The sounds and activities of an increasingly globalized human world often drown out the noises of the debates in scholarly journals and intellectual magazines about the coming wars among civilizations. This globalized theater of life is paradoxical, conflictridden and often destructive of many human values, but it is fundamentally an increasingly one-world context. Its struggles and conflicts cannot be best understood by viewing them as if they were wars between essentially different and separated entities.

The second edition of The Encyclopaedia of Islam (EI/2), published since 1954 by E.J. Brill in Leiden, is well known as an unparalleled scholarly reference for the history and culture of the Islamic lands. By late summer 1994, the Encyclopaedia had reached the entry Riḍā Shāh in the middle of the eighth volume. The volumes, each approximately 1000 pages long, are lodes of information about the people, places, events and ideas of Islamic history and thought; but simply by handling the volumes, a reader would never realize that the visual arts were an important component of Islamic culture. There are very few illustrations, none of them in color. Even to the most unsophisticated eye, EI/2 is a dense, ponderous, and user-antagonistic reference tool. Nevertheless, it is a useful resource for the history of art and architecture in the Islamic lands, particularly to those who already know something about Islamic civilization, although the reader must be an experienced miner to discover the ore-bearing strata.

The political and economic upheaval in the Libyan Jamahiriyah since 1969 had a profound impact on the country’s educational institutions, its research facilities and the local academic community as well. Revolutionary Committees at the local universities and the relocation of ministries and research institutes led to the dispersal and sometimes destruction of research and data collections. This was exacerbated by a general suspicion of Western-style research and by the forced return of scores of young scholars as the Qadhdhafi regime increased its confrontation with the West.

Readers normally assume that encyclopedias will be, well, encyclopedic, but they probably do not usually expect that a particular encyclopedia will function as a forum for advancing the state of knowledge in a field. Those who are familiar with Volumes I-V of the Encyclopaedia Iranica already know that its editor, Professor Ehsan Yarshater, has not only insisted that this encyclopedia would be exceptionally comprehensive, but that he has also encouraged many of his contributors to submit essays that represent innovative and original scholarship in Iranian studies. In fascicles 1-6 of Volume VI Professor Yarshater and his distinguished board of editors have maintained the exceptionally high standards of the first five volumes. Occasionally—but just occasionally—they have commissioned articles that seem to have marginal importance for the field, but ultimately scholars will appreciate and even delight in such entries which, in a sense, are a distinguishing trait of the editors’ ambitions and success.

Although muslims make up less than two percent of South Africa’s total population, they are a well-established community with high visibility. In 1994 South Africans will celebrate 300 years of Islam in South Africa. The introduction of Islam to South Africa is usually attributed to Sheikh Yusuf, a Macasser prince exiled to South Africa for leading resistance against Dutch colonization in Malaysia. But the first Muslims in South Africa were actually slaves, imported by the Dutch colonists to the Cape mainly from India, the Indonesian archipelago, Malaya and Sri Lanka beginning in 1667. The Cape Muslim community, popularly but inaccurately known as “Malays” and known under the apartheid system as “Coloureds,” therefore, is the oldest Muslim community in South Africa. The other significant Muslim community in South Africa was established over 100 years later by northern Indian indentured laborers and tradespeople, a minority of whom were Muslims. The majority of South African Indian Muslims now live in Natal and Transvaal. Indians were classified as “Asians” or “Asiatics” by the apartheid system. The third ethnically identifiable group of Muslims in South Africa were classified as “African” or “Black” by the South African government. The majority of Black Muslims are converts or descendants of converts. Of the entire Muslim population of South Africa, some 49% are “Coloureds,” nearly 47% are “Asians,” and although statistics regarding “Africans” are generally unreliable, it is estimated that they comprise less than four percent of the Muslim population. Less than one percent of the Muslim population is “White.”

In 1993 I taught an NEH summer seminar for high-school teachers on the Arabic novel in translation. As I went through the listing of translated novels that are available in the 1990s and also made a choice from translations of other genres as back-up materials, I became newly aware of the wealth of material that we now have available. To be sure, it is not of the size and variety that is available for many other literary traditions, but there are now sufficient published novels and anthologies of poetry, drama and short-stories to devote entire courses or at least significant segments of them to individual genres and themes. I could not help thinking back to the start of my teaching career in 1968.

Traditional iranian dastgāh music, as fostered in the courts and the homes of the aristocracy, draws from many sources, including regional music styles, religious genres of melody and chant and popular songs that have been reworked by master musicians and their students. In different regional capitals, musicians acquired their repertoire from their master teacher through a process of listening and repetition and also drew from local sources of music, incorporating these into their own unique version of this repertoire of traditional melodies and melodic fragments.

The Committee on the Selection of the Best Dissertation of the Year on a Topic of Iranian Studies of the Foundation for Iranian Studies has cited two dissertations with Honorable Mention. Azin Movahed’s, The Persian Ney: A Study of the Instrument and its Musical Style, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was cited for its unique contribution to a better understanding of an ancient and honorable Persian musical instrument and its interaction with modes and ranges of music and its possibilities and constraints for creativity and improvisations. Charles T. Kurzman’s, Structure and Agency in the Iranian Revolution of 1979, University of California at Berkeley, was cited for its highly original contribution to a better understanding of “the role of agency in revolutions in general and the various religious and nonreligious agents in the Iranian revolution in particular.” The Committee did not award a prize for 1993.