Journals:
IASC has been organized centering around the "Islamic Public Administration" course that has been offered at the University of Chittagong since 1992. Recent developments in public administration and challenges of the new millennium posed two fundamental problems in the study of public administration in modern times: i) how to educate and train people for meaningful participation in public management in order to ensure efficiency, public service, justice and responsiveness; and ii) how to choose an appropriate philosophical guide for public bureaucracy? In this case, Islam as a world-view of public bureaucracy, is unique in the sense that it emphasizes on the moral development of public officials alongside its almost equally important concern for efficiency, effectiveness and economy. This uniqueness of Islam, has in recent years, started drawing the attention of administrative thinkers both in the East and the West. As corollary to this, experience and findings of the researches have confirmed that the nature and performance of public administration of a particular country, is greatly shaped by the culture and environment of that society. Any model of administration or management to be successful in a societal development must, therefore, be relevant to the belief, culture and value system of that society. Countries of the developing world, specially the Muslim nations, have started realizing that Western models of political, economic and administrative development have so far failed to deliver the desire goods ,because among others, of their lack of cultural relevance. Islam, the only chosen religion of Allah(STA), demands that the Muslims (those who have surrendered themselves to the authority of Allah and the leadership of His Prophet (SM) shall be governed according to the laws of the Qur'an, the Sunnah and the rules of equity and justice. In this respect, it is the responsibility of the Muslim scholars to design and present appropriate models of administration and development drawn primarily from Islamic sources which can be more relevant to the socio-cultural settings of the developing societies inhabited by the Muslims and the non-Muslim population alike. In keeping with this spirit, the Department of Public Administration of the University of Chittagong, has initiated a course on "Islamic Public Administration" at its Master's program from 1991-'92 academic session. With the intention of generating necessary literature on Islamic Administration and making them easily available to the students, the publication of the Journal of Islamic Administration (JIA) has been initiated incorporating articles relevant to the course content of the subject. So far, five volumes of the JIA and a book on Ombudsman in Bangladesh (in Bengali) have been published accommodating more than forty articles, book reviews and commentaries written by Islamic scholars both from home and abroad. These articles have been deliberately selected (some are reprinted with permission) in view of the course content. By this time, the course on "Islamic Public Administration" has been introduced in various other public and private universities of Bangladesh. Consequently, the horizon of the IASC (Islamic Administration Study Center) has also been expanded as an inter-university study forum of Islamic thinkers and scholars.