FOREWORD

Abstract

By the grace of Allah, it is a great pleasure to introduce this issue of The International Journal on Islamic Applications in Computer Science and Technology

The success and the welcome of this Journal by researchers from many countries, gave us great encouragement for continuing issuing in the due time.

This Journal is aimed at publishing original research papers in the field of Islamic Applications in computer science and technology. This field is catching a momentum in the recent years. As a Journal interested in this field, it is the first International Journal of its specific field. As research is growing in this field, we hope that this Journal will be a platform for researchers working in the field to publish their research.

This issue contains two papers. The first one is entitled of A Siamese Transformer-based Architecture for Detecting Semantic Similarity in the Quran. This paper focuses on the semantic similarity in the Quran. A Siamese transformer-based architecture for pairwise semantic similarity detection in the Quran is proposed. Arabic pre-trained contextual representations is exploited to derive semantically meaningful verse embeddings. Then the twin transformers networks is tuned on a semantic similarity dataset drawn from the Quran. It is shown that the model improves the Quranic semantic similarity measures and performance over previous studies is indicated.

The second paper is entitled of The Landscape of Islamic Computing: A Systematic Mapping Study Focused on the Holy Quran, the Hadith, and the Pillars of Islam. The objective of this mapping study is to provide an overview of the landscape of Islamic computing. It aims to review and summarize published literature in the area with a focus on Islamic pillars and sources of legislation. A total of 228 research papers published during the period from 2015 till 2020 have been reviewed. The results of this study provide findings regarding how technology is used to support sources of legislation, the Quran and the Hadith and the Islamic pillars. It also sheds light on popular research methods in Islamic computing and the technologies used.  The results also show how Islamic computing research is distributed among different subject areas, and what classification for the studies exist. In addition, this study has also been useful in identifying research gaps in the field of Islamic computing in general and key areas where further investigation should be performed. Finally, the study concludes with recommendations for the community of researchers in the field of Islamic Computing.