I have borrowed the term “frontier” from the late Professor Joseph Schacht for the Islamic marches where Islamic political power and Islam were once firmly entrenched. Unlike him I would apply this term also to the Islamic marches in Europe: Spain and Sicily. Division of Islamic lands into geographical categories “The Central Islamic Lands” and the “Further Islamic Lands,” has also been adopted in the recently published Cambridge History of Islam.

“In a state of rude nature”, wrote Edmund Burke, “there is no such thing as a people… The idea of a people is the idea of a corporation. It is wholly artificial; and made, like all other legal fictions, by common agreement. What the particular nature of that agreement was, is collected from the form into which the particular society has been cast”. Whether the Iranians in the early Islamic period — that is, the period from the seventh to the twelfth century — were in Burke's sense a “people” is a question that the cautious scholar would be eager to disregard and loath to handle. After all, those specialists on early Islamic Iran who have, directly or indirectly, expressed opinions on this subject have all too often projected events from the life of their own nation and times back to these earlier centuries. In no case is this projection more obvious than in the many essays written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which see this question only as a question of “national liberation”: did the Iranians hate the Arabs, and did they hope to regain their empire by destroying, or profoundly reshaping, the empire of the Muslim caliphs?

Throughout the Ottoman period, dervishes and their convents have played an important part in both towns and countryside. Yet they have not received the attention that their importance merits, and the religious aspect of their activities has attracted more interest than the social. In the latter area, one of the pioneer works has been ömer Lutfi Barkan's study of the role of dervishes and their convents in the settlement of Anatolia and Rumelia, and the presen, t article was inspired by it. Barkan's emphasis was on how these convents, usually called tekkes and zaviyes, served as the nuclei around which future villages formed. It was pointed out how the dervishes guarded passes and caravan routes, introduced new crops and propagated more highly specialized agriculture.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries religion continued to play an obvious role in the Middle East. Among observers of that area the significance of the impact of religion on political development was consequently never minimized to the extent that it was among observers of political trends in the West. Western scholars interested in the Middle East, however, have tended to overrate the importance of the Muslim modernists with whom they felt a certain affinity. They also have accepted too uncritically the views of modernists concerning the lifelessness of traditional expressions of Islam. As a result, not until recently have we begun sufficiently to appreciate traditional Muslim religious leaders both for their impact on and for the diversity of their responses to modern political and intellectual currents. I believe that this diversity is not accidental but rather is susceptible to analysis and explanation. This essay demonstrates how four variables (historical circumstances, theological considerations, socioeconomic considerations, and governmental policies toward Muslim religious leaders) affected the political involvement of the Islamic ulama throughout the Middle East generally and in Tunisia particularly during the ‘liberal age’.

At the turn of the century the societies of the Near East provided materials for some of the most pressing anthropological and sociological issues of the day. W. Robertson Smith, Marcel Mauss, and Max Weber, to name only one representative of three national traditions, all devoted considerable attention to Semitic societies. Since that time, fewer sociologists and anthropologists have had a background in Semitic languages and literatures, and new materials from outside the classical and Semitic cultures have seemed to offer fresher, more challenging problems. In recent decades, Near Eastern societies have come to play a minor role in the development and discussion of anthropological problems. In general, only the tribal societies have maintained any prominence, and even these societies have only been test cases for a theory that was formulated by Evans-Pritchard for the Nuer of sub-Saharan Africa.

Before 1936 few Moroccans were concerned with or affected by French syndicalism. This condition was hardly modified by the promulgation of the dahir of 24 December 1936, under the impetus of the Front Populaire in the metropole, which accorded syndical liberties to the European populace of Morocco, nor was it changed by the dahir of 24 June 1938. These laws did not deter the French Congrès Général du Travail (CGT) from recruiting Moroccans, especially in the mining areas where it enjoyed considerable success. By the end of 1937 more than a thousand Moroccan miners had been enrolled at the Khouribga phosphate mines; but a series of rather violent strikes led to the repressive dahir of 1938. Disturbed by the entry of Moroccans into unions, the French administration presented to the sultan, Mohammed Ben Youssef, a dahir forbidding his subjects to form unions and established penalties applicable to Europeans permitting Moroccans to join their labor organizations. The sultan was only too ready to sign, seeing in union membership a grave threat to the authority of the Makhzen. Fortunately for the Moroccan labor movement, the formal interdiction of the 1938 dahir was never seriously applied.