the unexpected fall in love with someone whom it is subversive for the commodified wife to love; the subversion of this unexpected event that leads to the attempted resolution of this tension through murder; the separation of the lovers through the incarceration of the woman by the capitalist-patriarchal state; and finally, the unexpected outcome (albeit the most common one) that the male lover abandons his female lover once she's jailed, but the defiantly brave female lover finds platonic love in jail through close female friendships with other women who are similarly brave in both love and in revolution. Through this exposition, I show that Akhtar's diaries provide a way for us to build on Marxist Feminist theory through a theory of love and revolution from a Sindhi feminist perspective.

Our purpose in this paper is three‐fold. First, we shall briefly describe what is almost a truism— that is, the classical (especially the Greek) intellectual heritage of the Arab‐Islamic scholars upon which the latter, imbued by their young faith, developed their own comprehensive synthesis. Second, as part of that synthesis, we shall explore briefly the economic thought of a few early‐medieval Arab‐Islamic scholastics who extended that heritage and wrote on numerous issues of human concern, including economics. Those discourses took place during what is sometimes called the “golden age” of Islam — a period that coincided roughly with the so‐called Dark Age of Europe. Parenthetically, it might be noted that one of 20th century's most prominent economists, the late Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) had, unfortunately for the continuity and evolution of human intellectual tradition, declared that period as “the Great Gap,” representing “blank centuries,” during which nothing of significance to economics, or for that matter to any field, was said or written anywhere — as though there was a complete lacuna over intellectual evolution throughout the rest of the world (Schumpeter, 52, 74; see Ghazanfar, 1991). And finally, we will provide some evidence as to the historically influential linkages of the Arab‐Islamic thought, including economic thought, with the Latin‐European scholastics‐a phenomenon that facilitated the European intellectual evolution. An underlying theme of this paper is predicated on the premise that the classical tradition (i.e., Greek knowledge, though not exclusively) is part of a long historical continuum that represents the inextricably linked Judeo‐Christian‐and‐Islamic tradition of the West. This theme, though not common appreciated, is amply corroborated through the writings of well‐known scholars from the East and the West (see, for example, Durant, Haskins, Myers, O'Leary, Said, Sarton, Sharif, and others).

The practices of sustainable and responsible investment (SRI) among Islamic financial institutions (IFIs) nowadays still rely on the existing environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. However, based on observation, some of the existing criteria listed by the reports of certain authorities and organizations do not seem to be aligned with Shariah principles. Therefore, this study aims to investigate those criteria to help develop Islamic-SRI (i-SRI) criteria based on the ESG concept.

This study adopted the qualitative method via content analysis of documents and interviews with experts.

Based on the analysis, a set of i-SRI criteria is developed based on the ESG concept, of which 33 elements are environmental, 50 elements are social and 26 elements are governance issues. Overall, this study finds that there is no obvious contradiction with the Islamic philosophy in the existing ESG criteria, with the exception of four criteria, i.e. promoting human rights, freedom of expression, freedom of censorship and freedom of association under social criteria. These four existing criteria are not aligned with Islamic teaching and not appropriate with Islamic ESG criteria.

The creation of Islamic ESG criteria can assist relevant authorities to improve the current ESG criteria and to embed an Islamic perspective within it.

This study developed a set of i-SRI criteria, which may be suitable as a source of reference to relevant parties.

The purpose of this paper is to establish that financial crimes are unlawful (haram) in Islam and accordingly, the responsibilities of the Sharia's Supervisory Boards of Islamic financial institutions include the prevention and control of financial crimes.

The paper presents an analogy (qiyas) of the injunctions in the Qur'an and Sunna.

Financial crimes are prohibited in Islam as much as, if not more than, their prohibition by temporal laws.

The responsibilities of the Shari'a Supervisory Boards in ensuring “Shari'a‐compliance” on the part of the Islamic financial institutions include a wider ambit. It includes the prevention and control of financial crimes.

The paper provides additional dimension to Sharia's governance framework for the Islamic financial services industry.