The sixteenth century may be regarded as the “turning point” in the evolution of the murābiūṭūn tradition in the Maghrib.2 The crisis of Iberian imperialism in the Maghrib brought to the surface, by way of reaction, latent forces within the Maghribian social womb; the result was a social revolution which may be characterized as the “murabitun revolution” because of the rise to prominence of the murabitun in Maghribian society from the sixteenth century onward. Integral to the murabitun revolution was the religious ferment or renaissance generated by the anti-Christian reaction, a renaissance that was expressed in the effervescence of maraboutism, the characteristic Maghribian variety of oriental sufism.

Marcel Proust ends the first book Du côte de chez Swann of his mammoth novel A la recherche du temps perdu with this sentence: “Le souvenir d'une certaine image n'est que le regret d'un certain instant; et les maisons, les routes, les avenues, sont fugitives, hélas, comme les années.” It would seem that a significant part of the early fiction of Intiℑār Husain, a Shī'ite Muslim and by far the most talented Urdu writer in Pakistan toäay, is devoted to the remembrance of things past, moments gone, and faces dissolved by time.

As a field of study, the Middle East, like its predecessor the “Orient”, continues to exist more concretely within a vast realm of Western texts, both artistic and ethnographic, than it does on the ground. This ingrained disparity between representation and social reality has motivated some scholars to examine this literature as the manifestation of physical or ideological domination. In Edward Said's Orientalism the interpretation of this literature becomes a search for determining social and political forces, the evidence of which, like the nineteenth-century anthropological notion of “survivals”, resides in each text as an implicit network of unconscious images and metaphors. Similarly, Abdelkebir Khatibi, investigating the historical and ethnographic texts of Jacques Berque, views this literature as determined by the requirements of an exigent and compelling, but inherently flawed, Western metaphysic; an “onto-tháologie” which, in confronting questions of essence and existence, must formulate an “other” to realize its “self”.

Reflecting the political climate and preoccupations of the time, structural examinations of international politics in the 1950s and early 1960s tended to focus on East-West interaction patterns and associated questions of global polarity and polarization. A major exception to this statement has been provided by an eclectic group of regional subsystem analyses which were, at least initially, intended to counteract the distortions perceived to be associated with an exclusively global, bipolar perspective.

“Zein,” as friends and colleagues knew him, practiced an interpretive anthropology that, like the writing of history, is a craft in which the best work is realized only after long years of field experience, study, and the development of concepts and themes through teaching and writing. Zein's sudden death on 13 August 1979 at the age of 44 cut short his work just as it began to achieve its fullest form.

Zein's professional career was divided between two remarkably distinct periods. The first of these lasted for roughly the decade prior to 1966, during which he mastered the conventions of what might be called a standard, functionalist anthropology and applied them to ethnographic research in Egypt. The second period began in 1966 with his participation in the formative period of symbolic anthropology at the University of Chicago.

Virtually all underdeveloped countries suffer acute and sometimes debilitating geographical inequalities in the distribution of wealth and opportunity. These spatial inequities exist at all levels: between regions, between urban and rural areas, and between center and periphery. Some regional planners view such imbalances as essentially transitory and argue that with increasing economic development, wealth and opportunity will eventually spill over from growth centers and trickle down through the urban hierarchy to backward, less-developed areas.