bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Diner Versus the Ducat
Authors: Bacharach Jere L.
Published: December 2011

Since the Second World War, United States currency has been accepted in almost every country in the world, and in many locations the ‘George Washington’ dollar has been in greater demand than local monies. In ancient, medieval and modern times, other currencies have had a similar success. Examples of this phenomenon are the ancient Athenian silver ‘owl’, theByzantinegoldsolidus, the Florentine gold florin, and the Maria Theresa silver taler. In the late fourteenth century A.D. the florin was replaced by the gold coin of Venice, the ducat, as the ‘dollar of the Middle Ages’; that is, the international currencypar excellence. The position of the ducat was associated with the international trading position of Venice as well as the fact that ‘the Venetianducato, which was first coined in 1284, kept both its weight and fineness remarkably intact up to the end of the Venetian Republic’. The ducat's domination of the Eastern Mediterranean money market led to the appearance of a series of imitations, including Islamic imitations which were produced in response to the introduction of ducats into the internal economy of Mamluk Egypt. All the accounts based on Arabic sources date the domination of the ducat in the Mamluk market froma.h.801/a.d.1399. These same sources describe the various attempts by Mamluk sultans to meet the challenge of the ducat by coining imitations. Their efforts culminated in the ashrafî, first issued in 829/1425, which successfully replaced the ducat as the principal gold currency of the Mamluk Empire until the Ottoman conquest of 922/1517.
Armenia and the Caucasus in the Genesis of the Soviet–Turkish Entente
Authors: Hovannisian Richard G.
Published: December 2011

On 26 April 1920, three days after the opening of the Grand National Assembly in Angora (Ankara), Mustafa Kemal addressed his first officially confirmed message to the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) of Russia. Shortly thereafter, Bekir Sami Bey (Kundah), Turkish foreign minister, departed for negotiations in Mosocow.A draft treaty was initialed in August and delivered to Angora in September, and in March 1921 the governments of the Turkish Grand National Assembly and of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic established formal bonds by concluding the Treaty of Moscow. During the few intervening months the small Caucasian Armenian republic, which had been created in May of 1918 and which had become the fulcrum of Armenian aspirations for an independent state encompassing both the Russian Armenian provinces and the contiguous Turkish Armenian provinces of eastern Anatolia, was crushed by the invasion of General Kazim Karabekir's XV Army Corps. The offensive, begun after attainment of a vague Soviet-Turkish understanding, not only overturned the Allied-imposed Treaty of Sévres, which had awarded to the Armenian republic much of the four eastern vilayets of Van, Bitlis, Diyarbakir, and Erzurum, but also restored to Turkish dominion the sanjaks of Kars and Ardahan, since 1878 parts of Russian or Eastern Armenia. What was more, Nationalist Turkey annexed the Surmalu district, embracing Mount Ararat, the historic symbol of the Armenian people.
The Military Clauses of the Anglo–Egyptian Treaty of Friendship and Alliance, 1936
Authors: Morsy Laila
Published: December 2011

The legitimacy of stationing British troops on Egyptian soil for the defence of the Suez Canal, and maintaining a base in the Near East, were Britain's special requirements in Egypt. Accordingly, the security of these two vital imperial interests was the motive that dictated Britain's policy towards Egypt. The political pattern in the country, reflecting a continuous struggle between those two significant forces, the popular nationalist Wafd party and an autocratic palace, largely determined the course of Anglo–Egyptian relations.
The Reemergence of the Wafd Party: Glimpses of the Liberal Opposition in Egypt
Authors: Hinnebusch Raymond A.
Published: December 2011

What has been called the Revolution of 1952 was not really a revolution; a revolution should start from the bottom, not the top. The 1919 Revolution was different; it created the Egyptian man, while the 1952 revolution killed him. The 1919 Revolution … achieved … the British evacuation, while the 1952 revolution brought with it several defeats. The leaders and members of the 1919 Revolution faced torture in prisons, while the leaders of the 1952 revolution built palaces with money from secret sources and sent hundreds of people to military prisons.
The Islamic Militants in Egyptian Politics
Authors: Ansari Hamied N.
Published: December 2011

Because of the assassination of President Anwar Sadat, observers have felt a sense of urgency to analyze the conditions that favored the emergence of Islamic militancy in Egypt. Psychological, political, and socioeconomic categories have been widely used to explain—and even suggest the means to neutralize—the ill effects of sectarian and political violence on social harmony and the stability of the political order. Laudable as these attempts are, they must first be preceded by a clear conception as to whether the militants do represent a social movement whose existence can be supported by empirical data.
The Detribalization of Arabic Poetry
Authors: Loya Arieh
Published: December 2011

The forms, themes and patterns of classical Arabic poetry were laid down in the Arabian Peninsula before the advent of Islam. Indeed the oldest poem of which we have any record dates back to the period of Jâhiliyya, a derogatory term meaning ‘ignorance’ coined by the early Muslims to denote the state of religious and moral depravity of pre-Islamic Arabs. This period covers scarcely more than a century and a half (c. a.d. 500–622). Yet when the Arabs first sprang onto the stage of world history to carve an empire for themselves, they already had an extremely complex and refined poetic art. This remarkable phenomenon has baffled the student of Arabic literature and history: ‘The most striking feature in Arabic literature is its unexpectedness’ remarks Gibb, while Goitein refers to it as ‘the miracle of pre-Islamic poetry and literary language’. The Jâhili poets, though springing from primitive and illiterate nomadic tribes, were no beginners declaiming shaky lines in a mixture of dialects in prevalence at the time. These were a host of poets erupting all over northern Arabia, from Syria to Yemen and from the fringes of Iraq to the borders of Egypt, masterfully reciting highly developed qasîdas (odes) in one and the same language, betraying little of the dialects of their region. Above all, their poetry, vigorous and vivid as it was in general, was cast in the same, steel structure of a set of complex metrical schemes.
Class, Community, and Arab Historiography in the Early Nineteenth Century—The Dawn of a New Era
Authors: Philipp Thomas
Published: December 2011

The aim of the present essay is to explore some of the relations between the socioeconomic and political transformation which occurred in Syria during the eighteenth century and the development of a new view of the world and the self as it came to be expressed in the writings of several Arab historians at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Of particular interest in this context is the question of whether and when a clear departure from traditional patterns of society and thought can be discerned.
Ninteenth-Century Reform in Ottoman Libya
Authors: Anderson Lisa
Published: December 2011

The history of political change in Libya during the nineteenth century has been obscured by subsequent events in the Middle East and North Africa. A relatively unimportant province of the Ottoman Empire, it went to the least important European colonial power in the region – Italy – and the Italian tenure destroyed much of the legacy of Ottoman reform. Even contemporary observers in the nineteenth century usually viewed the province through a prism whose primary focus was elsewhere, leaving distorted and partial accounts of the changes wrought by the Ottoman administration. This lacuna in the literature has hindered comprehensive assessment of the Ottoman reform period and, perhaps as seriously, distorted interpretation of Libya's subsequent political history.
The 1912 Election Campaign in the Cities ofBilad Al- Sham
Authors: Khalidi Rashid Ismail
Published: December 2011

In a region which has witnessed so many violent seizures of power, violations of constitutional legality, and myriad varieties of dictatorship over the past few decades, it is often easy to forget that many parts of the Middle East enjoyed elements of democracy, including freedom of speech and assembly, a free press, and hotly contested elections, as far back as the late Ottoman period.
The City and the Mountain: Beirut's Political Radius in the Nineteenth Century as Revealed in the Crisis of 1860
Authors: Fawaz Leila
Published: December 2011

In the course of the nineteenth century, the relationship between Beirut and Mount Lebanon underwent important changes that have affected Lebanon's political life up to the present day. The city and the countryside had always been to some extent mutually dependent. They became more closely tied in response to the economic and political transformation of the region in the age of European penetration. This growing interdependence increasingly took the form of Beirut's ascendancy over the Mountain. While in earlier centuries it was the Mountain which had extended its sway over the city, in the nineteenth century the process was reversed. But Beirut's triumph as the dominant partner in the relationship was not an unmixed blessing: While bringing prosperity to the city, it also transferred to Beirut many of the unresolved tensions of the Mountain, preparing the way for the city's sectarian rivalries and tensions in more recent times.
Religion or Opposition? Urban Protest Movements in Egypt
Authors: al-Sayyid-Marsot Afaf Lutfi
Published: December 2011

Recent years have witnessed a resurgence throughout the Muslim world of movements calling for radical social reforms and for changes in the form of government. These movements are characterised by a strong religious component. Their calls for reform are couched in the Muslim idiom — that is, in demands for social justice (adala) and the satisfaction of man's basic necessities, and are accompanied by demands for a return to an Islamic form of government, one that is ruled by the sharia. The supporters of such movements frequently are dressed differentlyfrom the rest of their compatriots, an outward manifestation of their allegiance to a Muslim-guided and a Muslim-oriented goal. It has become customary in the West to refer to such movements as Muslim fundamentalists, but the Arab world refers to them more correctly as Muslim organizations, or jamaat islamivya. This nomenclature covers a multitude of organizations with different principles and slogans, but all have one common denominator — their reformist appeals derive from religious belief and are asserted to be founded in Muslim principles.
From Theocracy To Monarchy:Authority And Legitimacy In Inner Oman, 1935–1957
Authors: Eickelman Dale F.
Published: December 2011

The twentieth-century Ibadi imamate of “inner” Oman (1913–1955) constituted one of the world's last theocracies. In a demise unique for the mid-twentieth century, it became assimilated into one of the world's last absolute monarchies. The 1955 shift from theocratic to dynastic rule met initially with the support, or at least the acquiescence, of most of the tribesmen and notables of the interior. This acquiescence at first appears surprising because the fundamentalist Islamic religious and political principles for which the imamate stood continued to be properly supported. One of these principles for Ibadis was that the imām, the spiritual and temporal leader of the Islamic community, should be the most qualified of available candidates and chosen by a consensus of the community's religious men of learning and notables, a notion markedly at contrast with the ascriptive one of dynastic rule. Conflict between these two forms of rule is basic to much of Islamic political history and to that of pre-1970 Oman in particular.
Images of Arab Women in Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz, and Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
Authors: Takieddine-Amyuni Mona
Published: December 2011

Naguib Mahfouz's realistic treatment of his subject matter in Midaq Alley (Cairo, 1947) stands in sharp contrast to the symbolic mode of Tayeb Salih in Season of Migration to the North (Beirut, 1966). The style of Mahfouz here is simple, clear, and direct. His characters are common people who belong to the lower strata of life in Cairo and, more specifically, in the “Midaq Alley” of Cairo, this dark enclosed street which literally grinds down its inhabitants (as its Arabic name suggests), then carries on, indifferent to their plight.
A Standard Aggregative Model for the Jordanian Economy
Authors: Mikhail W. M.
Published: December 2011

The simple model presented in this paper is an econometric time-series model which was designed to use the available Jordanian national accounts statistics. It aims at explaining the structural changes in the Jordanian economy in the 1970s as well as projecting values of certain macroeconomic variables for the year 1985, that being the terminal year in the current 5-year plan.
The Ottoman Emigration to America,1860–1914
Authors: Karpat Kemal H.
Published: December 2011

Population movements have always played a major role in the life of Islam and particularly the Middle East. During the nineteenth century, however, the transfer of vast numbers of people from one region to another profoundly altered the social, ethnic, and religious structure of the Ottoman state—that is, the Middle East and the Balkans. The footloose tribes of eastern Anatolia, Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian peninsula were spurred into motion on an unprecedented scale by economic and social events, and the Ottoman government was forced to undertake settlement measures that had widespread effects. The Ottoman-Russian wars, which began in 1806 and occurred at intervals throughout the century, displaced large groups of people, predominantly Muslims from the Crimea, the Caucasus, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean islands. Uprooted from their ancestral homelands, they eventually settled in Anatolia, Syria (inclusive of the territories of modern-day Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel as well as modern Syria), and northern Iraq. These migrations continued until the time of the First World War. In addition, after 1830 waves of immigrants came from Algeria—especially after Abdel Kader ended his resistance to the French—and from Tunisia as well. These people too settled in Syria at Damascus.
Turkish Agriculture and the Five-Year Development Plans
Authors: Carey Jane Perry Clark , Carey Andrew Galbraith
Published: December 2011

Despite rapidly growing industrialization and large migration from the countryside,Turkey today remains primarily agricultural, with a farming area larger than that of any other southern European country, and an agricultural population consisting of just under 70 per cent of the approximately 35 million people in the country. Although reduced in importance, so that its contribution of 40 per cent of the total domestic product in 1963 was reduced by 1969 to little over 33⅓ per cent, agriculture still accounts for some 90 per cent of the country's exports.
The Study of ‘Complex Society’ in the Middle East: A Review Essay
Authors: Salzman Philip Carl
Published: December 2011

Anthropologists have devoted a good deal of attention recently to what they call ‘complex society’. This rather vague concept developed in contrast with ‘primitive’ or ‘simple’ society, the small-scale, isolated, local-oriented, non- literate grouping of like social parts which anthropologists made, or fancied, their primary object of study. This is Tonnies’ gemeinschaft, held together by Durkheim's ‘mechanical solidarity.’ ‘Complex society’ on the other hand, is more similar to Tonnies’ gesellschaft, bases to some degree upon Durkheim's ‘organic solidarity’; it has many differentiated parts, ingeniously interwoven into elaborate structures, with specializations and rankings and overlappings and other imaginative complications. More and more anthropologists found themselves, whatever their original intentions, involved in studies that were manifestly of ‘complex society.’ This was the result of two developments: One was the encapsulation of most ‘simple’ societies by colonial or national societies, and the concomitant engagement with government, economic markets, and development (or under development). This encapsulation was not something completely new that happened during the course of anthropological investigation, but something which had been going on and which anthropologists ‘discovered’ and began to devote attention to. The other development was the carrying of anthropological research to the areas of the ‘great civilizations’ in East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. In these areas, long-recorded histories, literate traditions, great states and empires, and sophisticated technologies belied the notion of ‘simple’ society, and raised embarrassing questions about classical anthropological methodology, ‘participant observation’ in a constricted area for one or two years.
The Zentrales Staatsarchiv of the German Democratic Republic as a Source for Late Ottoman and Middle East History
Authors: Quataert Donald
Published: December 2011

The archives of the imperial German government, 1871–1918, are an important but somewhat neglected source for late Ottoman and Middle East history. These collections fell into Soviet, American, French, and British hands after World War II and are presently divided between the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and the German Federal Republic (West Germany).
Problems Of Medieval Armenian and Muslim Historiography:The Mxit'ar Of Ani Fragment
Authors: Kouymjian Dickran K.
Published: December 2011

Only the introductory portion of the History written by the Armenian Mxit'ar of Ani has come down to us. However, an extensive passage on the Ghaznavids and Seljuks from the lost part of the work is quoted in the Universal History composed c. 1268 by Vardan Vardapet3. The content and the sources used for the compilation of this much-neglected narrative is the subject of this study.
The Cairo Archives for the Study of Èlites in Modern Egypt
Authors: Hunter F. Robert
Published: December 2011

Western scholarship is today at work ‘rediscovering’ the Egyptian archives. After a decade of relative absence, scholars have in the past few years converged on Cairo in ever growing numbers to mine the archival treasures hidden away in mosques, palaces, and old public buildings. Between 1968 and 1970 American scholars researched eight archive projects, Europeans several more; and in 1971–2 The American Research Center in Egypt administered 29 projects (a near threefold increase from the immediately preceding years), of which 18 proposed to use archival material1.
Power Persuasion, and Language: A Cririque of the Segmentary Model in the Middle East
Authors: Caton Steven C.
Published: December 2011

A famous definition of power reads: In studying political organization, we have to deal with the maintenance or establishment of social order … by the organized exercise of coercive authority through the use, or the possibility of use, of physical force.
Toutes Directions: Reading the Signs in an Urban Sprawl
Authors: Geertz Clifford
Published: December 2011

In late February of 1986, a week or two before the massive joint celebration of the 25th anniversary of Hassan II's accession to the Moroccan throne and the 10th of his launching of the Green March into the Sahara (the March actually took place in November of 1975, but it was ritually assimilated to Coronation Day for this milestone occasion), the municipal council of a small city in the east-central part of the country issued a decree. Henceforth, the color of all buildings in the city was to be beige:crème, in the French redaction,qehwi, in the Arabic. Paint could be obtained at designated outlets.
Winners and Losers of The Iranian Revolution: A Study in Income Distribution
Authors: Behdad Sohrab
Published: December 2011

The income inequality gap in prerevolutionary Iran was no doubt a contributing factor to the mass mobilization of Iranians in the 1979 Revolution. The Resolution of the Ashura March (December 11, 1978) demanded the establishment of “social justice, the right of workers and peasants to the full benefit from the product of their labor” and an end to “any form of discrimination, exploitation, profiteering and economic domination which may result in the accumulation of great wealth, on the one hand, and deprivation and poverty on the other.”
Oriental Despotism: The Case of Qajar Iran
Authors: Abrahamian Ervand
Published: December 2011

As R. H. Tawney once remarked, ‘the past reveals to the presenr what the present is capable of seeing’. Present political scientists who are interested in comparing past power structures have been the first observers to reveral methodically the fundaqmental differences between feudalism and oriental despotism. They have shown how the feudal monarchies of Europe, in their ideal form, were restricted by hereditary and independent aristocrats, by institutions representing the estates of the real, and with civil societies with corporate rights, immunities, and inalienable privileges. And they have shown how despots in the East, in their ideal form, ruled through patrimonial bureaucracies, did not contend with estate institutions, could withdraw concessions granted previously, and were unhampered by independent intermediaries between themselves and their subjects.
Observations on Sources for the Study of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Iranian History
Authors: Farmayan Hafez F.
Published: December 2011

Until recently, most works dealing with nineteenth-century Iran have had special points of view which now are hopelessly out of date. Concerned only with aspects of nineteenth-century Iran, they have treated these subjects either in connection with literature or with the rivalry of the European imperialist powers. Whatever the merits of these works, they may be said to have outlived their main usefulness. The age of imperialism is gone; and though the classical Persian literature of a thousand years may well be immortal, its creative spirit is dust. In Iran, as elsewhere, modern men have drastically altered their political, historical, and literary views. We now need histories of other kinds. It is time to explore and to research. Too much which is published on Iranian history continues to be either shallow, narrow, cliché-littered imitations of the not-so-great historians of the past, or are official glorifications of Iran's present, not always consistent with the truth. The field requires a widely extended and earnest historical inquiry into the development of modern Iranian society through the exploration of its recent past. An investigation of the social structure of nineteenth-century Persia, for instance, is absolutely essential to an understanding of the behavior of the present-day Iranian bureaucracy, which is often inexplicable to the Western observer. When the Persia of the peasants, the mullâs and the mîrzâs, is brought into clear perspective behind the Iran of the National Iranian Oil Company and the Plan Organization, we shall be in a position to understand the complexities of the present Iranian administrative machinery and the broad spectrum of motivation of its maintenance men.
The Ottoman Industrial Revolution
Authors: Clark Edward C.
Published: December 2011

The European industrial revolution adversely affected the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century and was instrumental in its final collapse. The eastward flow of European goods grew rapidly in the years following the end of the Napoleonic era in 1815, and Ottoman lands soon became important markets for many European manufacturers. Their wares increasingly displaced traditional Ottoman products, made Ottoman handicraftsmen jobless, reduced Ottoman internal sources of taxes, and so contributed to eventual European control of Ottoman finances. These phenomena are well known and have received appropriate recognition as symptoms of an economic invasion that was aided by the diplomacy of West European consuls and ambassadors, and sanctified by largely unquestioned European arguments in favor of laissez-faire.
Editorial
Authors: Fawaz Leila
Published: December 2011

As the new editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, my goal is to maintain the excellent reputation and standards of the Journal set by its departing editor. To achieve that task constitutes a tall order for just about anyone in the field, as Peter von Sivers has done such an admirable job over the past five years of promoting the Journal's international reputation. Under his editorship, the quality, number, and scope of submitted manuscripts and reviews, as well as the Journal's readership, have increased. Scholars from the Middle East have taken a more active part than ever before, as evaluators, reviewers, and authors.
The Ottoman Census System and Population, 1831–1914
Authors: Shaw Standford J.
Published: December 2011

No problem has perplexed students of modern Ottoman history more than that of determining the state of the empire's population during its last century. Foreign travelers and diplomats and various nationalist leaders claimed that the Ottoman government had no census of its own. They made self-serving estimates of its population to support their own political or diplomatic ambitions, using at best methods such as multiplying by preset figures the number of males found in neighborhood coffeehouses or Sunday religious services, or simply accepting the estimates of local priests. In the face of this, the Ottomans did no more than publish their figures without providing supporting data or bothering to explain their census procedures. As a result, the Ottoman census system and its data were largely ignored in the outside world, and the rough and inaccurate estimates of foreigners were generally accepted in preference to the official figures.
Agrarian Bourgeoisie, Semiproletarians, and the Egyptian State: Lessons for Liberalization
Authors: Springborg Robert
Published: December 2011

From Morocco to Iraq, Arab polities and economies appear to be liberalizing. The holding of comparatively free elections, easing of media censorship, and invigoration of associational activity have accompanied relaxation of political control by single parties. Economic liberalization has paralleled these political changes. Privatization, currency devaluations and partial flotations, rejuvenation of capital markets, reductions of subsidies on basic consumer goods, and other elements of economic liberalization packages have been adopted in varying degrees in the political economies of the Arab republics and, to a lesser extent, in the Arab monarchies.
Twilight of the State Bourgeoisie?
Authors: Waterbury John
Published: December 2011

For many years the class category of the state bourgeoisie has had considerable currency in the analysis of states and societies in the Middle East and in the developing world in general. In part, resort to this category has been driven by the remarkable expansion of the economic roles of these states, an expansion that has required that we try to understand the managers of the process. In that respect what is undertaken here fits into a broader and older effort to make sense, in class terms, of the owners of intellectual or technical capital—white-collar workers, civil servants, public-sector managers, and those in the service sector. These are awkward strata in that they neither own (much) capital nor do they provide labor to the owners of capital in the same manner as peasants and the proletariat. They are frequently portrayed as “intermediate” and “in transition.” They are situated between capital and labor, and, in Marxist analysis, are seen as the witting or unwitting agents of the dominant class as it emerges or as it consolidates its grip on the economy and the state apparatus.
An Early Arab Theory of Instruction
Authors: Haddad Fuad Said
Published: December 2011

The field of education, its various components and means of putting it into effect, have not received the attention of those who have studied the history of Arabic thought. It has been only recently that Arab education has received the attention of scholars. But thus far, research has been limited mostly to histories of educational institutions and to certain fragmentary aspects of education. Theories of education, or of areas within the field of education, have not been examined.
Portrait of a Nineteenth-Century Iranian Statesman: The Life and Times of Grand Vizier Amīn Ud-Dawlah, 1844–1904
Authors: Farmayan Hafez
Published: December 2011

In 1898, with Great Britain and Russia vying for political and economic dominance of Iran, Grand Vizier Mīrzā Alī Khān Amīn ud-Dawlah set in motion a cycle of events that, during the early part of the twentieth century, led to the downfall of the Qājārs, a dynasty he had spent his entire professional career serving. What initiated this cycle was the negotiation for a loan from Great Britain, sought partially for governmental expenses but mostly to finance a trip by the Shah to Europe. To obtain this loan, Amīn ud-Dawlah mortgaged the revenues of Iran's two most important customs houses in the south (Bushehr and Kermanshah), and also allowed those two departments to come under the control and administration of the British-owned Imperial Bank of Persia. In return for these astonishing concessions, the Bank advanced £50,000 to Grand Vizier Amin ud-Dawlah for emergency expenditures. The remainder, a mere £200,000, was to be paid upon completion of negotiations with the British Government. British bankers and diplomats in Tehran, aware of the sensitivity of the Grand Vizier's extraordinary decision, urged London to complete the negotiations as soon as possible. In the view of British representatives in Tehran this was imperative if temporary control of the customs houses was to become “a permanent institution.” However, negotiations dragged on long enough to give Russia and the Grand Vizier's rivals a chance to successfully frustrate the negotiations. Failure to obtain this British loan forced Grand Vizier Amīn ud-Dawlah to resign.
The Ideology of Mu'ammar Al-Qadhdhafi: Theory and Practice
Authors: St John Ronald Bruce
Published: December 2011

While the literature on ideology is long-standing and considerable, it is also very controversial. On the one hand, the termideologyremains in such poor repute that many authors apologize for using it or substitute other words or expressions. On the other, many scholars employ the term without definition as though its meaning was well understood.
The Socioeconomic Role of the Local Foreign Minorities in Modern Egypt, 1805–1961
Authors: Deeb Marius
Published: December 2011

The purpose of this study is to examine the socioeconomic role played by the local foreign minorities in modern Egypt. Who were these local foreign minorities? And what do we mean by their socioeconomic role?

Local foreign minorities were those foreigners like the Greeks, the Armenians, the Italians, and other Europeans, who emigrated to Egypt during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and who kept their language and culture and did not get assimilated into Egyptian society. Other local foreign minorities included the Syrians and the Jews. The former were originally Arabic speaking but a large proportion of them tended later to acquire foreign nationalities and a Levantine outlook. A great number of Jews in Egypt were foreign emigrants who settled during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century in Egypt, whereas a section of the indigenous Jewish population acquired foreign protection and foreign nationalities during the same periods.
The State and the Arts in Ottoman Turkey
Authors: Rogers J. M.
Published: December 2011

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.
The Ottoman Empire, Zionism, and the Question of Palestine (1880–1908)
Authors: Öke Mim Kemal
Published: December 2011

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.”
The System of Dependent Capitalism in Pre- And Post- Revolutionary Iran
Authors: Pesaran M. H.
Published: December 2011

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), thebazaris(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.
The Pīshivarān and Merchants in Precapitalist Iranian Society: An Essay on the Backgound and Causes of the Consrituional Revolution
Authors: Afshari Mohammad Reza
Published: December 2011

A single photograph taken during the Constitutional Revolution portrays the nature of that historical event better than most of the accounts purporting to explain the Revolution in terms of the ideological impact of the West. It is a picture of some fourteen-thousand artisans and shopkeepers (pīshivarān), dressed in their traditional attire, taking sanctuary (bast) in the garden of the British Legation in Tehran and demanding mashrūīyat (constitutional rule). At first sight the picture is perplexing; it stands at odds with the present studies of the Revolution: How could a “modern,” or a “national bourgeois” revolution have been brought about by a social class who appeared—and indeed were—traditional in every sense of the word?
The Logic of Analogy and the Role of the Sufi Shaykh in Post-Marinid Morocco
Authors: Cornell Vincent J.
Published: December 2011

In spite of the fact that it has been a favorite subject of scholars for more than seventy years, the religious history of Morocco, especially concerning the period before the French protectorate, remains at best incompletely studied and at worst completely misunderstood. This does not mean, however, that theories and indeed dogmatic assumptions have not been advanced, most notably in the study of what has been termed “popular religion,” that exotic blend of “orthodox” scholasticism and “heterodox”praxisthat has made “Moroccan Islam” so interesting.
Women, Class, and Gender: Muslim Jaffa and Haifa at the Turn of the 20th Century
Authors: Agmon Iris
Published: December 2011

The following four stories were recorded among hundreds and thousands of others in the sharica court records of turn-of-the-century Jaffa and Haifa. There is no obvious connection among these four court cases. They raised various legal issues; the litigants were city-dwellers as well as villagers; and they also differed from one another in their socio-economic backgrounds. What these stories illustrate is that there was a major difference between the perception of family loyalties and obligations typical of men and women in the Muslim families of late Ottoman Jaffa and Haifa. I believe that it is important to recognize this difference if we want to understand gender relations in these families. I shall tell these stories first, then discuss the gender relations.
The Modes of Production Approach to Seventeenth-Century Iran
Authors: Foran John
Published: December 2011

A number of the basic works on Iranian history have attempted to characterize seventeenth-century Iran as a whole, usually from a non-Marxist perspective. Vladimir Minorsky, for example, employs the term “tribal feudalism” to describe the pre-'Abbas I system, and speaks of the “great transformation” in the period to 1630 from tribal feudalism to “patrimonial absolutism.” These leads have been followed by Nikki Keddie, with “tribal feudalism”; Alessandro Bausani, with “pastoral nomadic feudalism”; and Amin Banani, with “patrimonial absolutism.” James Reid offers the term “uymaqsystem” (tribal state), while Hafez Farmayan notes the transition from Isma'ils “theocratic-feudal form of government” to 'Abbass “military and bureaucratic” centralized state. Marshall Hodgson's panoptic view of Islamic history provides the general term “agrarlanate citied society” and specific characterizations of Safavid Iran as heir to “military patronage state,” as a “bureaucratic absolutism” and as an “agrarian absolutism.” Each of these conceptualizations has its merits, not the least being that their authors include some of the most perceptive and empirically well-informed twentieth-century historians of Iran, Islam and the Middle East. While it is impossible to discuss their theoretical approaches in detail here, it should noted that the terminology tends to disclose two basic (if somewhat overlapping) orientations: (1) these are largelypoliticalconceptualizations—patrimonial absolutism, agrarian absolutism, theocratic feudalism, tribal state, military patronage state, and (2) a number of them suggest hybrid economic entities—tribal pastoral nomadic feudalism, agrarianate citied society. Without denying the interest of the first, primarily political approach to characterizing seventeenth-century Iran as a total system, it is the second set of terms—those of Minorsky, Bausani, Keddie and Hodgson—that is of particular significance for the present analysis, since each hints at themixedeconomic bases of the Iranian social formation, to which we shall return after a look at the standard Marxist approaches.
Fiscal and Monetary Systems in the Mahdist Sudan, 1881–1898
Authors: Nakash Yitzhak
Published: December 2011

This article focuses on two major aspects of the Mahdist political economy, i.e., its fiscal and monetary systems. It attempts to integrate an analysis of their structure with that of the political behavior of the Mahdist rulers in order to show how the Mahdist rulers' political power and personal aspirations affected the development of both systems. In doing so, the article will be primarily concerned with the struggle of the successors of the Mahdi for resource control; it will examine the efforts of the ruling group to control and manipulate the fiscal and monetary systems in order to turn these—and indeed the economy as a whole—into a power base so as to preserve the established political order.
Colonial Bridgehead: Social and Special Change in Alexandria, 1850–1882
Authors: Reimer Michael J.
Published: December 2011

The great revolution was a technological revolution by which the West made its fortune, got the better of all the other living civilizations, and forcibly united them into a single society of literally worldwide range. The revolutionary Western invention was the substitution of the Ocean for the Steppe as the principal medium of world-communication. This use of the Ocean, first by sailing ships and then by steamships, enabled the West to unify the whole inhabited and habitable world.
The Christians Between Ottomanism and Syrian Nationalism: The Ideas of Butrus Al-Bustani
Authors: Abu-Manneh Butrus
Published: December 2011

In the Ottoman system the population of the Empire was organized upon a confessional basis, not upon a territorial or linguistic one. It was composed of religious communities each of which had its own internal organization and was controlled by a religious hierarchy. Socially and culturally each community (millet) formed a separate entity, each kept apart from the other. There was no attempt to create uniformity. Consequently, no intercommunal solidarity or social integation evolved in Ottoman society.
Appeasement and the Problem of Palestine
Authors: Sheffer Gabriel
Published: December 2011

Laymen, Zionist leaders, and both Jewish and gentile analysts have maintained that in the 1930S the British government's policies toward Palestine were strongly affected by Britain's general orientation toward appeasement. Both contemporaneously and ex post facto, critics have made three assumptions about these policies. First, the decision-making elite which launched Britain's policy of appeasement was also responsible for Middle Eastern policies in general and policies toward Palestine in particular. Second, British actions in Palestine were an integral part of the general trend in British foreign and defense policies. Third, out of selfish interests Britain sacrificed the weaker democratic Jewish community in Palestine (the Yishuv) to its more aggressive protagonist (the Palestinian Arab community) which was supported by the leaders of neighboring Arab countries.
The Regional Equalization of Health Care and Education in Syria Since the Ba'thi Revolution
Authors: Drysdale Alasdair
Published: December 2011

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.
Agricultural Mechanization in Egypt: Hopes and Fears
Authors: Richards Alan
Published: December 2011

The fellah has never used tractors, reapers, binders, and threshing machines, and it is unlikely that he ever will. He is too poor, and in any case feels no need of intermediaries between him and the soilH. H. Ayrout, The Egyptian Peasant, 1963.

Father Ayrout might be surprised by the Egyptian countryside today! Agricultural mechanization has been spreading rapidly, especially since 1973. Although national tractor censuses are notoriously unreliable because of the problems of treating old machines, current official estimates place the number of four-wheeled tractors at 25,000. Over 1,000 tractors have been manufactured at the Nasr works in Helwan every year since 1973; the number of tractor imports has quadrupled in the same period (see table I).
The Evolution of Privatization in Turkey: The Institutional Context of Public-Enterprise Reform
Authors: Üniş Ziya
Published: December 2011

In the 1980s public policy shifted sharply in favor of market-based solutions, in contrast to the previously dominant “Keynesian” approach to economic management. A number of countries, irrespective of their regimes or stages of development, are currently implementing programs designed to reduce the size and scope of the public sector and strengthen the market. The privatization of public enterprises constitutes a key element in such a strategy.1 Yet hitherto, the extent of privatization—the number of enterprises involved as well as the scale of divestiture—has been extremely limited, especially considering the amount of rhetoric the idea has generated. In addition, the vigor with which privatization policies have been pursued also shows considerable variation among countries. These “stylized facts” of privatization clearly merit an explanation.2 Here I will look for that explanation by using the Turkish experience with privatization between 1980 and 1989 as a case study.
The Effect of Emigration of Husbands of Husbands on the Status of their Wives: An Egyptian Case
Authors: Brink Judy H.
Published: December 2011

It is a widespread pattern in many countries in the Third World for men to leave their families and migrate long distances in order to earn money. The effects of labor migration are usually studied using a macro approach: how migration effects the wages, labor supplies, and governmental policies on the national level. In this study, labor migration is studied using a micro approach: the effect of the migration of the husband on the relationships between husband and wife, mother and child, and wife and in-laws.
The Struggle for Dayr Al-Zur: The Determination of Borders Between Syria and Iraq
Authors: Tauber Eliezer
Published: December 2011

When World War I ended and the political map of the Middle East was redrawn, the ruler-straight borders separating the Fertile Crescent countries were not determined wholly in Europe, when the mandates were divided between Britain and France, as is commonly believed. The border between Syria and Iraq was determined between 1918 and 1920, when Iraqi officers serving in the Syrian army brought about the annexation of regions originally designated for British-occupied Iraq to Faysal 's Arab government in Syria.
Some Aspects of Changing Economy in Rural Iran: The Case of Kalardasht, a District in the Caspian Provinces
Authors: Mir-Hosseini Ziba
Published: December 2011

This paper is the result of fieldwork carried out in Kalardasht, a mountainous region of the Caspian provinces. It has two interrelated purposes. First, it is offered as a contribution to the economic ethnography of Iran. Second, it examines the process of continuity and change in the economic structure of rural Iran. Changes in rural communities as a result of transitions in the broader society have attracted much attention in recent years. Here, a number of such economic changes are documented and analyzed for Kalardasht from 1977 to 1985.