Since the famous tenth-century man of letters Abū Hayyān al-Tawĥīdī (Ca. 320/932–414/1023) named four specific contemporary writers as the authors of the otherwise anonymous encyclopedic work Rasā'il Ikhwān al-Safā', it became almost traditional for both medieval and modern scholars to accept his story as fact.

Population movements have always played a dynamic role in the transformation of human society throughout history. Indeed, there is not a single phase of history anywhere in the world which has not been related in some way to low or high rates of birth and mortality, to migration and settlement and to their social, cultural, economic, and political effects. The history of the Middle East supplies excellent examples to support this contention. The Muslim calendar begins with an act of migration, that is the hejira of a.d. 622. Migrants going from the countryside to urban centers or fleeing from areas hostile to Islam have always exerted a crucial influence upon the social and political destiny of Muslim countries. The refugees from Spain to North Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the forced migration of Muslims from Russia (the Caucasus and Crimea) in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, the shift of population in India, Pakistan, and Palestine in the 1940s, to cite just a few examples, have been major factors accounting, at least in part, for the social transformation of the Muslim world in general, and of the Middle East in particular.

Our perception of the world around us, both as to what it is and what it ought to be, is influenced by a variety of factors. Among such factors are the nature of training we have received and the philosophical outlook we have been exposed to in the course of our lives. To most of us, the manifestations and the impact, if any, of the ideas that we have thus formulated do not go beyond a small circle—our mates, children, friends, and associates. For a few, it can extend to a larger circle and at times to more than one generation. In one instance, however, the impact has encompassed a nation. The Shah's reform measures have not only affected the social, economic, and political life of Iran in this generation and generations to come, but it may have altered the destiny of the country in the community of nations.

The 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War left the Ottoman Empire burdened with a new debt that was to play a crucial role in the relations between Russia and Turkey in subsequent years. Diplomatic and financial histories, however, have largely overlooked this indemnity for a number of reasons. Foremost among them is the timing of the ratification of the indemnity treaty. The actual agreement governing the procedure for the payment of the indemnity was drawn up four years after the San Stefano negotiations and the Congress of Berlin. While monographs concerned with these events mention the indemnity, they fail to follow it up. Second, in the post-Berlin period the European bondholders of the Ottoman Public Debt were primarily interested in securing control over the administration of the revenues servicing their debt. The indemnity, however, remained apart from those revenues ceded to the Ottoman Public Debt Administration. The standard financial histories naturally concentrate on the projects of the bondholders and refer to the indemnity only in passing.

Anthropologists have devoted a good deal of attention recently to what they call ‘complex society’. This rather vague concept developed in contrast with ‘primitive’ or ‘simple’ society, the small-scale, isolated, local-oriented, non- literate grouping of like social parts which anthropologists made, or fancied, their primary object of study. This is Tonnies’ gemeinschaft, held together by Durkheim's ‘mechanical solidarity.’ ‘Complex society’ on the other hand, is more similar to Tonnies’ gesellschaft, bases to some degree upon Durkheim's ‘organic solidarity’; it has many differentiated parts, ingeniously interwoven into elaborate structures, with specializations and rankings and overlappings and other imaginative complications. More and more anthropologists found themselves, whatever their original intentions, involved in studies that were manifestly of ‘complex society.’ This was the result of two developments: One was the encapsulation of most ‘simple’ societies by colonial or national societies, and the concomitant engagement with government, economic markets, and development (or under development). This encapsulation was not something completely new that happened during the course of anthropological investigation, but something which had been going on and which anthropologists ‘discovered’ and began to devote attention to. The other development was the carrying of anthropological research to the areas of the ‘great civilizations’ in East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. In these areas, long-recorded histories, literate traditions, great states and empires, and sophisticated technologies belied the notion of ‘simple’ society, and raised embarrassing questions about classical anthropological methodology, ‘participant observation’ in a constricted area for one or two years.

Twenty-five years ago, when anthropologist Paul Stirling did the fieldwork for his book Turkish Village, he tried to find out what the villagers of Sakaltutan knew about the origin and history of their village. The villagers apparently had very little sense of their past, and the longest genealogies covered only six generations. On the basis of their information and other observations and opinions, Stirling estimated the age of the village at about two hundred years and suggested that the village ‘was probably founded by people from villages nearer Kayseri, who had made a temporary summer camp there for pasture, and later decided to settle permanently and plough’.

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.

The graduate history program of ‘Ayn Shams University has produced some of the finest scholarly studies in the field of Egyptian history in recent years. The program has been particularly receptive to the shift toward a social and economic approach within the discipline of history. It is noteworthy that for a number of years this program has been directed by two historians who were not themselves trained in this specialization. Dr. Ahmad ‘Izzat ‘Abd al-Karīm (the founder of the program) is an institutional historian, and Dr. ‘Abd al-Raḥlm Muṣṭafa (the current chairman) is a political historian

A substantial number of social-psychological studies dealing with the Arab world purport to explain the ‘Arab basic personality’, or ‘the Arab mind’. The alleged purpose of these studies is to understand the ‘psychology of the Arabs’ the underlying motivations of their behavior, and the reasons for their underdevelopment. Most of these studies emphasize the use of projective analyses of the Arab personality on the basis of supposedly dominant childrearing practices. The personality pattern which emerges from this research includes characteristics such as free-floating hostility, rigidity, the lack of reality testing, and suspiciousness6 which are said to explain the nature of Arab political behavior.

The archives of the imperial German government, 1871–1918, are an important but somewhat neglected source for late Ottoman and Middle East history. These collections fell into Soviet, American, French, and British hands after World War II and are presently divided between the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and the German Federal Republic (West Germany).