This paper is the result of fieldwork carried out in Kalardasht, a mountainous region of the Caspian provinces. It has two interrelated purposes. First, it is offered as a contribution to the economic ethnography of Iran. Second, it examines the process of continuity and change in the economic structure of rural Iran. Changes in rural communities as a result of transitions in the broader society have attracted much attention in recent years. Here, a number of such economic changes are documented and analyzed for Kalardasht from 1977 to 1985.

The role of the ulama in Iranian politics during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been studied extensively. Particularly the rise of the ulama's social influence and power in the Tobacco Movement (1891–1892) and the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911 has been investigated at length. Much less attention has been devoted to examining the relationship between the ulama and the state after the Constitutional Revolution, and the role of the religious community in Reza Khan's assumption of power and his subsequent accession to the throne in 1925.

The Sudan came to know of Communism directly during the 1940s, through Egypt and Herbert Storey. Egyptian Communism had passed through two phases. The first phase was in the 1920s when, under Joseph Rosenthal and his Alexandria Group, it appeared first as a socialist movement and then as a Communist one proper. During this phase it made some impact on some of the Egyptian intelligentsia, a few trade unions, and a small number of workers. It also tried, though unsuccessfully, to join the Comintern so as to act as its official representative in this part of the world, thereby assuming for itself the role that organization had already entrusted to the Communist parties of the European colonial countries. However, the efforts of Egyptian Communism during this first stage received a mortal blow in the mid-1920s at the hands of Saʿd Zaghlūl, the leader of the Wafd party, when he began to see in the activities of the Communists a serious challenge to the hegemony of the Wafd in Egyptian politics.

The sharifs of Hasanid descent, commonly referred to as the Banū Hasan, who ruled Mecca and its dependencies from the middle of the fourth century A.H./tenth century A.D. until the early twentieth century, can be divided into three major dynastic branches, each of which bears the name of the first of its members to attain the office of emir of Mecca. Thus, the first dynasty of the Hasanid sharifs of Mecca, known as the Jaʿfarids, was founded by Jaʿfar b. Muhammad b. al-Husayn al-Amīr, a descendant in the ninth generation of al-Hasan b. ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, in about the year 357/968, shortly before the conquest of Egypt for the Fatimids of North Africa by their general, Jawhar, in 358/969. Control of Mecca remained in the hands of the Jaʿfarids until the last representative of the line, Shukr b. Abī'l-Futūḥ, died without leaving a male heir in 453/ 1061.

At the time of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt—the conventional starting point of modern Middle Eastern history—central governments in the Arab world had long been exceedingly weak. The situation began to change after 1800: At an early stage, Egypt was brought under firm control, and toward the end of the century the Ottoman regime began to tighten its grip on its Arab subjects. In some places, however —the Arabian peninsula, for instance, or Morocco—it is only within living memory that the authorities have acquired the kind of power over their territories that a modern state is expected to have.