Among the figures in the scholarly imagining of the post-colonial world, “the peasant” is a strange kind of presence. With this abstraction, a category of human being has become a field of expertise, the subject of his own scholarly journals, and the object of a distinct body of theory and description. “What are villagers in India, in Egypt, in Mexico really like?” the anthropologist George Foster asks, as he begins a brief history of the field. “For nearly fifty years anthropologists (by no means to the exclusion of others) have searched for answers [to this question] …. living with villagers in order to question them and to observe their behavior, describing their findings in books and articles.” At first they called their research the study of “folk” societies, Foster says, but after World War II scholars “came to realize that ‘peasant’ is a more appropriate term, and thus was born the new subfield of ‘peasant studies’.”

The production of silk on Mount Lebanon dates back to the time of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian. From his reign in the 7th century until the 19th century, despite fluctuations in the production of silk, Mount Lebanon and parts of the Bekaa valley continued to produce “Syrian silk.” In the latter part of the 19th century, silk production on Mount Lebanon and elsewhere even expanded, as new areas for growing mulberry trees were added along the coast from Antioch to Sidon.

Studies on silk production in Syria, such as those of Gaston Ducousso, Dominique Chevallier, Roger Owen, and Boutros Labaki, focus on the silk industry and trade, treating silk as a cash crop and analyzing its impact on the 19th-century Syrian economy, and deal only indirectly with subjects such as the land-tenure system, the peasants' dependence on the silk merchants, the decline of the landlords, and changes in the mushāc system, or collective use of land.

The 1950s were years of profound change in the Middle East. In the realm of great power diplomacy, British hegemony gradually gave way to American ascendancy which, in turn, competed with the rapid spread of Soviet influence in the area. Within the region, the era witnessed the crystallization of a state system and, simultaneously, the growth of ideological movements dedicated to the unification of those states on national or religious bases. Internally, Middle Eastern governments sought new of opposition groups. These transformations, together with the dislocations of decolonization, the persistence of regional rivalries, and the introduction of new technologies, caused chronic instability throughout the Middle East, and in the winter of 1955–1956, combined to produce Britain's crisis in Jordan.

Infanticide is known to have been a common means of birth control from early, apparently even prehistoric, times. In societies that lacked any precise knowledge of the fertilization process and consequently methods for its prevention, infanticide was used more frequently than other known methods of population limitation, such as abstention from intercourse and abortion. Infanticide was expected to serve several functions: “general reduction in population numbers (including twin removal), removal of defectives, elimination of social ‘illegitimates’ (i.e., offspring whose existence violated social group boundaries), response to loss of the nursing mother, control of dependency ratio, manipulation of sex ratio, and finally, use as a backstop to other methods when those fail”.

The last three messianic claimants to appear in the Jewish diaspora appeared in Yemen in the 19th century. At this time and place the mutual influences of Jews and Muslims were notable both in messianic movements and in literary expression. Muslim society in Yemen was aware of the messianic tension among the Jews, and individual Muslims even took part in each of the known messianic movements. Conversely—and this is the subject of this article—Jewish society, at least on the popular level, was receptive to Muslim apocalyptic ideas and beliefs and integrated them into Jewish apocalyptic anticipations.

The belief in messianism and the sharing of ideas on redemption or of the golden age in the eschatological era (i.e., at the End of Time) have long been maintained by the Jews. Some of the concepts that served as paradigms for later messianic speculations were derived from the Bible. For instance, the concept of rescue—the rescue by God of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt—became the example of God's intervention to help his people and mirrored the rescue at the End of Days. Likewise, the Davidic kingdom was believed to be the fulfillment of an ancient covenant between God and the Israelites—and, therefore, the Davidic kingdom became in the history of Jewish messianism the paradigm for how the future kingdom would be, how the covenant would be fulfilled. Also, the term “messiah” (mashiah)—i.e., the anointed one—was originally the official title for the Davidic kings and the early root for the later messiah; hence, it would be a Davidic descendant who would lead the Jews into the messianic age.