The degree of development (or, if you prefer, material civilization) of any society is set by the size of its surplus (the total amount it produces minus the amount needed for the bare subsistence of the population) and the uses to which the surplus is put. In Emerson's wise words, “The question of history is what each generation has done with its surplus produce. One bought crusades, one churches, one villas, one horses and one railroads.” The size of the surplus is, in turn, determined by four factors: the amount of energy available to the society, the society's technology, the mix of its economy, and the size of its population. Until comparatively recently, energy was, with the important exception of sailing ships, provided exclusively by human or animal power.1 Two important steps forward were the invention of the watermill and that of the windmill; their development will be discussed later. Nevertheless, it has been estimated that until the Industrial Revolution, some 80–85 percent of total energy was provided by plants, animals, and people.2 This means that the basic factors determining the amount of energy available to a society were the amount of land (arable, pasture, and woodland) it had at its disposal and the land's productivity. Land “was not simply the principal source of food for the population [the other being the seas and rivers] but also virtually the sole source of the raw materials used in industrial production”—fibers, hides, hair, wood, and so forth; almost all industrial workers were engaged in processing agricultural materials.

Writing in 1962 Stephen Neill listed twelve of what he regarded as “positive achievements of New Testament studies” over the past century.1 As an affirmation of progress in a notoriously difficult field of investigation, they make satisfying and even cheerful reading for the historian. Who was Jesus of Nazareth? What was his message? Why was he put to death? Why did his few followers become, in effect, the nucleus of the powerful and widespread community called Christianity? These were the enormously difficult questions that had begun to be posed in a critical-historical way in the mid-19th century, and some of the answers Bishop Neill discerned, though by no means final, represented ground gained and truths won. Neill's widely read book was revised in 1988, and though his optimism was here and there tempered by what had been said and thought in the twenty-five years since the first edition,2 there was still good reason to think that historians were by and large on the right track in pursuing what Albert Schweitzer described in 1906 as “the quest of the historical Jesus.”3

Classes are objective positions defined by the social relations of production. These positions broadly determine, among other things, the occupants' political and ideological orientations and their potential to participate in revolutionary movements. The conflict between and the contradictory nature of these positions are the underlying mechanisms for the generation and reproduction of class struggle. Nevertheless, a simple structural analysis is insufficient for analyzing the role of classes in a revolutionary movement. Classes are not static entities fixed once and for all, nor are they completely determined by “objective” economic “facts” such as the social relations of production.1 To understand the success of the dominated classes in a revolutionary movement, one must analyze their level of class formation—namely, the capacity of the members of a class to realize their interests. Class capacity is contingent, among other things, on the level of organization and mobilization of the members of the class. Rather than deriving automatically from the structural positions, class capacity is “rooted in traditional culture and communities.”2 Class boundaries, interests, and mobilization are always shifting: interests change, coalitions are formed and break up, positions in the economy are created or destroyed, and demobilization occurs.3 Classes are continually organized, disorganized, and reorganized.4 The methodological strategy adopted in this article to demonstrate the importance of class in shaping the economic policy of the Islamic Republic is based on the analysis of the significant and controversial issues that appeared in the post-revolutionary period. It will be argued that these issues were a manifestation of class struggle and that the way they were finally resolved reflected the balance of class forces.5

For those who have, or once had it, power holds a strange fascination. For that very reason it waxes men inventive. It is almost invariably surrounded by ideologies of legitimacy, which adduce tradition, divine grace, or the law in order to support the establishment of those at the top. These ideologies are, strictly speaking, instruments of mystification; yet they are permissible weapons as long as they do not prevent the other side from returning them in kind.—Ralf Dahrendorf1

When World War I ended and the political map of the Middle East was redrawn, the ruler-straight borders separating the Fertile Crescent countries were not determined wholly in Europe, when the mandates were divided between Britain and France, as is commonly believed. The border between Syria and Iraq was determined between 1918 and 1920, when Iraqi officers serving in the Syrian army brought about the annexation of regions originally designated for British-occupied Iraq to Faysal 's Arab government in Syria.

Metaphors of the evil eye (sahir) are interpreted as posing a threat to the Muslim Arab Rubāṭāb1 of the Sudan. A common situation in which these metaphors are used is when the speaker (saḥḥār) attempts to cast or “shoot” a sahir metaphor at persons or objects by comparing them to something else. A victim may then try to counteract the shot by uttering protective invocations. The victim's later account of the event in which the evil eye was cast upon him will include subsequent misfortunes and perhaps justifications for personal failure. For example, a sahhār likened someone eating a green onion to somebody speaking into a microphone. The man threw away the onion, cursed the sahhār, and complained thereafter that his hand had never been the same. The audience evaluates the metaphors. Good comparisons evoke much laughter. “He is really evil,” or “He killed him,” are often pronounced by the audience both in appreciation of the theoretical powers of the metaphor shooter and in anticipation of the harm that may come in the shot's wake. The audience later reports the interaction as a joke or legend.