A remarkable man in his own lifetime, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani became a legend after his death.1 For many people, Afghani evokes an image that combines the medieval ideal of the cosmopolitan Islamic scholar with the romantic aura of the 19th-century revolutionary. Since the late 1960s, Afghani has been the object of particular attention and controversy in both the West and the Islamic world. Iranian and Western scholars have radically reinterpreted his background and beliefs.2 This reevaluation of Afghani on the basis of new information about him has, however, not been generally accepted in the Islamic world. If anything, recent attention to Afghani's unorthodoxy and possible irreligion has only served to harden his defenders by giving credence to his own statements. Afghani plays an important role in the historical image of Muslim unity and sophistication presented by many Islamic groups and governments in this age of revived panIslamism. His plea for Islamic renewal through solidarity never lost its relevance as a powerful symbol linking the past with hopes for the future. The image of Afghani as the indefatigable fighter against Western imperialism who helped make the Muslim world aware of its distinct identity remains equally as suggestive.

In the massive contemporary literature that has come to be known as “Islamic economics,”1 the claim is repeatedly made that an Islamic economic system would achieve a greater degree of economic justice than existing capitalist and socialist systems. An Islamic system, it is said, would be free, on the one hand, of the exploitation and severe inequalities that characterize capitalism, and on the other, of the class struggles and intolerable restrictions that are the hallmarks of socialism.2

In January 1950, in the first free election held in nearly eight years, Egyptians went to the polls to return a Wafdist government to power. After having been banished from office for five years, Egypt's majority party assumed office aware that it shouldered a heavy burden of responsibility. Between October 1944, when the King dismissed the war-time government of Mustafa al-Nahhas, and January 1950, eight minority governments governed, or tried to govern, Egypt. Escalating political violence marked a period of increasing disillusion with parliamentary rule that encompassed all sectors of Egyptian society. Indeed, it might be argued that Egypt's ancien régime survived until 1950 only because the minority governments marshaled the coercive powers of the state to control the streets, campuses, and factories, where dissidence was most manifest. At the time, many sensed that if the political establishment failed to achieve the evacuation of British troops from Egyptian soil, contain rampant inflation, and narrow the gap between rich and poor, martial law could not save the liberal order from collapse. What would follow was uncertain, but talk of revolution, fearful or hopeful, filled the air.

In 1887 or 1888, a small group of Syrian Isma'ilis journeyed to Bombay to visit Sultan Muhammad Shah, the third Aga Khan, and on their return to Syria recognized him as their Imam. Unexpectedly in consequence, little more than a decade later, the religious leader of that section of the Isma'ili sect in Syria and a number of his followers found themselves arrested and imprisoned, accused of treason and other crimes. Their trials before criminal courts in Damascus lasted, intermittently, from 1901 until 1906, and before those trials were concluded, more men of their faith had been similarly accused, imprisoned, and put on trail. The persecution of the Isma'ilis only ended, and even then not completely, with the Ottoman constitutional revolution of 1908.

Syria was one of the few areas of medieval Islam where cities emancipated themselves from centralized rule to a certain degree by shaping local self-representative institutions and by transforming “classical” government offices according to their special needs. For nearly two hundred years—from about the second half of the 10th century to the middle of the 12th century—Syrian cities possessed urban heads (ru'asā') and militias of young men (ahdāth) that, in a way, complemented or even replaced the rulers and garrisons representing the Fatimid and Saljuq central governments; in time, they became institutionalized collaborators within the Saljuq regimes. This development is most evident in Damascus and Aleppo, although things evolved differently in the two cities. By gaining the rulers' recognition, the urban forces (ru'asa' and ahdath) not only managed to take over the functions of the police (shurta) and partake in the rulers' military and political tasks, but they also controlled—to a certain degree—the economic, administrative, and financial affairs of the city (these, it will be argued, can be substantiated only with regard to Damascus, not to Aleppo). It is significant, for example, that the Arabic sources reporting on Damascus do not mention the muhiasib, the “classical” official for the urban administration and economy, when there was a ra'īs. Even more striking is the fact that sometimes the ra'īs also functioned as the vizier installed by the ruler. Thus, one can see that the ra'īs, the holder of a local urban office, became a very important member of the central ruling system, normally represented by a foreign-born elite that also supplied the vizier.

In recent decades, most historians have begun to shy away from the once predominant idea of post-16th-century decrepitude in the Ottoman Empire1 and come to recognize the remarkable resilience and recuperative ability of the Ottoman imperial structure even into its final century.2 Against the gathering momentum of this trend of reinterpretation, it is, ironically, chiefly the Ottomanist specialists themselves who have shown the greatest resistance. The “experts,” as a consequence of their quite proper immersion in indigenous sources, are better exposed to and, hence, more likely to become ecmeshed in the culturally determined value system of the subject of their study. This article is an attempt to identify some of the sources that contributed to the formulation of the decline topos and related topoi.