The reign of Reza Shah characterized a difficult and controversial period in the contemporary history of Iran. Properly speaking, it may be said that it represented not only the beginning of the Pahlavi dynasty which Reza Shah had founded in December 1925, but also what could be considered pioneering efforts designed to modernize a feudal system in a land that had in the past commanded a venerable culture. The scholarly literature dealing with the earlier period of Reza Shah's rule has developed almost in response to continuing interest shown in things Iranian, and particularly in the country's recent history.

As far as I am concerned I remember that the first elements of Arab consciousness began to filter into my mind as a student in secondary schools, wherfrom I went out with my fellow schoolboys on strike on December 2nd [sic] of every year as a protest against the Balfour declaration whereby England gave the Jews a national home usurped unjustlu from its legal owners.

Iran's Islamic Revolution seems to have taken the world by surprise. The Western mass media have subsequently been alarming their readers with warnings of Islamic “revival,” “resurgence,” “rumble,” and “anger.” Strategists and political practitioners have joined in – invariably using the same or more academic-sounding jargon, such as the “arc of trouble” or the “crescent of crisis.” The area referred to stretches from Morocco to Indonesia, where nearly 800 million Muslims live and in which some of the world's most strategic raw materials and real estate are located. The rising attention and the West' alarm are quite understandable and indeed quite justifiable. After all, most of that alleged anger is directed at the West and its local allies and surrogates - the Shah being a case in point. The seizure of the American embassy in Teheran along with some fifty hostages in November 1979 highlighted this deep-seated resentment. But in neighboring Afghanistan another chapter of the Islamic drama is unfolding - this, time in the form of a resistance to the Soviets and their local surrogates. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December of 1979 compounded an already complicated situation. It plunged the world closer to the brink.

Popular belief, if not serious scholarship, maintains that the position of women in pre-twentieth-century Islamic society was an extremely depressed one. And although scholars were always cautious on this point, the popular belief, shared also, it would seem, by many Orientalists, is a stubborn one. The low status of women is said to have derived from the fact that the patriarchal family was supposedly the backbone of the social structure throughout Islamic society. Women, it was supposed, were often secluded in harems and, therefore, were barred from participating in public life, which meant that they could not pursue economic occupations, or go to court to defend their interests and legal rights. Moreover, it seems to have been generally agreed that women were frequently deprived of the benevolence bestwed on them by classical Islamic law, which mitigated the extremities of the pre-Islamic tribal law of Arabia. Thus, Islam reduced the number of women allowed to a man to four, in order to ensure their better treatment. Similarly, Islam denounced the usual deprivation of inheritance suffered by women, and assigned them a share in the estate of the deceased, although this was very much less than that assigned to male inheritors. It has generally been thought that even this modest improvement in the position of women was never, in fact, effected.

In his collection of essays, Peasant Society and Culture, Robert Redfield stresses that peasants are men of the countryside who are tied to the land and rooted in villages and who, at the same time, must take account of the city — whether that recognition involves its political power, its marketplace, its beliefs, its style of life, or the people it produces. Redfleld calls attention to two aspects of the interaction between town and countryside. On the one hand he focuses on the linkers, whether men (e.g., dons, senoritos, mandarins, mukhtars) or institutions (temples, schools, castes, mosques, or dramatic companies) of peasants and townsmen; on the other hand he focuses on the cultural materials (beliefs, ceremonies, art forms) they exchange. In both cases Redfield is interested in the process of exchange in its “social organizational” context. That is, he is interested in the day-to-day situations in which beliefs from the “great tradition of the reflective few” are heartily rejected or wholly accepted, or more usually tolerated, accommodated, and perhaps reinterpreted by a “little tradition of the largely unreflective many” (Redfield 1958, p. 70). And he is interested in the opposite process by which the beliefs of the many are accepted or rejected, or more usually tolerated, accommodated, and/or reinterpreted by the reflective few

Afghanistan's Khalq leaders who seized power in April 1978 inherited a mixed legal system and a bifurcated legal elite. In theirn ideological commitment to revolutionary chanfe, the Marxist government sought to employ legal institutions to further far-reaching social and political aims. The ruling group intended to curb the power of local jurists and the authority of Islamic legal reasonin through secularizing administration of the law. These policies testified for many to the regime's underlying hostility toward religion, and its determination to displace autonomous provincial leadership, both motives for rebellion by tribal insurgents and Islamic nationalists in 1979. This essay, which was researched and written before the fall of the Daoud government, examines Afghanistan's legal cadres, their education, recruitment, and performance. The persistance of Islamic influences in these processes, along with the adoption of modern practices, should convey the depth of traditionalism in the nation and also the capacity of the Afghans to accommodate new concepts not hastily or callously imposed.

The region of Mascara, Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century is an attractive terrain for one seeking to combine anthropology and history in a North African setting. It was from this milieu that the 'amīr ‘Abd al-Qādir had emerged to lead resistance to the French in the 1830s and’ 40s. And the region abounded in that quintessentially Maghribin social type best known to the Western world as “marabouts,” but known in local parlance as 'awlād sayyid. These were the descendants of walīs, saintly men whose mortal remains are sheltered by the qubbas, or small, white-washed domed shrines one sees throughout North Africa. The two subjects are closely linked, for the 'amīr himself came from a prominent 'awlād sayyid family, as did many of his most important followers.

In the historiography of Egypt it has long been accepted that private ownership of land was introduced in the nineteenth century. This development in statute law has often been linked analytically to a process of “modernization.” Modernization theory posits a fundamental dichotomy between two ideal-type societies, the traditional and modern, which implies an equally sharp discontinuity between historical eras: before and after the beginning of modernization. In this view, traditional societies lack the potential for generating significant social change from within. Change results rather from the expansion of communications and diversification of technology worldwide from modern Europe and North America. In the process of modernization, traditional norms and structures break down in the host societies, and new, rational values and institutions emerge in their place. The development of Egypt's new land regime is usually considered one such change.

There have been various anthropological conceptions concerning cultural minorities in the traditional Middle East. One model, the cultural mosaic (Coon 1958), stresses the cultural and religious autonomy of groups in contrast to their interdependence in the marketplace. Another view emphasizes the dominance of Islamic culture which clearly leaves its imprint on the culturally variant groups in its midst (Patai 1971). Both of these viewpoints are useful as starting points, but both oversimplify and overstate the case. The first implies extreme, and hence implausible, separation between the world of work and the rest of social life. The second views the processes of cultural influence in too mechanical a fashion, leaving little room for the dynamics of interaction and reinterpretation of cultural forms in varying milieus. Recent work on Jews and Muslims in Morocco (Rosen 1972; Bowie 1976) has given a more refined picture of the complexities of social contact but has either merged the conceptual level with the interactional, or paid little explicit attention to the intricacies of cultural form. All these views, therefore, ignore the existence of a religious interface and an arena in which cultural forms recognised by both the majority and minority are the subject of “discussion” –agreement and disagreement, negotiation and compromise. We wish to illustrate this point by presenting and analyzing a text dealing with Muslims and Jews in Tripolitania. Our emphasis is on a cultural understanding of the text, not on presenting an example of Jewish-Muslim social interaction.

For nearly three centuries after the famous Battle of Poitiers (Tours), which is usually regarded as the high-water mark of Arab/Muslim expansion into Western Europe, the Muslims continued to maintain a series of relatively isolated presences in regions of Western Europe outside the Iberian Peninsula. Although these presences have tended to be forgotten within the larger picture of Muslim/Christian relationships during the medieval period, the researches of some nineteenth and twentieth century scholars would seem to indicate that they left behind a considerably larger legacy than has previously been suspected.

Like many other parts of the world, in the last two hundred years or so the Middle East has gone through a process of de-industrialization followed by reindustrialization.* The decline in handicrafts continued until well after the First World War. But by then another development was under way: the growth of a modern factory industry that started around the 1890s, gathered increasing momentum in the 1920s and 1930s, and since the Second World War has proceeded at a very rapid pace.

Is there indeed a new or renewed demographic transition? The evidence suggests that there is. A rapidly growing number of countries of diverse cultural background have entered the natality transition since World War II and after a 25-year lapse in such entries. In these countries the transition is moving much faster than it did in Europe. This is probably related to the fact that progress in general is moving much faster in such matters as urbanization, education, health, communication, and often per capita income.

The Middle East was the cradle of the World's three great monotheistic religions, and to this day they continue to play a very important role it its affairs.

The international political implications of the Iranian revolution will not be known for many years to come, and American foreign policy makers and pundits will debate the question of “who lost Iran” long after that. Even the international economic implications of the revolution will not be fully realized, or recognized, in the near future. It is, however, already amply clear that the fall of the Shah has had profound consequences on Iran's economic and trade relations with other countries, in general, and with the United States in particular. It is to the latter issue that this essay addresses itself.

The subordination of women to men in Mediterranean societies is characterized by public segregation, relegation of women to the private sphere of the home, and control of their behavior through the operation of an elaborate code of “Honor and Shame,” a code whose outstanding features are the maintenance of virginity before marriage and strict fidelity after it. The specific expression of these criteria, however, varies greatly between the Christian and Moslem sides of the Mediterranean where two distinct cultural traditions prevail. In this essay, I shall examine some aspects of the status of women in Morocco in terms of their familial roles and the patterns of domestic interactions that operate within the traditional, patriarchal, extended household.

Post-World War II studies of Egypt's economy devote considerable attention to her population growth and agricultural development. Such attention is necessary in that Egypt, (though) so limited in its habitable land, has experienced a quadrupling of population during the present century; and, as its most important sector is still agricultural, more than half of that population is concentrated in rural areas. Therefore, studies have focused on the effects of population pressure on the distribution of agricultural income, on the agrarian reforms of 1952 and 1961, and particularly on population growth and policies.

In order to achieve socioeconomic progress in a developing society, it is important that modern technology, which is Western in genesis and has evolved over the past three centuries, be imported and applied. Modern technology requires not only the instrumentalities of technology and pure science as a body of knowledge and a dominant institution, but also a social and psycho-social structure at least compatible with, if not reinforcing of, the drive towards better technology and scientific inquiry. Developing societies, however, usually have an institutional apparatus and value system which are indifferent to, incompatible with, or hostile to, modernization. A process of modification, adaptation and reform of many social institutions and values is necessary in order for these societies to appreciably benefit from the introduction of science and technology. People and organizations must also restructure their modes of behavior in productive processes so that the full productivity of modernization can be obtained. The transfer of science and technology from modern to pre-modern societies is really a process of social change within the developing society, and not solely the physical importing of equipment and scientific-technical manpower, useful as these are in the modernization process.

In several scholarly works it has been asserted that opposition to tyranny is a fundamental and pervasive characteristic of Shi'i Islam.1 Here I shall try to show that the revolutionary character ascribed to the Shi'i ulama in Iran has been greatly exaggerated. I will argue that the ulama's perception of the socio-economic and political structure of Iranian society often did not basically differ from that of the secular power elite. Further, I will analyze the causes of the opposition of the ulama to the state during the early 1960s. It was in large part his analysis of these events that made Algar partially amend his conclusion to his study of the ulama in Qajar Iran, namely “that they failed to perceive the nature of what was being demanded and its implication for Iran and themselves.”2

The Latāfat-nāma (Book of Eloquent [Praise]) is a Central Asian Turkic panegyric poem from the early fifteenth century. Its author, Khujandi, a poet with a bilingual (Turkic and Persian) background and with a religious, probably Sufi, upbringing, composed this work in Khorazmian Turkic on the model of Khorazmi's Mahabbat-nāma and dedicated it to Mahmūd Khan, son of Küchük Muhammad and ruler of Khorezm in 1411 and 1422−1424.

There exists a growing body of literature which either explicitly or implicitly utilizes semiotic theory to discuss various sign systems in the Middle East. I believe that by exploring these works and linking them to similar studies, we can acquire a fresh perspective on the symbolic life of the people of the Middle East. I do not argue that semiotics can or should replace other paradigmatic approaches to out analysis of culture, but rather that semiotics can serve as a complementary method for interpreting sign systems.