Why This Course?

It would surprising for most of people to see the title of this website i.e. Intro Stat for Muslims. We are made to believe that Statistics is only interpretation of the facts revealed by the data without any role of personal judgments or opinions. If this was true that it would not be appropriate to categorize statistics as Islamic or un-Islamic. However in fact none of valuable information can be extracted from the data without invoking personal judgment or opinion. For example, suppose you are being asked to produce single point summary of a given data set; should it be simple average, median, mode, trimmed mean or something else? The answer depends on your personal opinion. When you go to more complex statistical problems, you will see more deep involvement of personal opinions in selecting appropriate statistical summary of any phenomenon. While making a model for consumption income relationship, should you use GDP, GNP, GNI, NNI or something else as an appropriate measure of income? Should you use log-log for or semi log form, or linear form or some exponential form of model? What type of time series model is more appropriate, ARDL, VAR, VARMA, BVAR or some non-linear model? All these decisions involve your personal judgments. Once we realize that opinions do involve in statistical decision making, Islam provides best guide to shape the opinions properly.

In fact numbers are used aggressively by our Western Economists and Philosophers to dictate the economic and other policies. Muslims who think that Statistics is just the facts and logical arguments tend to accept dictations without any hesitation because they think that West is superior to them in use of statistical sciences, and what they are saying must be true. This tradition goes against the interests of Islam and Muslims.

The objective of this course is to learn the tools of statistics as well as to understand how conflicting results can be produced from the same data sets, what are implications of those results and what are most appropriate statistical for any particular data set.