Given Gabriel Baer's 1962 study “Submissiveness and Revolt of the Fellah,” there should be no more talk of the political passivity of Egyptian peasants and their rural neighbors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Baer demonstrates that rural uprisings were frequent and widespread during the years just before and on into the regime of Muhammad Ali Pasha. Furthermore, he describes three series of provincial rebellions which were significantly larger and better organized than any that preceded them. These three series of rebellions, which are associated with the village of as-Salimiyyah between Qina and Farshut in 1820–1821, with that of al-Ba'irat opposite Luqsur in 1822–1823, and with virtually the whole of Qina province in 1824, illustrate both that a very large number of people in this region would actively support an antigovernment leader during the 1820s and that these people were willing and able to establish effective and legitimate governmental institutions of their own on a local level.

Little is known about the twelfth-century poet called Qasmūna the Jewess. She was one of a constellation of Arabic-writing women poets of medieval Spain, and is the sole representative of her faith from whom we have surviving verses. These are collected in the fifteenth-century anthology of women's verse compiled by as-Suyūtu, who drew upon the Nafh at-tub of al-Maqqaru. The sketchy biographical data that as-Suyūtu records show Qasmūna as a witty and intelligent young woman who received an excellent education from a doting father named Ismā'il ibn Ba@dālah. Indeed, the first of the three poetic texts we have from her is the product of a collaboration between Qasmūna and her father. In addition, she was endowed with great physical beauty, as becomes apparent in her poetry.

This paper examines the relatively neglected rural history of Syria. It concentrates on the Hauran, a dry-farming region of hills and plains south of the Damascene oasis between the northern Jordan's tributaries and the eastern desert. Although the Hauran is today no longer a region of primary economic importance to Syria as it once was, it is of historical interest because it was the very first of greater Syria's outlying rural zones to be integrated into the developing modern Middle Eastern economy.

The Hauran is, moreover, of comparative interest because it held a position in Syria's political economy then which bears many resemblances to the positions held by younger hinterland regions now. The parallels between the situation of the Hauran then and the Syrian north and northeast now, for example, are indeed many.

Students of Islamic history more or less agree that the Fātimid regime conducted what may be loosely termed a liberal economic policy, and that the rulers of tenth- to twelfth-century Egypt intervened in the Egyptian economy to a minimal degree. Goitein, maintaining that the Fātimid period “was one of relative tolerance and liberalism, if compared with the preceding and, in particular, the following periods,” also stresses the x201C;comparatively little interference by the [Fātimid] governments in the trade of their subjects.” Ashtor tells us that “a striking feature of the Fātimid regime was freedom of enterprise,” and that “ all sectors of economic life were free — crafts, industry and trade.” Staffa asserts that “the [Fātimid] government made no attempt to impose strict control over the economy.” It may be suspected that the notion of Fātimid “liberalism,” as opposed, say, to Ayyūbid or Mamluk “conservatism,” had helped some decades ago to mole the thesis (now generally discarded) that the origins of guilds and professional organizations in the Islamic Near East are to be sought in the Fātmid state.

In order to gain a proper historical perspective on opium production in Turkey, it is necessary to look into its worldwide impact during the first half of the nineteenth century. During this time, opium production and trade in both India and Turkey grew rapidly and international trade in opium acquired great significance in shaping England's commercial and political relations with the Levant and the Far East for over a century.

Reflecting the political climate and preoccupations of the time, structural examinations of international politics in the 1950s and early 1960s tended to focus on East-West interaction patterns and associated questions of global polarity and polarization. A major exception to this statement has been provided by an eclectic group of regional subsystem analyses which were, at least initially, intended to counteract the distortions perceived to be associated with an exclusively global, bipolar perspective.