Much of the meaning we commonly attach to the term ‘revolution’ grows out of our image of the French Revolution.1 The social upheavals we associate with the latter have been deeply etched in the history of thought by Taine's accounts of bloodshed and terror, and later generations have only broken the spell with difficulty.

The power of traditional popular Islam in the modern world is difficult to assess. At times, however, developments provide at least an indirect means of evaluation for specific Muslim populations. One such experience is provided by the relations of the British with the ‘Ulamâ’ in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan during the early years of the Condominium. These relations also provide a case study of British imperial attitudes toward Islam.

Machiavelli, in The Prince, compared the Ottoman Sultan's authority with that of the King of France and found the latter wanting.

All the Turkish monarchy is governed by one ruler, the others are his servants, and dividing his kingdom into ‘sangiacates’, he sends to them various administrators, and changes or recalls them at his pleasure. But the King of France is surrounded by a large number of ancient nobles, recognised as such by their subjects, and loved by them; they have their prerogatives, of which the king cannot deprive them without danger to himself.

As Libya is the smallest in population of the four Magẖreb countries, so Libyan Jewry was less numerous than those of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Jewish settlement in rural Tripolitania is quite old. A tombstone reportedly found near Tajura dating from the tenth century (Cazés 1890; Slouschz 1927: 11–12) and El-Bekri's eleventh century mention of the Jews of Jado in the Jebel Nefusa (El Bekri 1913: 25) are two of the earliest post-Islamic examples. The present discussion, however, focuses on the century before the mass migration of Tripolitanian Jewry to Israel, which began in 1949. At that time there were over 29,000 Jews living in Tripolitania (see Table 3), and somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 living in Cyrenaica.

Waqf documents in Cairo form an invaluable yet relatively unexploited source of Egyptian history for the last six centuries. In a body of records of immense value for the quality of their content as well as their number is to be found data of great significance for virtually the entire spectrum of the extended social sciences. By waqf records is meant not simply the original waqfîya, or ḥhujja establishing the waqf, but those subsidiary documents that modify the original donation in some way. Each class of these documents provides information of a unique character. Together they afford one of the most intimate glimpses into the inner functioning of Egyptian urban and rural society.