“Our present knowledge concerning the Arab city's past history is unsatisfactory,” remarked André Raymond in his Grandes villes arabes à l'époque ottomane.1 He went on to state that “the mediocrity of our information concerning the history of Arab cities is particularly noticeable for the modern period, that is, for the four Ottoman centuries.” Several explanations account for this insufficiency. First of all, “the absence of all statistical and numerical information about the urban population's social structure in relation to its dwelling conditions renders numerical and cartographical analysis difficult. As a result, specific descriptions concerning the geography of residential areas in relation to the different socioeconomic groups within a population and their dwellings is problematic.” Secondly, our knowledge concerning the better-off groups far overshadows that for the poorer levels of society: “We are only really well acquainted with the rich or middle-class dwellings in the Arab cities. In fact, it is only these types of dwellings for which urban archaeology provides a satisfactory sampling"2; archival documents usually concern only the most sumptuous and luxurious residences belonging to the highest urban real estate bracket. Finally, the study of Arab cities is obscured by several traditional ideas that affect all research in this field, particularly, the notion that traditional Islamic society was basically egalitarian and that therefore spatial segregation based upon socioeconomic criteria did not exist.

The Book of Dede Korkut is an early record of oral Turkic folktales in Anatolia, and as such, one of the mythic charters of Turkish nationalist ideology. The oldest versions of the Book of Dede Korkut consist of two manuscripts copied sometime during the 16th century. The twelve stories that are recorded in these manuscripts are believed to be derived from a cycle of stories and songs circulating among Turkic peoples living in northeastern Anatolia and northwestern Azerbaijan. According to Lewis (1974), an older substratum of these oral traditions dates to conflicts between the ancient Oghuz and their Turkish rivals in Central Asia (the Pecheneks and the Kipchaks), but this substratum has been clothed in references to the 14th-century campaigns of the Akkoyunlu Confederation of Turkic tribes against the Georgians, the Abkhaz, and the Greeks in Trebizond. Such stories and songs would have emerged no earlier than the beginning of the 13th century, andthe written versions that have reached us would have been composed no later than the beginning of the 15th century. By this time, the Turkic peoples in question had been in touch with Islamic civilization for seeral centuries, had come to call themselves "Turcoman" rather than "Oghuz," had close associations with sedentary and urbanized societies, and were participating in Islamized regimes that included nomads, farmers, and townsmen. Some had abandoned their nomadic way of life altogether.

On 9 November 1956, a poem in colloquial Arabic appeared in the month-old Cairo daily al-Masāʾ. The poet was an unknown named Hamid al-Atmas, a carpenter from the Delta city of Damanhur. Entitled “That's It, I'm Off to the Battlefield,” al-Atmas's poem celebrated the worker as soldier, for British and French troops had just landed in Port Said. The narrator states that he will put down his tools—as will many laborers and craftsmen—to go and fight. Following victory, he will return to his shākūsh (hammer) and mingār (plane). This, he stresses, is a people's struggle.1 The point is made no less subtly through the poet's choice of language: the narrator's diction is based on that of shop, home, and street.

The Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) was founded in 1602 and began its trading activities in Iran and the Gulf in 1623, when factories (trading stations) were established in Bandar Abbas and Isfahan, after a favorable commercial treaty had been concluded with Shah Abbas I. This was the beginning of a very profitable trade for the VOC, which throughout the 17th and in the beginning of the 18th century was Iran's most important foreign trading partner. VOC activities in Iran were not restricted to Bandar Abbas and Isfahan: the VOC also had a trading station in Kirman (1697–1739) for the collection of goat's wool, and in 1738 its sphere of activities was extended to Bushire.

The succession crisis and civil war that followed the death of Caliph Harun alRashid in 809 is a gloomy chapter in the history of the Abbasid caliphate in its prime that captured the attention of later medieval Muslim scholars. Their main challenge lay in trying to find an appropriate rationale for justifying the conflict between the caliph's sons, al-Amin and al-Maʾmun, and the fate of the community under a caliphate seized by force for the first time in the Abbasid era. The destruction wrought by the civil war on the capital, Baghdad, combined with the spread of factional strife to other provinces of the caliphate, presented an ethical and religious dilemma reminiscent to contemporaries of the early Islamic fitnas. Conscious of this parallel, the chronicler al-Tabari, writing a century later, devotes considerably more space to the years of the civil war than he does to the reigns of al-Rashid and al-Maʾmun that bracketed it.

Subsidies are a widespread economic practice in most developing countries and in centrally planned economies such as those of Eastern Europe. In the United States and Western Europe, they are generally associated with price support for producers, especially in agriculture. In the less-developed countries (LDCs), subsidies usually support consumers. When extended to producers, the benefit is passed on to consumers through official price controls. The question is whether such price support is the best means available to meet the basic needs strategy of development.

Subsidies in LDCs often begin as measures to help the poor, but they usually expand beyond the target population and constitute by and large a wage supplement for almost all salaried workers.