A recent burst of interest in revisionist interpretations of early Islamic and especially Abbasid history may be attributed in large measure to the availability of a number of fresh source materials, one of the most important of which is an anonymous history of the Abbasid family. A number of problems surrounding this work are still far from being satisfactorily resolved, including the questions of its title, the date of its composition, the identity of its author, and its historical and historiographical value.

The Sa⊂ūdī Civil War, which developed after the death of the Imām Faiṣal at al-Riyāḍ in A.H. 1282/A.D. 1865, and which was largely responsible for the debilitation and ultimate demise of the Second Sa⊂ūdī State, has received relatively little attention from either Sa⊂ūdī or Western historians. In neglecting this period, modern Sa⊂ūdī scholars may have been influenced by the consideration which led Wahhābī chroniclers of an earlier generation to provide only cursory treatment of the Civil War in their accounts of Najdī history; the decade between the Imām Faiṣal's death and the resolution of the conflict in 1293/1876, characterised as it was by persistent fraternal rivalry and displays unprincipled political opportunism, does not represent a particularly creditable episode in the history of the āl Sa⊂ūd.

The traditional view of ʿUmāni history during the past two centuries is that the country was unified under the Āl Bū Saʿīd dynasty, which was based first in Rustāq and later, with the assumption of power by Ḥamad b. Saʿīd in 1785, in Masqaṭ. The supposed shift of the capital to Masqaṭ, the country's major port, was interpreted by Lorimer as a disruptive influence in ʿUmāni politics, whereas J. B. Kelly has depicted the move as representing a change in the basis of ruling power in ʿUmān from the land to the sea. This study takes exception to these two interpretations as well as to the general assumption that Masqaṭ was the capital of a unified ʿUmān. In 1785 Ḥamad b. SaḤīd Āl Bū Saʿīdī established an independent state in Masqaṭ in a move that enabled him to profit from trade with the interior of ʿUmān, which was dependent on Masqaṭ for imported foodstuffs, textiles, metals and other raw materials, while freeing him of the tribal opposition that has traditionally plagued any ruler in ʿUmān trying to control both the interior and entrepôt. Once established in Masquaṭ, Ḥ and his successors adopted an aggressive military and political policy in the Arabian Gulf (1785–1820) and then East Africa (1820–1829) which was designed to create a commercial empire centered on Masqaṭ. A fundamental principle of this policy was the avoidance of any unnecessay involvement in the affairs of ʿUmān, which was divided among various tribal leaders.

A number of writers on Egyptian Arab nationalism have maintained that this nationalism originated in religious motives, that it was initially exploited by the Palace and its allies and only then reluctantly adopted by the Wafd for primarily party purposes. In an essay entitled “Pan Arabism and British Policy” Kedourie links the initiation of an active pan-Arab policy to King Faruq and his “coadjutors and instruments” Ali Mahir and Abd al-Rahman Azzam, who in the late thirties “invented and propagated pan-Arabism as a policy for Egypt” and who “conceived the dream of an authoritarian Muslim state in Egypt embracing gradually all the Arabs and perhaps in the fullness of time all the Muslims.” He acknowledges that the Wafd and not the Palace entourage negotiated the Arab League but he attributes al-Nahhas's acquiesence to personal and party interests. “We do not yet know what convinced al-Nahhas that pan-Arabism was a paying policy,” he writes, “but no doubt the desire to please the King, to dish his opponents by adopting their policy, the dislike of Iraq's aggrandisement should Nuri al-Said's [Fertile Crescent unity] scheme be realized, the approval of the British, and visions of future grandeur had their part to play.” Egypt, he claims, had never manifested any interest in Arabism before the 1943–1945 negotiations leading to the Arab League.

Kedourie presents the fullest, most explicit, and baldest statement of this interpretation but it is found, or reflected, variously, in other well-known works, including Heyworth-Dunne's Religious and Political Trends in Modern Egypt in which it seems to have been first formulated, as well as Safran's Egypt in Search of Political Community and Mitchell's The Society of the Muslim Brothers

The year 1973 was clearly a turning point in the recent economic history of the Middle East. On October 1 of that year, the price of Arabian Light, a representative type of Middle Eastern crude oil, stood at $3.01 per barrel. On October 16, following the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war, the price rose to $5.12. By January 1, 1974, the price had reached $11.65, as OPEC further exploited its opportunities for cartel profits. In consequence, there was an international transfer of purchasing power—from oil importers to oil exporters—unprecedented in its scale and suddenness. The Middle East has been the major beneficiary of this transfer. Other Middle Eastern countries benefited indirectly, as the oil states expanded their demand both for imported commodities and for immigrant labor, and stepped up their programs of financial assistance to less favored parts of the region. So 1973 saw the start of an acceleration of Middle Eastern growth that was both rapic and widely diffused.

The Islamic fundamentalist doctrine on riba states that the rate of interest is zero, a doctrine based upon the Quranic injunctions against it. The word ‘riba’ means ‘increase’ as interpreted by Imam Razi, which corresponds to the word ‘interest’ as defined by Webster's New World Dictionary. In both cases the increase refers to the amount beyond what is owed. Thus, the strictest interpretation that can be given to the word riba is that it means interest—an amount, or rate, due above the principal of a loan. The word riba, however, is commonly translated as usury which is defined by Webster's Dictionary as “an excessive or unlawfully high rate or amount of interest.” Thus, the fundamental aspect of the controversy about the doctrine of interest in Islam is whether the rate of interest is zero, in which case riba is interpreted to mean interest per se, or whether a positive rate of interest is permissible, in which case nba is interpreted to mean usury.

In viewing American relations with the middle East since the Second World War, scholars have focused on the more dramatic events: Israel's independence in 1948, the Suez affair of 1956, and the post-1967 amalgam of conflicts and diplomacies. This, however, has resulted in a dearth of research on the inter vening periods, particularly the first half of the 1960s, when admittedly American leaders were preoccupied with events and crises elsewhere. Yet this period witnessed a substantive transformation in the American-Israeli relationship, complemented by a revealing twist in American relations with the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Relying primarliy on recently declassified documents, this paper seeks to explain both the course of American realtions with Israel and Egypt, as well as the reasons for the Middle East's relegation to the sidelines by American foreign policy decisionmakers. More specifically, two developments require explanation: Israel's emergence as an acknowledged ally of the Unisted States and recipient of offensive weapons; and the determination of American decisionmakers to pursue closer realtions wiht Nasser's Egypt despite numerous conflicting interests.

Part 1, (IJMES, 14 [1982], 249–281) presented arguments in favor of the first of two major contentions in respect to the development of Egyptian Arab nationalism between the two world wars; namely, that a rigid dichotomization between an assumed Arab-Islamic orientation of the Palace and a secular-liberal, Egyptian orientation of the Wafd and other parties is false. In the preceding segment I tried to show that in the interwar period both the Wafd and the Palace began to develop Arab nationalist orientations, albeit cautiously, and in a manner that continued to subordinate Arab concerns to the national question more narrowly conceived. I was particularly interested in demonstrating that no new, activist pan-Arab policy could be attributed to the Palace in the late thirties. Part 2 elaborates upon these and other themes as it discusses my second major contention:

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were a number of armed attempts by people in the Arab world, and particularly in the Maghrib countries, to resist European penetration and colonialism. Historians have made considerable efforts to categorize these attempts as being either examples of ‘primary’ resistance or of ‘modern nationalist’ resistance, a distinction based largely on the presence or absence in the movement concerned of an ideological content making reference to the various Islamic reform movements or to European-style nationalism. Thus Edmund Burke can write of the rebellion in the Moroccan countryside around Fez in 1911, which finally ushered in the French and Spanish Protectorates: “One looks in vain, for example, for evidence of the influence of reformism, Pan-Islam or Islamic modernism upon the movement.”

The purpose of this article is to present to a wide public the documents relating to the construction of Süleymaniye published by the late ömer Lutfi Barkan and his team of collaborators in Süleymaniye Camii ve Inşaati, Vols. I, II (Ankara 1972, 1979). They strikingly illustrate the ability of the Ottoman central administration to co-ordinate complex operations minutely from a distance; and nothing of such detail exists for any monument of Istanbul before the early seventeenth century, or for any other building in the Islamic world.

Some topics have already been considered in detail by Barkan, which explains the present choice of the sections of the accounts relating to furnishing and decorating Süleymaniye. They offer a mass of material of considerable intrinsic interest and of considerable value for the history of the luxury trades, both domestic and foreign, in sixteenth-century Ottoman Turkey. But simple translation is not enough: there are too many variant or dubious readings; the technical vocabulary is often recondite and the senses of certain terms must be a matter for conjecture; and the identification or designation of many of the materials is problematic.

In the analysis of the transition from low-income, rural-centered, capital-poor countries to modern, capital-rich, urbanized nations, small enterprises have received increasing attention in recent years. In rural areas, there is a belated recognition of the importance of nonfarm enterprises as supplementary sources of income and employment in village households. In towns and cities, there has been an explosion of interest in small producers, including but not limited to the so-called urban informal sector.

The Arab region is generally thought of as wealthy, being the recipient of a large income from oil. In reality, oil wealth is confined to a small minority of states and peoples; most of the region's population are poor.

This paper discusses the employment pattern and future problems of the six poorest countries of the Arab region: Syria, Jordan, Sudan, South Yemen (Peoples' Democratic Republic of Yemen), Egypt, and North Yemen (Yemen Arab Republic).

In his recent book on Orientalism Edward Said made it clear that the German relationship to the Orient has been different from that of the British or French. In Germany there was no sustained national interest in the Orient; the relationship was not “actual,” for it was almost exclusively “scholarly.” Said also argues, however, that Germany did have in common with other European nations a “kind of intellectual authority over the Orient” and that it, too, contributed to the Western invention of the term “Orientalism,” itself an act of dominance and superiority. In this point it seems that Said is correct, for the act of labeling not only suggests expertise but also exercises expressibility as a means of intellectual and cultural control. Yet recognition of the linguistic basis of authority and the power to dominate another culture with that authority is not new. German writers during the eighteenth century also felt that British and French dominance interfered with the development of the arts and sciences in their country. Indeed, Goethe recognized at least two forms of authority which shaped Oriental literature: one was the political forces within the Orient itself and the second one, a more subtle form of authority extrinsic to the Orient, was the scientific philology of Western culture which fostered a particular image of the Orient. That is, Goethe suggests in his critical writings on Oriental literature a departure from the norms of Western science and at the same time champions the need to understand the sociocultural forces at work in the Orient itself. Thus Goethe's critical writings in many ways anticipate Said's view that “Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed”.

The study of proverbs has a long history. Collectors have come from many walks of life and their motives have been various, but foremost among them was the idea that the proverbs of a people would provide valuable clues about their character and culture and open paths of communication. While this notion is in part correct, the cultural portrait painted by proverbs may be fragmented, contradictory, or otherwise at variance with reality. Proverb collections, both old and new, can still constitute a fertile field for study, but must be regarded not as accurate renderings but rather as tantalizing shadows of the culture which spawned them.

The increased interest in Afghanistan, highlighted by the Soviet invasion of that country in December 1979, calls for the reassessment of the more recent political history of Afghanistan, particularly its relations with the great powers. In this connection the period of World War 11 has often been treated superficially, and until today there has been only one book (L. W. Adamec, Afghanistan's Foreign Affairs to the Mid- Twentieth Century: Relations with the USSR, Germany, and Britain [Tucson, 1974]) which contains adequate coverage of the war years. These years ought to be considered as a watershed for the entire region since they clearly foreshadowed the events to come, which we are observing today with great amazement and alarm.

This study examines the structures of thought behind a representative selection of recent Arab historical and social scientific works on the Ottoman era of Arab history to elicit their historically bound social uses.

The “Upheaval” (mahapach) of May 1977 brought to an end forty-four years of Labor hegemony in the international institutions of the Zionist movement and twenty-nine years of Labor dominance in the political institutions of the State of Israel. In the wake of the 1977 election, the Israel Labor Party found itself forced into the unfamiliar role of opposition–and with it the rural settlement movements associated with the party.

Whatever their underlying causes, social upheavals and revolutions represent violent and often anarchic manifestations of the masses' frustrations and unfulfilled aspirations in the face of nonresponsive despotic rulers with an autocratic and suppressive bureaucratic machinery. Iran's revolution of February 1979 was first and foremost a popular uprising against the dictatorial rule of the Shah. The millions of people who throughout 1978–1979 joined street demonstrations were united in what they wanted to dispose of and whom they were fighting against. Mobilized under the tactical tripartite alliance of the ulama (men of religion), the bazaris (merchants, small traders, and shopkeepers), and the intelligentsia (secular liberal reformists and leftist revolutionaries), the masses were determined to topple the Shah's rule. The demise of the old regime seemed to be the only obstacle to a promising future. Beyond this immediate aim there was, and still is, no agreement as to the root causes of the February revolution and its ultimate objectives.

By the 1880s, the growth of anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria as well as the avalanche of pogroms in Russia and East Europe convinced a considerable section of the Jewish intelligentsia that assimilation was no longer a desirable nor a possible solution to the “Jewish Question.” They came to realize that Jews were not only a religious group, but also a separate nation, bound by a common faith and sentiment rather than by land. According to these Jewish nationalists, the Jewish Question could only be solved if the Jews stood on a par with other nations, which could be attained by the collective return of Jews to the ranks of the nations as a people living in their homeland. This was why Dr. Theodor Herzl, as the founder of political Zionism, insisted that the Jews should be “granted sovereignty over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation.”