The first twelve months following the arrival of the American Protestant missionaries to the shores of Syria, the eastern Mediterranean haven of religious dissidence, constituted the “bright spring time of the mission” as one observer put it. Soon thereafter in 1824 the ecclesiastical authorities of the Maronites, “Romanists”, and Uniat Meichites awoke to the danger threatening them and began to resent their presence. The reason for the short honeymoon is not difficult to perceive: when the missionaries took stock of the situation it soon dawned upon them that they could function in one of two ways, “either silently in the bosom of native churches to revive religion or attempt a reformation of rites and ceremonies”. They chose the second course, and the end result was both hostility to their activities and a feeble Protestant community at best, unable to survive without outside protection and support.

In August 1894, as if by prearranged signal, a series of Muslim attacks on the Gregorian Armenian subjects of the Porte broke out in eastern Anatolia and spread gradually, province by province, throughout most of Asiatic Turkey. These disorders raged sporadically for two years until finally, in August 1896, they culminated in a similar assault on the Gregorian Armenian community of Istanbul, beneath the very windows of the embassies of the Great Powers. European estimates placed the total of Armenians killed throughout this period at between 250,000 and 300,000 men, women, and children, and 10 percent of the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire.

I have borrowed the term “frontier” from the late Professor Joseph Schacht for the Islamic marches where Islamic political power and Islam were once firmly entrenched. Unlike him I would apply this term also to the Islamic marches in Europe: Spain and Sicily. Division of Islamic lands into geographical categories “The Central Islamic Lands” and the “Further Islamic Lands,” has also been adopted in the recently published Cambridge History of Islam.

The question of the relations between Muslims and Jews in late niineteenth-Century Morocco is a fascinating and complex subject. Much has been written about the discrimination which most members of the Jewish community in Morocco experienced at the hands of the Muslims. That the Muslim Majority regarded the Jewish minority as inferiors cannot be denied. Historically, Islamic governments have relegated Christians and Jews to a lower status as ahl'l-kitâb or ‘People of the Book’, who possessed a religious book, although not the religious book. In the case of Morocco the Jews found their freedom of action circumscribed by certain regulations. First of all, in return for the payment of a poll tax, the jizya, the sultan guaranteed Jewish life and property. In areas which were beyond government control, Jews fell under the patronage of powerful figures in their regions. Secondly, their testimony was considered invalid in Muslim courts. Thirdly, they were compelled, quite frequently, to wear special clothing and to remove their shoes when passing in front of mosques. Fourthly, Jews were often not permitted to carry arms or ride horses. And lastly, the display of a properly respectful attitude toward Muslims was expected.

The study of Ottoman history must move out of Istanbul and into the provinces and, in so doing, it must come to grips with the derebeys, local rulers of Anatolia whose independence contributed to the weakness of Ottoman government in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The derebeys of Cilicia are of special interest because they were the last to succumb to the expanding control of the nineteenth-century reformers. The purpose of this article is to examine the nature and extent of the power of these autocrats and to see why they were able to continue in defiance of the Porte until 1865.

Only recently has the Persian Gulf assumed primacy in Iran's foreign policy. Basic reasons for this ascendency lie in: (a) stabilized relations with the superpowers since the early 1960s, (b) progressive enhancement of the Gulf's role in Iran's economic and strategic interests, and (c) competitive and conflicting interests and aspirations of nonlittoral states of this region.

“In a state of rude nature”, wrote Edmund Burke, “there is no such thing as a people… The idea of a people is the idea of a corporation. It is wholly artificial; and made, like all other legal fictions, by common agreement. What the particular nature of that agreement was, is collected from the form into which the particular society has been cast”. Whether the Iranians in the early Islamic period — that is, the period from the seventh to the twelfth century — were in Burke's sense a “people” is a question that the cautious scholar would be eager to disregard and loath to handle. After all, those specialists on early Islamic Iran who have, directly or indirectly, expressed opinions on this subject have all too often projected events from the life of their own nation and times back to these earlier centuries. In no case is this projection more obvious than in the many essays written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which see this question only as a question of “national liberation”: did the Iranians hate the Arabs, and did they hope to regain their empire by destroying, or profoundly reshaping, the empire of the Muslim caliphs?

Political modernization is a difficult concept to grapple with1. The traditional approach is to view the political systems of industrially developed Western countries as a model of, or sometimes even as a synonym for, a politically developed polity.

Throughout the Ottoman period, dervishes and their convents have played an important part in both towns and countryside. Yet they have not received the attention that their importance merits, and the religious aspect of their activities has attracted more interest than the social. In the latter area, one of the pioneer works has been ömer Lutfi Barkan's study of the role of dervishes and their convents in the settlement of Anatolia and Rumelia, and the presen, t article was inspired by it. Barkan's emphasis was on how these convents, usually called tekkes and zaviyes, served as the nuclei around which future villages formed. It was pointed out how the dervishes guarded passes and caravan routes, introduced new crops and propagated more highly specialized agriculture.

In the two decades between 1953 and 1973 the rapidly growing industrialization of Iran has shifted to industry much of the former emphasis on agriculture. During the last five years of the period, the share of agriculture in the GNP declined from somewhat under 25 percent to i6 percent. Despite its decreasing part, agriculture in 1972/3 was still responsible for the largest portion of consumer expenditures, and agricultural products, notably such traditional items as carpets, dried fruit and nuts continued to rank next below oil as Iran's largest exports, and so were the second largest provider of the country's foreign exchange.

The rapid rise in the population of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century is well known. Ömer Lütfi Barkan long ago published a table showing that twelve important Ottoman cities grew from a combined population of 142,562 in 1520/1530 to a population of 271,494 in 1571/1580; likewise he has shown that the population of five major provinces in Anatolia grew 59.9 per cent in the same period, from 872,610 to 1,360,474. Fernand Braudel supports the thesis that there was a general 100 per cent population growth throughout the Mediterranean basin in the sixteenth century, and Barkan claims that growth at the Ottoman end of the Mediterranean was even more dynamic. However, there is still need for specialized studies of Ottoman population and its flux in the sixteenth century.

In this part,* the concept of honor among Black Sea Turks is compared with the concept of honor among clans (hamûla) of Levantine Arabs. The system of meaning among the Arabs is similar to that among the Black Sea Turks, but the cultural structuring of this system of meaning is different. First, the differences in cultural structuring are explained in detail. Then, the two contrasting structurings are shown to provide an understanding of a number of contrasts between the two societies with regard to ‘marriage’ and ‘affinal and maternal relationships.’

The ethical theory of the Mu'tazila is properly called ‘rationalism’, because it held that the values of human and divine actions are knowable in principle by natural human reason. Since this doctrine and related parts of the theory (mentioned in the next section) were the prevailing ethical theories in the major preIslamic religious cultures of Iran and Byzantium, the question easily arises, to what extent were the Mu'tazila as the first systematic theologians in Islam indebted to these cultures for their ethics?

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries religion continued to play an obvious role in the Middle East. Among observers of that area the significance of the impact of religion on political development was consequently never minimized to the extent that it was among observers of political trends in the West. Western scholars interested in the Middle East, however, have tended to overrate the importance of the Muslim modernists with whom they felt a certain affinity. They also have accepted too uncritically the views of modernists concerning the lifelessness of traditional expressions of Islam. As a result, not until recently have we begun sufficiently to appreciate traditional Muslim religious leaders both for their impact on and for the diversity of their responses to modern political and intellectual currents. I believe that this diversity is not accidental but rather is susceptible to analysis and explanation. This essay demonstrates how four variables (historical circumstances, theological considerations, socioeconomic considerations, and governmental policies toward Muslim religious leaders) affected the political involvement of the Islamic ulama throughout the Middle East generally and in Tunisia particularly during the ‘liberal age’.

The course of events in the Middle East since 6 October 1973 has been as surprising and as unexpected as the very events of that day. In retrospect, of course, the surprises of that day have been depreciated and obscured by journalists, scholars, and politicians who have begun to treat the outbreak of the war as part of a chain of natural developments initiated in June 1967, or in May 1948, or in 1897 depending upon their historical bent. But hindsight notwithstanding, no one expected war to break out in the Middle East in 1973. For this reason, the decision to launch a war against Israel must be examined for what it was: a complex calculation encompassing not one or two but a broad range of considerations. The decision to go to war is never a commonplace decision, nor is it one taken lightly or made naturally – not even in the Middle East. Rather, it is a complex phenomenon whose threads must be unraveled in order to be understood.

The subject of this communication is a relatively short but interesting passage in the ίστορίαι of the Athenian historian Laonicus Chalcocondyles, which deals with the administration and fiscal income of the Ottoman Empire in the reign of Muhammad II. The contents of this text were first utilized by von Hammer and most recently by Franz Babinger in his monumental history of the reign of Muhammad II, so it is obvious that in choosing this theme I am not presenting something completely new or unknown. Nevertheless, this material merits closer scrutiny than it has hitherto enjoyed, not only because of the scarcity of early sources on Ottoman fiscal history but because it will contribute to the ongoing evaluation of the historical worth of the toίστορίαι, and finally because it gives a view of the system to which the peoples of the empire were subject. A translation of the text is presented, followed by an analysis of the contents and a partial comparison with other sources.

The following is a report of a pilot study on nomad-sedentary relations viewed in terms of exchange. The study was conducted in the Zagros Mountains of Iran and in the central Hazarajat of Afghanistan during the summer of 1971. The research involved the application in a field situation of a theoretical framework that links exchange and social structure. In previous research we had investigated the relationship between social structure and exchange in societies having a particular kind of exchange system—the potlatch. Utilizing Levi-Strausss approach to structure, we have taken certain kinds of rules, preferential marriage rules or rules of succession, and built models of social structure on the basis of such rules (Levi-Strauss, 1963). These were related to other models based upon the analysis of exchange behavior. In an earlier volume, Feasting with Mine Enemy, we demonstrated the applicability of this approach in our analysis of six Northwest Coast societies by relating their different forms of social structure to the variations they exhibited in their potlatch activity (Rosman and Rubel, 1971). The purpose of the pilot study reported on here was to apply our conceptual framework relating exchange and social structure to more complex social systems.

Ibn Ṭufayl (d. 1185), the Spanish Muslim philosopher, is at once a scientist, a mystic, and a believer. His science-oriented spirit, his mysticism, and his religious belief fall naturally into their proper places within the framework of his philosophy. This philosophy is imbedded in his distinguished treatise Ḥayy Bin Yaqẓân. In this work, he fuses his comprehensive knowledge of various disciplines in an all-embracing view of things which bears the results of his intellectual labor and culminates in a science-based mysticism. In preparing for the presentation of his views, Ibn Tufayl writes an Introduction to his work which includes a rigorous criticism of the philosophies of his predecessors. This Introduction imbues the treatise with philosophical seriousness and systematic value, and reveals the author's metaphysical presuppositions and basic motives for writing Ḥayy Bin Yaqẓân. He also draws a fundamental distinction between naturalistic knowledge and mystical gnosis, two methods of cognition that are not, in his opinion, mutually exclusive, and the rigorous training in the first necessarily leads to the, attainment of the latter. Such a distinction determines the entire philosophic plan of the treatise which commences with Ḥayy's early scientific and conceptual development and culminates in his inevitable union with the Necessary Being. Had Ibn Ṭufayl not written this Introduction, a great amount of scholarly work and historical investigation would have been required to trace the historical and intellectual threads with which Ḥayy Bin Yaqẓân was uniquely woven.

At the turn of the century the societies of the Near East provided materials for some of the most pressing anthropological and sociological issues of the day. W. Robertson Smith, Marcel Mauss, and Max Weber, to name only one representative of three national traditions, all devoted considerable attention to Semitic societies. Since that time, fewer sociologists and anthropologists have had a background in Semitic languages and literatures, and new materials from outside the classical and Semitic cultures have seemed to offer fresher, more challenging problems. In recent decades, Near Eastern societies have come to play a minor role in the development and discussion of anthropological problems. In general, only the tribal societies have maintained any prominence, and even these societies have only been test cases for a theory that was formulated by Evans-Pritchard for the Nuer of sub-Saharan Africa.