Rabiʿa Balkhi was a princess and poet who, according to medieval accounts, flourished in 10th-century Balkh. She gained wide popularity in 20th-century Afghanistan, where she has been the subject of books, poems, and movies. This article recounts the story of her grave's discovery in the center of Balkh's town park in the 1960s, the emergence of a shrine around it, and its integration with Balkh's landscape of antiquity. Drawing on parallels from across the Muslim world, I argue that Rabiʿa's shrine emerged through a dialogue between state officials and local forms of placemaking. But although initially motivated by nationalist sentiment, the Afghan state lost its ability to define Rabiʿa's life on nationalist terms. As Afghanistan fragmented through war, her shrine survived as a space where her life was constantly reinterpreted and where disputed visions over the nation's past and future played out.

The profile of Egypt at midcentury is quite typical of Third World countries: Two-thirds or more of the population lived and made a living off the land, more than half of the national labor force was rural, the contribution of agriculture to GNP was one-third the total, and that of industry less than 15 percent. Land distribution was extremely unequal, less than one percent of landowners possessed more than one-third of the cultivated land and many of them were absentee landlords. The credit system and extension services were inadequate if available at all. Finally, population pressure on the land was relentless.

The arrival of Lashin1 on the Egyptian literary scene in the 1920s marked a turning point in the history of the short story: he was an outstandingly vigorous pioneer who developed the genre and brought its formative years to a close. His writings represent the culmination, in both form and content, of the work of previous writers and of his contemporaries. He was also the major figure of a versatile literary group, Jama⊂at al-Madrasa al Haditha (the Modern School), which played a decisive role in developing the Egyptian short story, extending its reading public, and shaping the characteristics of the new sensibility of that period. This group did not start as a proper literary school as the name implies, but rather as a gathering of enthusiastic young writers whose common dream of issuing a paper of their own, to express their views and publish their unconventional works, took almost a decade to be realised.

During the last three decades, there has been an increasing drive in developing countries towards integration, characterized by an equally apparent tendency towards the institutionalization of this attitude. This is a direct result of the realization that their future development as well as their ability to break the vicious circle of their dependence on the developed world depend on the extent of their success in attaining collective self-reliance. It was this realization and the futility of past integration efforts that motivated the six Arab Gulf countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to establish in 1981 the Gulf Co-Operation Council (GCC) in an attempt to find a common basis on which economic development could be carried out on a regional basis.

The system of administered trade has been quoted in the literature as an effective mechanism to insure trade between economically unequal countries while protecting the less-developed states from any real contact with more developed areas (see Polanyi et al. 1957, esp. Arnold: 1957,154–187).

Using the example of the traditional state of Morocco, this paper seeks to demonstrate that administered trade was not an effective safeguard against commerce with technologically advanced countries, and in fact, that the system itself contained features which, rather than protecting traditional countries, actually contributed to their conquest by more technologically advanced ones.

In 1970, I published in Mélanges de l'Institut Dominicain d'Etudes Orientales (MIDEO) a long article entitled ‘La civilisation musulmane dans l'æuvre du Professeur von Grunebaum’ which was part of a study in preparation for publication. This study although sympathetic was a very objective approach to the works of Gustave E. von Grunebaum. He appreciated it but urged me to make a personal critical evaluation of his work, without hesitating, if necessary, to contradict any of his opinions. As a close friend, I accepted willingly.I composed it under the form of 'some questions posited to M. Grunebaum'. He read my essay and found the questions provocative andinteresting enough to answer. But alas, death snatched him before the essay was published. As tribute to his memory and as a historical document I thought it would be interesting to publish it as is, without any recasting.

This article attempts to delineate the set of circumstances under which religion acts as a significant conducive factor in the development of Arab political communities, and those circumstances under which religion presents an important obstacle to the emergence of a political community. The focus is restricted to the Arab world so as to permit a more precise analysis than would be possible were one to attempt to generalize across more diverse cultures, but some of its main threads may apply equally well to other peoples and other religions. For the reasons discussed below, religion seems to be a particularly powerful source of individual political identities, and of feelings of membership in political communities.

The aim of this study is to examine the way in which the Iraqi government prepares its expenditure estimates and how and why they tend to differ from the actual outturn figures. One hardly expects to see an exact matching of these two figures given the difficulties in estimation which especially exist in developing countries where data bases may be less than exact and techniques crude. In Iraq this error in estimation was first alluded to by Saadi, and it was tentatively suggested that the expectation of discrepancies should be taken into account in the planning process. Others have suggested that this and other poor estimates should be examined and followed up more closely. However, its continuation and growth have not been otherwise studied.

The study of the Middle East is experiencing an explosion in the dimensions through which scholars study space. The five new books reviewed in this essay stand out for pushing the boundaries of how we conceptualize the production of space and mobilize it as a methodological intervention. Through remarkably sensitive ethnography, creative use of sources, and an array of vibrant theoretical and methodological tools, they expand upon an earlier pioneering literature that centered spatial analysis in the study of the Middle East. In this essay, I focus on three dimensions they have opened up: analyzing space in time; drawing connectivities across spaces; and reframing the agency of spatial tactics and the nonhuman.