The Arab Rebellion in Palestine began with sporadic outbursts of terrorism on April 19, 1936. The ensuing disorders and the Arab general strike that followed were in retaliation against the British refusal to grant three demands first put by the Arab leadership of Palestine to the Mandatory in November, 1935. The three demands were: (a) total cessation of Jewish immigration into Palestine; (b) prohibition of all sales of Arab land to Jews; and (c) the granting of independence to Palestine and the ending of the Mandate.

For the Muslims, ancient Egypt was a land of mystery and magic. The monuments of Pharaonic Egypt attested a once-flourishing civilization, and the sheer scale of so many of these remains seemed to point either to a despotic monarchy which could command the services of multitudes of slaves to build the pyramids or to carve the rock temples of Upper Egypt (this being the rationalistic explanation put forward by, e.g., Ibn Khaldūn), or else to the existence of a priestly tradition of esoteric wisdom and the ability to command supernatural powers (which Ibn Khaldūn fully admitted elsewhere in his Prolegomena). This last view had behind it the sanction of the Qur'ān, above all, in regard to the story of Moses’ throwing down his staff before Pharaoh and its metamorphosis into a serpent, and his subsequent contest in magic with the Egyptian sorcerers (Qur'ān, 7, 101–23/103–26); these events naturally lent themselves to much fascinating embellishment by the qussās or popular storytellers.

In Western democracies elections are viewed as a means by which the public controls the policies of the government and decides who the policy-makers should be. Democratic theory makes two basic assumptions about elections: one is that the electorate is generally informed to the extent that it can make a meaningful and rational choice among various policy alternatives; the other, that the electorate expresses its policy preferences through recognizable partisan groupings in a two- or multiparty system.

Theodor Nöldeke's Geschichte der Perser und Araber sur Zeit der Sasaniden is one of the masterpieces of “the greatest Semitist of his own time and, perhaps, of all times.” It treats a section of the Tärīkh (History) of Tabari, Nöldeke's counterpart in medieval Islamic times—the two representing the ripest fruits of two great periods of scholarship and learning, nineteenth-century Germany and ninth-tenth-century Baghdad. The careers of the two men present certain similarities: both were child prodigies, they traveled far and wide for their education, were extremely prolific and versatile, and their longevity was as remarkable as their scholarly contribution was durable.

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Assyrians—Syriac-speaking Middle Easterners belonging throughout the medieval period to either of the two branches of Eastern Christianity (Jacobite and Nestorian)—remained a little-known community scattered throughout Ottoman and Persian territory. The Assyrian community examined here was concentrated in Iranian Azerbaijan, mainly around the town of Urumiyah (Rizaiyah). Together with tribal Assyrians, who remained in their ancestral mountain villages on either side of the Perso-Ottoman border, Urumiyan Assyrians formed the nucleus of the Nestorian community until World War I. They were united by the same language, modern Eastern Syriac (henceforth referred to as Assyrian), and owed ecclesiastical allegiance to the Church of the East under the hereditary Patriarch, the Mar Shamūn.