Essays presented are adapted papers read at the 7th Nordic New Testament Conference in Stavanger, Norway, June 14-18, 2003.

The fourteen studies included in this volume have been chosen to serve several purposes simultaneously. At a basic level, they aim to provide a general - if not wholly systematic - coverage of the emergence and evolution of law during the first three and a half centuries of Islam. On another level, they reflect the different and, at times, widely divergent scholarly approaches to this subject matter. These two levels combined will offer a useful account of the rise of Islamic law not only for students in this field but also for Islamicists who are not specialists in matters of law, comparative legal historians, and others. At the same time, however, and as the Introduction to the work argues, this collection of distinguished contributions illustrates both the achievements and the shortcomings of paradigmatic scholarship on the formative period of Islamic law.

Today, it is difficult to imagine all spheres of human activity without personal computers, solid-state electronic devices, micro- and nanoelectronics, photoconverters, and mobile communication devices. The basic material of modern electronics and for all of these industries is semiconductor silicon. Its properties and applications are determined by defects in its crystal structure. However, until now, there has been no complete and reliable description of the creation and transformation of such a defective structure. This book solves this mystery through two different approaches to semiconductor silicon: the classical and the probabilistic. This book brings together, for the first time, all existing experimental and theoretical information on the internal structure of semiconductor silicon. It will appeal to a wide range of readers, from materials scientists and practical engineers to students.