The Middle East, as a geographical term, is generally used today to cover the area stretching from Morocco through Afghanistan, and is roughly equivalent to the area of the first wave of Muslim conquests plus Anatolia. It is a predominantly Muslim area with widespread semi-arid and desert conditions where agriculture is heavily dependent on irrigation and pastoral nomadism has been prevalent. With the twentieth-century rise of exclusive linguistic nationalisms, which have taken over many of the emotional overtones formerly concentrated on religious loyalties, it becomes increasingly doubtful that the Middle East is now much more than a geographical expression – covering an area whose inhabitants respond to very different loyalties and values. In Turkey since the days of Atatürk, the ruling and educated élites have gone out of their way to express their identification with Europe and the West and to turn their backs on their traditional Islamic heritage. A glorification of the ‘modern’ and populist elements in the ancient Turkish and Ottoman past has gone along with a downgrading of Arab and Persian cultural influences–indeed the latter are often seen as having corrupted the pure Turkish essence, which only re-emerged with Atatürk’s swepping cultural reforms. Similarly the Iranians are increasingly emulating the technocratic and rationalizing values of the capitalist West, and in the cultural sphere identify with the glorious civilization of pre-Islamic Iran. This identification goes along with a downgrading of Islam and particularly of the Arabs, which has characterized both radical nationalists like the late nineteenth-century Mîrzâ Âqâ Khân Kirmânî and the twentieth-century Ahmad Kasravâ1 and more conservative official nationalists such as the Pahlavi Shahs and their followers. The recent celebrations of the 2500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy, for example, were notable for their virtual exclusion of the Muslim ulama, though religious leaders of other religious were invited, and their lack of specifically Islamic references. In both Iran and Turkey, traditional Islam has become largely a class phenomenon, with the traditional religion followed by a majority of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie, but rejected or radically modified by the more educated classes. With the continued spread of Western-style secular education it may be expected that the numbers of people identifying with nationalism and with the West (or with the Communist rather than the Islamic East) will grow.

In the early 1590s an obscure chieftain of the Druze district of the Shûf, in the mountain hinterland of Sidon, was appointed multazim (tax farmer) of the whole Druze mountain (the Shûf along with the Gharb, Jurd and Matn, in the hinterland of Beirut) by the Ottoman beylerbeyi (provincial governor) of Damascus. The name of this chieftain was Fakhr al-Dîn ibn Qurqumâs (Turkish Korkmaz), and he belonged to the family of the Ma'ns, who had been hereditary chieftains of the Shûf at least since the fifteenth century1. In time, Fakhr al-Dîn made use of favourable circumstances to extend his dominion over the whole of Mount Lebanon, and also over other parts of the Syrian countryside. In 1633, however, the Ottomans turned against him and crushed him, and a mysterious figure called ‘Alî ‘Alam al-Dîn was appointed to replace him in the paramount chieftainship of the Druze mountain. For over three decades this man, and his sons after him, maintained themselves in power as paramount chieftains of the Druzes, while the Ma‘ns were reduced to their original size as traditional chieftains of the Shûf. Finally, in 1667, Emir Ahmad Ma‘n, a grandnephew of Fakhr al-Dîn’s, was appointed multazim of the Druze districts of the Shûf, Gharb, Jurd and Matn, and of the Maronite district of the Kisrawân, and the Ma‘nid hegemony over the southern Lebanon was thus re-established. When Ahmad Ma‘n died without male progeny in 1697 he was succeeded in his iltizâm, and hence in the hegemony of the southern Lebanon, by the Shihâbs–Sunnite chieftains of Wâdî al-Taym, on the western slopes of Mount Hermon, who were descended from the Druze Ma‘ns in the female line (see Table I). In 1710-11 the ‘Alam al-Dîns, in eclipse since 1667, re-emerged on the political scene to challenge the Shihâb succession; their revolt, however, failed and they were massacred to extermination. The Shihâbs subsequently became the unchallenged masters of the southern Lebanon, and remained so until their downfall in 1841.2

During the past several decades, deliberate attempts to move from a ‘traditional’ to a ‘modern’ form of society have been made in the Republic of Turkey, resulting in rapid change economically, socially, and even politicallyI. The effort to change from a predominantly agrarian economy, and the concomitant increases in urbanization and industrialization, have had a profound effect on several sections of the country and have, to a large extent, created a whole new structure of spatial organization and patterns. Nevertheless, most of Turkey has been only slightly affected by the modernization process, and remains unaltered by the progress of economic and social development. Although economic growth and capital expenditures for development have steadily increased, they have not been uniformly distributed throughout the Republic, resulting in distinct regional disparities and a socio-economic system with many dualisms in its structure2.

The sources for the Bahrî period are particularly rich for four significant problems of Mamluk history: (I) relations between the Mamluks and Mongols, especially as revealed by Mamluks who defected to the ÎlKhâns and Mongols who deserted to the Mamluks;1 (2) the role of Arab tribesmen, in particular the Âl-Fadl of Syria, in the Mamluk polity; (3) the role of the kuttâb in the Mamluk bureaucracy, particularly as exemplified by the infamous al-Nashû (d. A.H. 740/A.D. 1340) in the latter part of the reign of al-Malik al-Nâsir (693–741/1293–1341); (4) the role of the ‘Ulamâ’ in the dynamics of Mamluk politics, as illustrated by the career of Ibn Taymiyya, by all odds the most famous and in many ways the most important single figure in all of Mamluk history, both Bahrî and Circassian.

The Samaritans summarize their basic religious beliefs in five tenets:(1) The Lord is the one and only God and there is none beside him.(2) The only prophet is Moses and no other prophet was or will be beside him.(3) The only Holy Book is the ‘Torah’…(4) …the only Holy place in the world is Mt. Garizim the Blessed Mountain, not Jerusalem…(5) The Day of Judgement of the Lord will be according to the laws of the Old Testament, then every man will be judged and punished for his sins.’

The first President of the Middle East Studies Association and one of its principal founders, Gustave E. von Grunebaum, died of cancer in Los Angeles, California, on 27 February 1972, at the age of sixty-two. Born in Vienna on I September 1909, he belonged to a family well established in the economic and intellectual life of the old Austrian Empire, which was soon to pass into history but not without leaving to some among the younger generation the legacy of an open-minded cosmopolitanism, a wide participation in Europe's multilingual structure, and a keen enjoyment of style and elegance in the material and spiritual pleasures of life. Von Grunebaum was not given to speaking much about himself, and I do not recall that he ever mentioned to me why he chose Oriental studies as his subject at the University of Vienna, nor did I meet him when he, a Ph.D. recipient not yet 22 years old, came for a year of postgraduate study (1932-3) to Berlin where I had just begun my studies. Soon the second collapse of the world that had nurtured him came with the infamous Anschluss of 1938. Because of his clear perception of the new barbarism as completely antithetical to all the values he cherished, he left for the United States to join the Asia Institute in New York, where Arthur Upham Pope (1881-1969) was making an heroic, and greatly successful, effort to give displaced European Orientalists a new start. While his first five years in the United States were not easy, they brought such compensations as sharing in the intellectual atmosphere of a New York so different, yet in certain respects similar, to that of Europe,uninterrupted work in the quiet of the Oriental Reading Room of the New York Public Library, small and cramped but friendly in addition to containing what was then the best collection of Arabic books in America and, above all, getting married to his Austrian sweetheart Giselle Steuerman as soon as she was able to reach this country.