Labor problems were no less a reality to big business in the medieval Islamic world than they are today. Where competition was keen and skilled laborers in limited supply, workmen could demand to receive their pay on schedule or, indeed, even demand higher wages from their employer on a par or above those paid by his competitors.

During the last decade or so, educational institutions of developing countries have attracted the attention of social scientists as the prime movers of structural changes in such societies. Some of those who are concerned with economic development and growth have argued that a major barrier to economic development is not so much the scarcity of natural resources and capital, but rather the lack of trained manpower resulting from insufficient or mismanaged investment in training the ‘necessary manpower’.

No historical treatment of the first decade of the British occupation of Egypt overlooks the abortive mission of Sir Henry Drummond-Wolff to Cairo and Istanbul from 1885 to the spring of 1887. Most, however, fail to discuss the diverse political interests within Egypt itself, which, in one fashion or another, stood to be affected by the mission and its objectives. Consequently, an entire segment of the negotiations which led to the 22 May 1887 convention setting the conditions for withdrawal, including an original draft article covering the future status of the capitulatory and mixed court regime in Egypt, has all but disappeared from the record. The circumstances behind this forgotten article demonstrate in capsule form the degree to which the issue of judicial reform indirectly dominated London's Egyptian policy in stages from 1876 to the Montreux Convention on the capitulations concluded by Nahhas Pasha in 1937.

Israeli political, economic, and social achievements have apparently made Israel a developed nation. Social scientists customarily ignore its geographic setting in the developing world and study the country as a phenomenon of political, social and economic development. One aspect, however, is still problematic and controversial. This is the administrative. Israelis doubt the extent to which their governmental administration is developed, by which they mean the extent to which their administration is staffed by trained officials appointed on grounds of merit. While the forms of a modern government service exist, Israelis are skeptical of their substance, because of what they suspect to be widespread instances of inattention to the rules for appointment and promotion to civil service positions. Social scientists seem to have accepted the conventional wisdom of Israeli public opinion and they, too, have judged the Israeli civil service to be embryonic or stunted in development, largely because of political interference in appointments and advancement to senior positions. It is true that in every country the issue of which governmental offices should be political and which administrative is a problem. But this problem is exacerbated in Israel where, because of party politics, it is, ostensibly, one resolution which exists in law and another in fact.

Juristically speaking, ‘amal means the practice of the courts, and in Mâlikî doctrine it has a regulative force. As it developed in North West Africa, and especially in Morocco, ‘amal represents a unique instance of Muslim case-law. A wealth of Maghribî legal literature bears witness to the paramount importance and the success that ‘amal has acquired as an official source of the law in Morocco. This literature includes collections of ‘responsa’ (fatâwî), ‘opinions’ (ajwibah), ‘precedents’ (nawâzîl), and ‘formularies’ (wathâiq). But besides these general works, there exist special collections of judicial precedents with critical and analytical commentaries. These were designed to serve as practical ‘amal manuals for the qâdîs, who, in Mâlikî doctrine, are required to follow the judicial practice even when it runs contrary to the predominant opinion (mashhûr) of the school.

The forms, themes and patterns of classical Arabic poetry were laid down in the Arabian Peninsula before the advent of Islam. Indeed the oldest poem of which we have any record dates back to the period of Jâhiliyya, a derogatory term meaning ‘ignorance’ coined by the early Muslims to denote the state of religious and moral depravity of pre-Islamic Arabs. This period covers scarcely more than a century and a half (c. a.d. 500–622). Yet when the Arabs first sprang onto the stage of world history to carve an empire for themselves, they already had an extremely complex and refined poetic art. This remarkable phenomenon has baffled the student of Arabic literature and history: ‘The most striking feature in Arabic literature is its unexpectedness’ remarks Gibb, while Goitein refers to it as ‘the miracle of pre-Islamic poetry and literary language’. The Jâhili poets, though springing from primitive and illiterate nomadic tribes, were no beginners declaiming shaky lines in a mixture of dialects in prevalence at the time. These were a host of poets erupting all over northern Arabia, from Syria to Yemen and from the fringes of Iraq to the borders of Egypt, masterfully reciting highly developed qasîdas (odes) in one and the same language, betraying little of the dialects of their region. Above all, their poetry, vigorous and vivid as it was in general, was cast in the same, steel structure of a set of complex metrical schemes.

Towards the end of World War II, when the French had regained control of the Levant, revived fears of Hashemite expansion in that area gripped the Free French. The Hashemite rulers of Iraq and Jordan were seen as subversive forces which were constantly attempting to destroy any French influence left in the Middle East, replacing independent states with Hashemite satellites. Eventually, if not counteracted, the whole Middle East would come under their control, and, as the British were behind them, the latter would have once again outmaneuvered their rivals.

I.O. The work under consideration1 was originally a doctoral dissertation at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Department of Linguistics, under the supervision of the former head of that department, Professor Robert B. Lees, now at the University of Tel Aviv. The book deals with an interesting subject, to be sure. The basic theses and conclusions presented are worth considering and worth testing, though in my opinion they are wrong. The work as a whole is marred by typographic, stylistic and scholastic infelicities, the latter in the form of erroneous bibliographical citations, for the most part. First, I shall address myself to the main theme in terms of general linguistic theory, and Arabic linguistics and dialectology. Then I shall proceed to list some of the typographic, stylistic and scholastic infelicities, more to help the author should he revise the work than to inform the reader who would, of course, see them for himself.

Prior to 1964 the Iranian budgets were only a simple record of the receipts and expenditures of the central government. Such conventional administrative budgets were the results of the reforms of A.D. 1911 (21 Safar 1329 A.H.D.) when a Comprehensive Financial Law for the country was legislated. This law was modeled on the existing laws of France. The French laws were in turn based on the philosophy of government as conceived by the classical economists. These economists thought of the governments as an organization which protected the right of the individual to pursue his best interest without trespassing on the rights of others. Also, they advocated government non-intervention and non participation in economic activities.

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.