In the past two decades, the rate of growth of agricultural output in Egypt has been quite low and, in particular, has fallen behind the country's population growth rate. Most observers seem to agree that despite certain natural constraints, such as limitation of arable land, the sector's performance could have been much better if the Egyptian government had chosen to pursue more supportive policies toward agriculture. There is, however, much less agreement over the specific policies that have been most responsible for the sector's past stagnation. Several recent studies have emphasized the role of price policies, pointing out that the government has taxed agriculture heavily by keeping the relative prices of most major crops quite low. Others, on the other hand, have held the government's investment policies responsible, arguing that the sector's resources have remained undeveloped because of insufficient public investment in research, extension, and infrastructure. While the debate over the relative importance of these sets of policies has generated a number of valuable contributions to the understanding of Egyptian agriculture, the past analyses of the sector's production system have not sufficed to settle the differences. One of the main problems is that, so far, most studies have concentrated on outputs and prices of individual crops and have thus failed to provide comprehensive analyses of the sector as a whole.

Writer's block is not a new concept, but I should like to consider it in a new context: the realm of the young and rapidly developing Francophone literature of the Maghreb. I am suggesting that the writer's malaise before the blank page is a sign of a highly developed authorial relationship with one's language and materials and that the recent increase in the number of (1) testimonials in which Maghrebian writers bear witness to their sense of impotence when facing the purity of the white page and (2) reactions symptomatic of that frustration is evidence of development in the literature in question.

At the end of the 1950s Khi¯lid Muhammad Khālid, whose importance for the history of modern Islamic thought and sentiment can hardly be overestimated, propagated the rather preposterous thesis that the terms “tyrant” (derived from Greek lyrannos) and “Türān,” the customary (Persian) word used for the homeland of the Turks, were etymologically and, as a corollary, also semantically akin. What was so irritating about this anti-Turkish libel was not so much its insipidity as the reaction or, more to the point, absence of a reaction to such and similar statements in the Arab public. The lonely voices of historians such as Salālh al-Dīn al-Munajjid and Abdallah Laroui, who from very different ideological vantage points chided their Arab audience in the late 1960s for foolishly blaming all their troubles on the Turks, remained unheeded for a very long time.

Zionist historiography of the Mandatory period accords a considerable place to the problem of land purchase and colonization. In the early 1930s, the Zionists feared that Britain would put restrictions on land purchase and that great difficulties would ensue from ordinances designed to protect the tenantcultivators in the event of eviction. The historian's eye has also been caught by the ambivalent position of the Arab national leadership which, while publicly demanding an end to Zionist expansion, privately continued to sell land to the Jews. But the literature hardly deals with the tenants themselves—the human center of the land debates and the subjects of considerable social interest in themselves.

This paper is a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Islamic ideology and female employment in Iran today. I examine the Islamic regime's ideology regarding women's roles (as well as the inconsistencies within it) and contrast it with women's employment patterns. I also compare the employment patterns today with those before the Revolution. The paper shows that much of the initial rhetoric discouraging female employment and attempting to impose an ideology of domesticity has not been successful. Although labor participation rates have declined for women, they have declined even more for men. The female share of the urban labor force has not altered, and government employment for women is actually higher today than it was before the Revolution. This paper suggests a discrepancy between ideological prescriptions and economic imperatives.