One major trajectory of early 'aql traditions is scrutinized: the Aqbil! Adbir! creation narrative "lamma khalaqa llahu l-'aqla (When god had created the intelligence ...)". In Part I early Sunni and Shii transmission and reception of the varying texts dominates the discussion, with analysis of chief motifs. Then successive transformations are traced, with attention devoted to ideas of 'first creation'. The original context of the Aqbil! reports is convincingly explained within the thought forms of 1st & 2nd century theological ideas of voluntarism or predestination, without recourse to Goldziher's "new-Platonic element". The late neo-Platonising form "awwalu ma khalaqa llahu l-'aqlu, (The first (thing) God created is the intellect ...)", is shown to be not earlier than the mid-3rd/9th century. / In a related class of narratives, 'aql pre-exists in the realm of the divine Throne. The focus is the notion of the divinely provisioned innate trait of 'intelligence' or 'wisdom' as a "light in the heart" inequitably apportioned among humanity. Part II examines the creative manner in which the sixth Shi'iimam Ja'far al-Sadiq (d.148/765) transforms the Aqbil! tradition by integrating this heavenly sapiential 'aql with the 'Adam-Iblis' conflict into a binary listing of the character traits (akhlaq, khisal). His myth of the creation, empowerment, and opposition between 'aql and jahl (intelligence & ignorance, or wisdom & folly) propounds a psycho-ethical scheme for the inner purgative struggle, wherein 'aql operates as chief of the character traits, Ja'far stresses the cognitive function (ma'rifah) in the perfection of 'aql peculiar to the inner circles of humanity (prophets, saints$ $ Imams, the faithful). An assessment is given of the repercussions of al-Sadiq's contribution for continuing Shii and Sufi enrichments of the 'aql creation narratives (eg. with al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi).

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The present thesis examines Shafi'i's theory of naskh and its influence on the 'ulum al-Qur'an. The thesis looks at two types of sources: internal and external. Internally, the discussion focuses on the origins of naskh, the background and construction of Shafi'i's theory of naskh, tracing the ingredients of Shafi'i's thought in general and of his theory of naskh in particular. Having established Shafi'i's theory of naskh, the thesis goes on to examine it externally by considering Shafi'i's influence on six authors of naskh books (Naḣḣas's al-Nasikh wa al-Mansukh, Makki's al-Idḍaḥ, Ibn al-Jawzi's Nawasikh al-Qur'an, Shu'lah's Ṣafwat al-Rasikh, Ibn al-'Ata'iqi's al-Nasikh wa al-Mansukh) and his impact on the exegesis of eight Qur'anic verses -Q. 2: 106, Q. 22: 52, Q. 45: 29, Q. 7: 154, Q. 16: 101, Q. 13: 39, Q. 4: 160, and Q. 3: 7, discussed by six authors of tafsir (Ṭabari's Jami' al-Bayan, Jaṣṣaṣ's Aḥkam al-Qur'an, Zamakhshari's al-Kashshaf , Ibn al-Jawzi's Zad al-Masir, Qurṭubi's al-Jami' li Aḥkam al-Qur'an, and Suyuṭi's al-Durr al-Manthur). / This thesis argues that despite its marginality in Shafi'i own time and throughout the ninth century in general, his theory of naskh played a significant role in the process of elaborating and systematizing the conceptual discourse on naskh in Qur'anic studies. Support for this assertion is found in the direct quotation of Shafi'i's view by the authors discussed herein, as well as by inference through a comparative analysis of their opinion. Nevertheless, this influence was not carried over into the domain of exegesis.

Questa tesi comprende la ricerca sui materiali provenienti dagli scavi britannici, avvenuti fra il 1911 e il 1920, del sito di Karkemish (Gaziantep - Turchia). Vengono qui studiati gli oggetti (a eccezione delle sculture) databili all’Età del Bronzo e del Ferro, che sono nella quasi totalità inediti. Si sono prese in considerazione i reperti attualmente conservati al British Museum di Londra, nei Musei Archeologici di Istanbul e al Museo delle Civiltà Anatoliche di Ankara. / The dissertation includes the archaeological material from the British excavation, carried out between 1911 and 1920, at Karkemish (Gaziantep – Turkey). The thesis deals with research undertaken at the British Museum, Archaeological Museum at Istanbul and the Museum of Anatolian Civilization at Ankara. The small object (excluding the sculpture) dating Bronze and Iron Age.

This thesis studies an inventory-location problem faced by a large manufacturer and supplier of small to medium sized aircraft and their spare parts. The sale of after market spare parts is a major source of revenue for the company, but it is a complex industry with many unique challenges. The original problem is a multi-echelon network design problem, which is decomposed into a facility location problem with consolidated shipping challenges, and a spare parts inventory problem. The facility location problem is solved a number of times under different scenarios to give the company's leadership team access to a wide range of feasible solutions. The model itself is an important contribution to industry, allowing the company to solve a spare parts network problem that will guide strategic decision-making for years. The chapter serves as case-study on how to accurately model a large and complicated service parts supply chain through the use of mathematical programming, part aggregation and scenarios. The company used the scenario results to redesign its spare parts distribution network, opening new hubs and consolidating existing service centres. The costs savings associated with this project are estimated to be $4.4 Million USD annually. The proposed solution does increase the burden of customer freight charges on the company's customers compared to the current network, but the operational savings are expected to more than outweigh the increase in customer shipments costs. The project team thus recommended that the company consider subsidizing customer freight costs to offset the expected cost increase the customers face, resulting in lower costs for both the company and their customers. This solution could set a new standard for aircraft spare parts suppliers to follow. Considered next is an integrated inventory-location problem with service requirements based on the first problem. Customer demand is Poisson distributed and the service levels are time-based, leading to highly non-linear, stochastic service constraints and a nonlinear, mixed-integer optimization problem. Unlike previous works in the literature that propose approximations for the nonlinear constraints, this thesis presents an exact solution methodology using logic-based Benders decomposition. The problem is decomposed to separate the location decisions in the master problem from the inventory decisions in the subproblem. A new family of valid cuts is proposed and the algorithm is shown to converge to optimality. This is the first attempt to solve this type of problem exactly. Then, this thesis presents a new restrict-and-decompose scheme to further decompose the Benders master problem by part. The approach is tested on industry instances as well as random instances. The second algorithm is able to solve industry instances with up to 60 parts within two hours of computation time, while the maximum number of parts attempted in the literature is currently five. Finally, this thesis studies a second integrated inventory-location problem under different assumptions. While the previous model uses the backorder assumption for unfilled demand and a strict time window, the third model uses the lost-sales assumption and a soft time window for satisfying time sensitive customer demand. The restrict-and-decompose scheme is applied with little modification, the main difference being the calculation of the Benders cut coefficients. The algorithm is again guaranteed to converge to optimality. The results are compared against previous work under the same assumptions. The results deliver better solutions and certificates of optimality to a large set of test problems.

Background The development of serological tests for the diagnosis of coeliac disease, including tests for endomysial and tissue transglutaminase antibodies, has made population screening for coeliac disease a realistic possibility. Several serological screening studies from European countries have shown that as many as 1% of the general population may have undetected coeliac disease. The implications of this diagnosis are unclear since the only data on the morbidity and physiological characteristics associated with previously undetected disease come from small, selected, case series. Most adult screening studies in the general population have identified only small numbers (i.e. less than 20 cases) of previously undetected cases and have therefore been unable to examine these issues through lack of statistical power. Clinically diagnosed coeliac disease has traditionally been linked with a variety of adverse co-morbid conditions including osteoporosis, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and an increased mortality in general. These conditions are thought to be partly a consequence of the altered nutritional status associated with the malabsorption that occurs with villous atrophy of the small bowel in coeliac disease. Although some of the adverse effects of, for example, vitamin and calcium deficiencies in coeliac disease have previously been explored whether there may be potentially beneficial effects of mild malabsorption have not. There are two main aspects in this thesis. The first is to estimate the prevalence of undetected coeliac disease in England and explore the important physiologic correlates of this condition. The second is to examine the risk of fracture, vascular disease, malignancy and mortality in people with diagnosed coeliac disease compared to the general population. Objectives 1. To estimate the seroprevalence of undetected coeliac disease in England. 2. To explore the relationship between undetected coeliac disease and various socio-demographic characteristics and physiological measures. 3. To quantify the impact of diagnosed coeliac disease (compared to the general population) on the risk of: a. Fracture b. Vascular disease (hypertension, high cholesterol, atrial fibrillation, myocardial infarction and stroke) c. Malignancy and mortality Methods To examine objectives 1 and 2 I utilised the Cambridge General Practice Health Study. This study identified individuals aged 45-76 registered with 12 general practices and invited them to complete a health survey, have a bone density measurement and submit a blood sample between 1990 and 1995. Serum samples from 7550 participants were tested for antiendomysial antibody (EMA). Seroprevalence of undetected coeliac disease was defined by EMA positivity. Differences between EMA positive and negative participants of various physiological measures and reported characteristics were estimated using multivariate logistic and linear regression and adjusted for age, gender, social class and smoking behaviour. To examine objective 3 I performed a population based cohort study using the General Practice Research Database to quantify the risk of fracture, vascular disease, malignancy and mortality in people with coeliac disease compared to the general population. I identified 4732 people with coeliac disease and 23620 age and sex matched control subjects. I used Cox regression to estimate hazard ratios for fracture, myocardial infarction, stroke, malignancy and mortality, and conditional logistic regression to estimate the risk of diagnosed hypertension, hypercholesterolaemia and atrial fibrillation, in people with coeliac disease compared to the general population. Findings The studies show that undetected coeliac disease is likely to affect about 1% of the population of England aged 45-76, a figure similar to several other countries. Those affected more commonly reported “good or excellent health”, however they do have an increased risk of osteoporosis and mild anaemia. In contrast they have a favourable cardiovascular risk profile including lower serum cholesterol and blood pressure. In people with clinically diagnosed coeliac disease, compared to the general population, there were small increases in both the absolute and relative overall fracture incidence with a 2-fold increase in the risk of hip fracture. Adults with treated coeliac disease did have a favourable vascular disease risk factor profile but numbers having heart attacks or strokes were modest and rates of heart attack and stroke were not reduced. There were modest increases in the overall risks of malignancy and mortality in people with coeliac disease and most of this excess risk occurred in the first year of follow up after diagnosis, suggesting ascertainment bias. I found a marked reduction in the risk of breast and lung cancer in people with coeliac disease and the mechanism of this merits further attention as it may provide insight into the aetiology of these common malignancies. Conclusions I found that approximately 1% of general adult population of the UK has undetected coeliac disease. The findings suggest that although coeliac disease is associated with some adverse conditions; it may also have some beneficial health effects. Please note: This version does not include the copies of journal articles which were included in the original thesis, but just details of the articles.

This thesis deals with logistics of the satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS) surveys. Heuristic techniques, within the field of Operational Research (OR), for hard Combinatorial Optimization Problems (COPs), have been applied to the design of GPS surveying networks. The aim of a COP is to search and determine the most suitable solution for optimizing (minimizing or maximizing) an objective function (cost, accuracy time, distance etc) over a discrete set of feasible solutions. The designing of a GPS network as a COP consists of set of feasible schedules and the goal is to determine the cheapest schedule. When related to GPS, a network can be defined as a set of stations which are co-ordinated by placing receivers on them to determine sessions between them. A session can be defined as a period of time during which two or more receivers are simultaneously recording satellite signals. The required minimum number of receivers is two, and the problem of network designing becomes crucial as this number increases. The problem addressed is to search for the best order in which these sessions can be organised to give the best schedule (minimal cost) to complete all sessions. In practice this means determining how each GPS receiver should be moved between the stations to be surveyed in an efficient manner taking into consideration some important factors such as time, cost etc. Exact methods can solve only small networks and are not practical as the size of the network increases. Hence, it is important to have approximate techniques (heuristic techniques) which can provide an optimal or near-optimal schedule for large networks in a reasonable amount of computational time. In this thesis, new techniques of research based on effective computer based heuristic optimization techniques for the above mentioned problem have been researched, designed, developed, implemented and analysed theoretically and empirically. These heuristics, which are based on ideas from Artificial Intelligence (AI), are the most recent and powerful development techniques applicable to a wide range of important problems which occur in a variety of disciplines, such as, statistics, engineering, mathematical programming and operational research. A heuristic technique starts with an initial starting solution (within this context, an initial schedule). It iteratively attempts to improve upon the current schedule by a series of local improving changes (swapping sessions) generated by a suitably defined mechanism until a stopping criterion is met. The heuristics that have been implemented in this research are Local Descent Search(LDS), Simulated Annealing (SA) and Tabu Search (TS). The LDS method accepts only a schedule that generates a reduction in the objective function value. On the other hand, both SA and TS techniques combine different operational and organizational strategies based on robustness and computer models in order to obtain high-quality schedules. Computational results for several case studies are presented for these techniques. Within the GPS surveying and OR literature, this is the first attempt of its kind to have been carried out. The main contribution of this thesis is the development of the above heuristics for solving the GPS network logistics design problem. Their performance was investigated, evaluated and compared with networks with known optimal schedule with respect to schedule quality and the computational effort. The new concept of a sessions-interchange mechanism was developed and implemented. To assist in the evaluation, tests were carried out using two large and different types of networks observed in Malta and the Seychelles. For both networks, the developed SA and TS techniques yielded high-quality schedules than those actually observed. The main limitation with the SA method is the amount of computational time required. This is considerably improved by the use of the sequential sessions structure. The use of a new cooling optimization scheme is developed and implemented to remedy the most time consuming part of process, but the design of a network still needs higher computation times. It is concluded that the SA approach of finding the cheapest schedule for large networks is time consuming. The superiority of TS has been proven both with respect to the GPS schedule quality and computational effort on large GPS networks. For the GPS surveyor, it has been shown that the techniques developed can reduce significantly the cost of carrying out a GPS survey. As these techniques have both theoretical and practical interest, not only the best results have been reported, but some variants of these techniques have been proposed. This provides a strong motivation and fertile opportunity for innovation in adapting heuristics for solving other practical surveying optimization problems where feasibility and good solutions are difficult to obtain.

The De miseria humane conditionis (1191--1195) by Lotario di Segni (Pope Innocent III) was a greatly influential text in medieval culture, and was translated and reworked in many European languages. Early translations of the work, however, have been usually overlooked by scholars. This is true in particular of Della miseria dell'uomo, composed in the second half of the 13th century by the Florentine judge Bono Giamboni. / My thesis consists in an extensive comparison of Bono's Della miseria dell'uomo with Lotario's De miseria humane conditionis. My purpose is twofold: to detect the differences between the two texts; and to understand how the two texts correspond to two completely different historical contexts. How the spirit of Lotario's text was transformed a century later into Bono's work? Bono's Della miseria reveals some crucial dimensions of the mentality and sensitivity of the communal age. It transforms Lotario's discouraging analysis of earthly life into a moral treaty conceived according to a more realistic and serene mentality. Bono feels compelled to console those who are burdened by the tribulations of life; to encourage sinners to humble themselves and repent; and to give hope to men of good will in order that they become better persons. He thus conveys a positive vision of life. It is not by chance that the last part of Bono's treaty deals with paradise.

In the Islamic tradition, as in other religious traditions, female saints are relatively few and not much scholarly attention has been given to them. Fatimah, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, is one such example. It is, however, a point of interest in her case is that in the twentieth century she has captured the attention of writers of Muslim religious literature to such an extent that there now exist at least eleven fairly recent biographies of her in Urdu, English, Arabic and Persian. This is remarkable, given that the earliest sources of Islamic history contain only a minimal amount of information on her. These modern biographies present Fatimah in a manner which interweaves historical information with hagiographic accounts, thus reinforcing her status as a saint. / This thesis attempts to identify, from the earliest available sources, the details concerning Fatimah as a historical person but ultimately shows that there is little real evidence for her life and even what facts do exist are the subject of controversy. Following this it examines the growth of the hagiographical tradition which created out of her a true Muslim saint and discusses its significance particularly for the Shi'ah. Finally, the conclusion presents some of the possible reasons for Fatimah's exalted status and for the resurgence of interest in her in the context of the modern Islamic world.

Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi'i (d. 204 H.), the subject of the present thesis, was a Muslim legist who played a central role in the development of Islamic law. He wrote the first treatise on jurisprudence in Islam, a work in which he discusses the nature and sources of Islamic law and develops a legal methodology designed to interpret those sources. Al-Shafi'is legal theory is based on two principles: an insistence on following the scripture and traditions and a restriction on the use of reason. Furthermore, al-Shafi'i established the hierarchy of the four sources of law: the Qur'an, Sunnah, ijma' and qiyas. / In the centuries that followed, al-Shafi'is legal theory was to have a great influence. The Hanbali and the Zahiri schools of law arose in an environment that was considerably influenced by al-Shafi'i and his followers. The founders of these two schools strictly followed revelation and restricted the use of reason: Dawud al-Z ahiri even refused to consider qiyas as one of the sources of law. Although not all aspects of al-Shafi'is theory gained acceptance among later scholars, these scholars nevertheless owe much to al-Shafi'i for his efforts at systematizing the method of deriving law.