Over the last twenty years there have been several interesting attempts by scholars working both in Turkey and elsewhere to offer a critical examination of the workings of the competitive party system in Turkey, and to relate changes in the parliamentary arena to the tensions created in a rapidly developing society. This emphasis on the social and economic background to political change has tended to turn attention away from the constitutional and legal arrangements on which the proper functioning of parliamentary democracy also depends. What follows tries to assess the impact of one of these factors — the electoral system — on Turkish political development since 1950. It closes with some suggestions about the possible effects on Turkish politics of some hitherto untried systems of election.

The recent Iranian revolution has brought into light the question of the nature and significance of both the logic and the sociology of long-term social and economic development in that country. This subject is of considerable interest in its own right, but it is of even greater significance for a realistic understanding of the country's recent developments, its present situation, and its future prospects. For it was mainly the Jack of such an understanding and insight which led the vast majority of modern Iranian intellectuals and educated masses of all political and ideological persuasions to misconstrue the logic of the events since 1963, and fail to predict the form, content, and consequences of the recent revolution.

The purpose of this article is to present an analysis of the pre-1958 political system in Iraq based on explanatory factors which are relevant to an understanding of the nature of similar pre-radical regimes in other Arab States and to an understanding of how and why such political systems were transformed. In order to understand the qualitative nature of the systemic change in the Arab States in the twentieth century it is essential to move away from concepts like “traditional” and “modern” and the rise of “new men” or “new social forces.” To explain how one kind of political system changed to another one requires the abstraction of those features which indicate the positive rather than residual attributes of that earlier system. Indeed some recent studies have attempted to do this, with analytic and conceptual awareness.

The use of mass media to shape public opinion, disseminate public information, and transform political culture, has grown tremendously in developing countries during the last two decades. Many of these countries have raised the slogan of “creationg a new man,” that is, one with skills, attitudes, and values that are conducive to development. In this respect, they have relied on mass media as a major purveyor of modern influences and as one of the most effective agents of political resocialization.

To the people of the province of Syria, Midhat Pasha's appointment as their governor on 13 November 1878 was no ordinary event. Midhat was well known there, largely as a result of his involvement in the deposition of Sultan 'Abd al—'Azīz (1861–1876) and the declaration of the Constitution on 23 December 1876. He was frequently referred to as ‘the father of the free and the deposer of sultans.’ He came to the province of Syria with a well-founded reputation, having served three times as governor in the provinces of Bulgaria, Danube, and Baghdād, and twice as grand vizier, the second most important position in the Empire. The optimism and hope his appointment generated in the province were as genuine and deep as were the corruption and deterioration there. Lisān al-Hāl reflected this optimsim when it said: ‘Syria has had enough oppression and misery. It has been up till now a marketplace for governors and functionaries: they come to it empty-handed and leave with tired shoulders because of the heavy treasures they carry away. Undoubtedly, Midhat Pasha came to it as a tradesman, his merchandise being justice and reform.’

Artifacts that have experienced atrocities, even genocide, and survived, acquire the power to recall the horrors of the past, and to recollect the absent persons, things, and places that were lost. They symbolize violence, but also survival and resilience. Material objects that have endured looting, mutilation, displacement, and separation from the communities where they functioned as sacred relics, liturgical aids, or prized artworks form a special category. They are survivor objects.

These are critical times for democratic politics from Morocco to Iran, as heterogeneous popular movements for greater representation and social justice increasingly challenge established authorities. It is not surprising that these struggles have laid claim to symbolic urban places in the process of claiming their collective political demands. Politics is not purely discursive or institutional; it always has material and spatial dimensions, which for democratic politics is manifested through public space. For all the recent enthusiasm about the emancipating possibilities of the digital media, the fact remains that Tahrir Square (Cairo), Gezi Park (Istanbul), Revolution Street (Tehran), and Pearl Roundabout (Manama) are not virtual locations on the Internet.

This paper reports the outcome of computations of indexes for total agricultural output and for apparent consumption of basic food: cereals and pulses in Egypt during the period 1886/87–1967/68.

On the morning of Tuesday, 29 May 1453, the warriors of Mehmet II poured through the shattered walls of Constantinople. Later in the day their commanding general, Zaǵanos Pasha, accepted the keys of Galata, the walled town standingon a promontory on the shore opposite the Golden Horn, signaling the end of Genoese domination.

With a more than sixty-seven-year displacement, the Palestinian refugee case is an extreme instance of a widespread phenomenon: the need for humanitarian organizations that are oriented toward emergency to respond to circumstances that are “protracted.” Humanitarian practice does change as needs on the ground change, but long-term need and displacement poses both definitional and practical challenges for this work. The broad trajectory of Palestinian refugee experience has moved from “crisis” to chronic needs—what Elizabeth Povinelli calls “cruddy” conditions. Povinelli specifically contrasts suffering that is “catastrophic, crisis-laden, and sublime” with that which is “ordinary, chronic, and cruddy.” Palestinians share experiences of poverty and immobility with others around the world who are part of what is sometimes referred to as the “precariat.” It is this sort of suffering, which often persists below the threshold of an “event,” that Povinelli terms cruddy.

This article revisits the official culture of the early khedivate through a microhistory of the first modern Egyptian theater in Arabic. Based on archival research, it aims at a recalibration of recent scholarship by showing khedivial culture as a complex framework of competing patriotisms. It analyzes the discourse about theater in the Arabic press, including the journalist Muhammad Unsi's call for performances in Arabic in 1870. It shows that the realization of this idea was the theater group led by James Sanua between 1871 and 1872, which also performed ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Misri's tragedy. But the troupe was not an expression of subversive nationalism, as has been claimed by scholars. My historical reconstruction and my analysis of the content of Sanua's comedies show loyalism toward the Khedive Ismail. Yet his form of contemporary satire was incompatible with elite cultural patriotism, which employed historicization as its dominant technique. This revision throws new light on a crucial moment of social change in the history of modern Egypt, when the ruler was expected to preside over the plural cultural bodies of the nation.

While the idea that Saudi Arabia has functioned as a beacon of ultraconservative religious influence since the 1970s oil boom is commonplace, the modalities of this influence have rarely been seriously interrogated. As a window onto this issue, this article considers the history of the Islamic University of Medina, an influential Wahhabi missionary project with global ambitions. It pays particular attention to the role played by non-Saudi staff, who for long periods made up a majority of the university's faculty. Previous accounts of migrants working in Saudi religious educational institutions have tended to focus on the contested question of their contribution to the rise of politically activist modes of Islamism within the kingdom. In contrast, the account offered here draws on the concept of spiritual capital to argue that they also played an important part in legitimizing the expansion of the Wahhabi mission to diverse Muslim communities around the world.

In cities like Paris and London in the 19th century, the leading bankers not only supported the developing industrialization but also established practices that determined the nature of their charitable and philanthropic activity and their patronage of the arts. They supported scientific and archaeological research as well. The recurrence of these practices over the century is increasingly recognized and would justify investigation to uncover the underlying rules that governed the activities of bankers outside the financial sphere. In other words, it would justify research in terms of the anthropology of bankers. One aspect that has, so far, received insufficient attention is the impact these bankers had on cities—both in their role as builders and protectors of schools and hospitals and in the imprint they made on the urban landscape. In housing, for example, the Stern, Heine, and Weill families established foundations in Paris for the construction of HBM (habitat bon marché, low-cost housing), and architects adopted by the great banking families, such as William Bouwens, chosen by the banker Henri Germain to build the Parisian headquarters of Crédit Lyonnais, designed the great undertakings of the Parisian Belle Époque.

The literature on the genesis of Arab nationalism in Syria often mentions a group of religious reformers who influenced the first generation of Arab nationalists. The relationship between reformers and nationalists, however, has not been explored, perhaps because sources mention the influence of liberal sheikhs without suggesting where the sheikhs came from or what they signified. This study traces the social origins and ideological import of the religious reform movement in Damascus, a hitherto neglected phenomenon. The relationship between reformers and Arabists is also discussed so as to shed new light on the beginnings of Arab nationalism and its significance in late Ottoman Syria.

And as it often happens in Iraq in times of internal turbulence, a general wave of looting swept the north. Assyrian villages were looted by Kurdish and Arab tribesmen and by neighbouring villages, with the Yezidis joining the Kurds and Arabs in this general free-for-all. Sixty Assyrian villages, according to Stafford, were looted in this way and completely or partially destroyed, resulting in a total estimated loss to the Assyrians of at least £50,000. Stafford, however, also records that there was not a single act of aggression against any Assyrian village until 8 August, even the defenceless villages of the men who had gone to Syria with Yaqu not being touched before this date.1 Still, some of the acts committed by the Iraqis subsequent to the attack on them and to their discovery of the atrocities committed by the Assyrians are nothing but black and terrible. But even these were to pale beside what was to happen at Summayl.

Although social-contract theorists differ on a number of points, they concur that human beings choose to form associations to promote their interests. An important corollary is that tension exists between the individual's inherent independence and freedom and the authority to which she or he must submit to achieve compliance with the goals of the contract. Occasionally, a theorist discusses God in the overall scheme of things, but the conception is deistic, so that the God who created the world does not intervene in its operation. For the rest, contractarian theories privilege natural law and natural rights, according to which the individual is treated as a social being who is fully rational, free, and independent. Fundamentally, three steps are taken in the process of making the social contract: (1) creating society; (2) creating the sovereign state; (3) discharging obligations and enjoying benefits.

The dictionary definition of ‘homeostasis’ is: ‘the tendency of an organism to maintain a uniform and beneficial physiological stability within and between its parts; organic equilibrium’. As applied to a political organism, it denotes the tendency of that organism to ‘maintain as much of its former condition as is practically possible’, however determined the attempts to alter its shape. In a paper presented to the meeting of the Middle East Studies Association of North America in 1967. I suggested that the principle of homeostasis was inherent in the Persian polity.Iran's ancient civilization has produced social attitudes and deeply ingrained characteristics which do not admit of rapid change,except by means of the disruptive force of violent revolution. The 2,500-year tradition of the Persian monarchy, a tradition fostered and preserved under a succession of alien rulers — Arab, Turk, Mongol, Tatar and Afghan - has given to the Persian polity, and to Persian society, an organic stability which places Iran in a category completely apart from most other countries in the Middle East, and from the majority of the so-called 'emerging' and 'underdeveloped'nations in general. As E. G. Browne noted at the time of the Persian Constitutional Revolution in 1906, the chief characteristics of the Persians are: (i) the stability of the national type and (ii) the power of national recovery.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of a group of‘rebels’ (in Iran they are called looties) who made significant contributions to the Iranian Constitutional Movement in 1908–1909. A discussion of the norms and values of this group and the way they fit the social situationand events of that period in Iran, serves to explain their involvement in the Constitutional Movement.

The cholera and plague pandemics of the 19th and early 20h centuries shaped Ottoman state-building and expansionist efforts in Iraq and the Gulf in significant ways. For Ottoman officials, these pandemics brought attention to the possible role of Qajar and British subjects in spreading cholera and plague, as well as the relationship between Iraq's ecology and recurring outbreaks. These developments paved the way for the expansion of Ottoman health institutions, such as quarantines, and the emergence of new conceptions of public health in the region. Specifically, quarantines proved instrumental not only to the delineation of the Ottoman–Qajar border, but also to defining an emerging Ottoman role in shaping Gulf affairs. Moreover, the Ottomans’ use of quarantines and simultaneous efforts to develop sanitary policies informed by local ecological realities signal a localized and ad hoc approach to disease prevention that has been overlooked. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that environmental factors operating on global and regional scales were just as important as geopolitical factors in shaping Ottoman rule in Iraq and the Gulf during the late Ottoman period.

One of the more serious and threatening, yet unsolved, problems in theology is uncertainty about the meaning of time. Clearly, the theologian of an omnipotent and absolute God must reconcile His transcendence with the human worshiper's graphic and personal particularity. To come to terms in the matter of spatial dimension is, moreover, relatively easy when compared with the problem of the temporal dimension. Compounding the woes of the theologian (or perhaps causing them) is the abject poverty of all languages in proper terms for time and aspects of time. In describing time, all theologians resort to the use of an artificial vocabulary – so unfortunate because it makes the communication of already unfamiliar ideas doubly difficult.