1.1. Among the most obscure aspects of the past of Arab towns, that of the number of their population at different periods of their history must be mentioned. A better knowledge of their demography would no doubt bring more accurate answers to the main problems of urban evolution (expansion or decline, prosperity or decadence) as, through lack of well-founded figures, they have often been resolved by authors from general impressions or even from a priori attitudes. The first really serious statistics go no earlier than the end of the eighteenth century (Description de l'Egypte) for Cairo. For earlier periods, the only available sources for a long time were the evaluations provided by chronicles or travel accounts which proposed more or less fanciful and often divergent figures, the more reasonable evaluations often being a question of chance, or being considered so only because they confirmed the users' prejudices.

In a region which has witnessed so many violent seizures of power, violations of constitutional legality, and myriad varieties of dictatorship over the past few decades, it is often easy to forget that many parts of the Middle East enjoyed elements of democracy, including freedom of speech and assembly, a free press, and hotly contested elections, as far back as the late Ottoman period.

The growth and transformation of Middle Eastern manufacturing industry has been little studied for the period before the advent of tariff autonomy, and thus protectionism, in the early 1930s The reasons for this are various but must have much to do with the many difficult problems involved. There is an obvious lack of data, particularly about the activities of the craft or small-scale sector which, even to this day, is regularly under-counted by government statisticians. There are also serious problems of definition which hage generally been ignored by the vast majority of economic historians who remain content to analyse manufacturing activity in terms of such simple dichotomies as modern/factory/capitalist versus traditional/workshop/pre-capitalist, a method which not only masks the fact that there are a whole range of activities which do not fall into such apparently neat categories but also — to introduce the major theme of this essay — makes it impossible to examine the complex interrelationship between plants of different size and degree of capitalisation. Finally, much of what passes for a ducussion of manufacturing activity has, in fact, got muddled with the much larger debate about the whole process of industrialisation, about whether particular areas of the Middle East could have developed their own industrial base before 1930, and about why they might have been prevented from doing so.

In the course of the nineteenth century, the relationship between Beirut and Mount Lebanon underwent important changes that have affected Lebanon's political life up to the present day. The city and the countryside had always been to some extent mutually dependent. They became more closely tied in response to the economic and political transformation of the region in the age of European penetration. This growing interdependence increasingly took the form of Beirut's ascendancy over the Mountain. While in earlier centuries it was the Mountain which had extended its sway over the city, in the nineteenth century the process was reversed. But Beirut's triumph as the dominant partner in the relationship was not an unmixed blessing: While bringing prosperity to the city, it also transferred to Beirut many of the unresolved tensions of the Mountain, preparing the way for the city's sectarian rivalries and tensions in more recent times.

Man has always sought to acquire information regarding his enemies, rivals, even allies, in order to understand their motivations, predict their actions, and behave according to the best of his own interests. In the Bible, we are told that Yahveh ordered Moses to send spies to the land of Canaan. Sun-Tzu's treatise on war, written five centuries B.C., comprises a chapter on intelligence. Leo VI's Taktika insist upon the importance of intelligence, while the Thousand and One Nights contains numerous accounts of Byzantine intelligence operations. Thanks to his spy-networks, the Mongol ruler Subotaï was well aware of conditions prevailing in Christian Europe. Moctezuma's spies kept him well informed as to the strength and whereabouts of the Spanish invaders. Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth l's chancellor, had set up a formidable intelligence service. As Hobbes put it, “spies are no less important to the sovereign than rays of light to the human soul for the discernment of visible objects.”

For urban politics in Syria, the interwar years were pivotal. The country was in a transitional phase, uncomfortably suspended between four centuries of Ottoman rule and national independence. Although the Empire had collapsed and new forms of social and political organization were available, there remained a distinctive Ottoman cast to Syria's urban elites. Meanwhile, France had occupied the country, but was ruling clumsily and with a growing measure of uncertainty. The Mandate system itself dictated that the French could not remain in Syria indefinitely and Arab nationalism, however inconsistent and inarticulate, had become the reigning political idea of the age. The cry of independence rang across much of Syria, and nowhere more loudly and clearly than in her cities, the traditional centers of political life.

Recent years have witnessed a resurgence throughout the Muslim world of movements calling for radical social reforms and for changes in the form of government. These movements are characterised by a strong religious component. Their calls for reform are couched in the Muslim idiom — that is, in demands for social justice (adala) and the satisfaction of man's basic necessities, and are accompanied by demands for a return to an Islamic form of government, one that is ruled by the sharia. The supporters of such movements frequently are dressed differentlyfrom the rest of their compatriots, an outward manifestation of their allegiance to a Muslim-guided and a Muslim-oriented goal. It has become customary in the West to refer to such movements as Muslim fundamentalists, but the Arab world refers to them more correctly as Muslim organizations, or jamaat islamivya. This nomenclature covers a multitude of organizations with different principles and slogans, but all have one common denominator — their reformist appeals derive from religious belief and are asserted to be founded in Muslim principles.