Islamic studies progress. In recent years a great deal of work has been done on the Umayyad period, on the early history of Shi‘ism, and on the origins of the Muslim schools of law. A broader current of research has yielded numerous studies of the ‘ulamâ’ and their place in Muslim religious and communal life. New historical information and new points of view are gradually modifying received perspectives on Muslim religious movements and on the nature of Muslim religious elites.

Although the effects of the Revolution of 23 July 1952 on Egyptian politics and the economy are well known, its impact on Egyptian culture has not yet been satisfactorily explained. Politically and economically, the Revolution has gone thrsough two more or less distinct phases. During the first decade of its existence, it moved cautiously on all fronts, and its spokesmen were fond of pointing out that their ‘ideology’ was experimental, pragmatic, and flexible rather than bound to any set of predetermined ideas. Then in 1961 the government veered sharply to the left. The so-called Socialist Laws were issued, altering profoundly the ownership and distribution of wealth in Egypt.

One of the most significant, but unstudied, aspects of the reforms accomplished in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century under the leadership of the Tanzimat statesmen and of Sultan Abd ul-Hamid II was a radical transformation of the traditional Ottoman tax structure and the introduction of the system that has remained in force, with relatively few changes, to the present day, at least in the Republic of Turkey.

On 14 October 1973 Turkish voters went to the polls for the seventh time since the advent of multiparty politics twenty-three years earlier. This election was the subject of unusual interest because it followed the 12 March 1971 military intervention. It was also of intrinsic analytical interest because it afforded an opportunity to determine whether previous electoral trends were continuing or not.

No other people in the world, perhaps, have given more information in their poetry on their cultural and social life than have the Arabs over the centuries. Many years before the advent of Islam and long before they had any national political organization, the Arabs had developed a highly articulate poetic art, strict in its syntax and metrical schemes and fantastically rich in its vocabulary and observation of detail. The merciless desert, the harsh environment in which the Arabs lived, their ever shifting nomadic life, left almost no traces of their social structure and the cultural aspects of their life. It is only in their poetry – these monuments built of words – that we find such evidence, and it speaks more eloquently than cuneiform on marble statues ever could.

A survey of the contributions of political science to the understanding of the Middle East and of Middle East studies to the development of political science shows that one of the most fruitful areas of cross-fertilization is in elite studies.1 It might be interesting to speculate on the reasons behind this: Are politics and society in the Mideast especially elitist, or is it simply an accident of research that one scholar who stumbled on a mine of elite data inspired his students to pursue similar types of analysis?2 Whatever the reason may be, another characteristic of Mideast elite studies that stands out is their single- polity focus. If some of the elite studies of the Muslim East have developed a diachronic dimension, none has undertaken multinational comparison.