We were commissioned by the editors of the series in which this volume appears to produce a manuscript on the politics of economic development in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). In fact we have written a book that seeks to describe and explain the responses of that region to the threats and opportunities posed by economic globalization, the driving force of change not only for these, but for virtually all economies in the developing, not to say developed, world. We have sought to avoid the normative debate over the phenomenon. We have also not speculated on the possible consequences for the MENA of increasing criticism of and resistance to globalization and its standard bearers. We have assumed that at least for the foreseeable future this criticism and resistance are unlikely to fundamentally alter the course or momentum of economic globalization, whatever its consequences for the rhetoric and actions of such standard bearers as the IMF and World Bank.

We are convinced that globalization should be the starting point for understanding economic change in the region. It is the primary thesis against which all countries of the region are struggling to form responses. The widely perceived analogy, at least in the MENA, between today's globalization and yesterday's colonialism provides an analytical framework with which to understand not only the region's response as a whole to ‘awlama (the newly coined Arabic term for globalization), but also the strategies employed by individual countries and particular social forces within them. Similar to the colonial dialectic which pitted the region's traditional, radical, and revolutionary nationalists against imperialism, the “globalization dialectic” is now generating three distinct stances contending with what is simultaneously a threat and an opportunity, both politically and economically. Aspiring globalizers contend with reactive moralizers in search of new syntheses that might promote the needed reforms in the name of the authentic Islam.