In May 1896 Lord Cromer, the British Agent and Consul-General in Egypt and that country's de facto ruler, received a “very numerously signed petition” from the coalheavers of Port Said. These workers, most of them migrants from Upper Egypt, were employed through labor contractors by several English and other foreign-owned companies to carry coal onto ships transiting the Suez Canal. The coalheavers complained of ill-treatment by the contractors (shuyuūkh), who “buy and sell us like slaves”, stealing part of their wages and forcing them to buy all they needed at stores owned by the contractors. Cromer acknowledged receipt of the petition in a letter to the coaling companies, commenting that the workers “seem to have some real grievances, notably in connection with the truck system”. Suggesting that the employers seek to avoid a strike, he expressed the opinion that the government “should deal with a strike at Port Said on the same lines as a strike in England, that is to say, that they should preserve order and not interfere to any serious extent between employers and labourers.”

In the past two decades, the rate of growth of agricultural output in Egypt has been quite low and, in particular, has fallen behind the country's population growth rate. Most observers seem to agree that despite certain natural constraints, such as limitation of arable land, the sector's performance could have been much better if the Egyptian government had chosen to pursue more supportive policies toward agriculture. There is, however, much less agreement over the specific policies that have been most responsible for the sector's past stagnation. Several recent studies have emphasized the role of price policies, pointing out that the government has taxed agriculture heavily by keeping the relative prices of most major crops quite low. Others, on the other hand, have held the government's investment policies responsible, arguing that the sector's resources have remained undeveloped because of insufficient public investment in research, extension, and infrastructure. While the debate over the relative importance of these sets of policies has generated a number of valuable contributions to the understanding of Egyptian agriculture, the past analyses of the sector's production system have not sufficed to settle the differences. One of the main problems is that, so far, most studies have concentrated on outputs and prices of individual crops and have thus failed to provide comprehensive analyses of the sector as a whole.

Orthodox theories of crime in the Third World and in regions of uneven economic development offer a unilinear explanation of the relationship between economic development and increased crime rates. Simply stated, this Durkheimian position views the transition from traditional to modern society as being associated with the weakening of mechanical forms of solidarity and the emergence of secular and impersonal role structures based on a complex division of labor. Universalistic and achievement criteria replace ascriptive and particularistic values, and deviance-derived social control models based on formalized coercive sanctions substitute for traditional and community-based forms of control. Anomic behavior, frustration of expectations, and norm violation are considered an expected, if transitory, outcome of social change, and are explained on the basis of a clash between modern and traditional value systems.

Foreign currency transactions have come under stringent controls in postrevolutionary Iran. This is a relapse into the prevailing conditions in the years preceding 1974, before the increase in oil revenues eliminated the foreign currency gap. Initially, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) imposed exchange controls to stop the postrevolutionary capital flight. Soon, however, exchange controls became an integral policy instrument of the government for rationing the existing supply of foreign currency in the face of a widening foreign exchange gap.

Writer's block is not a new concept, but I should like to consider it in a new context: the realm of the young and rapidly developing Francophone literature of the Maghreb. I am suggesting that the writer's malaise before the blank page is a sign of a highly developed authorial relationship with one's language and materials and that the recent increase in the number of (1) testimonials in which Maghrebian writers bear witness to their sense of impotence when facing the purity of the white page and (2) reactions symptomatic of that frustration is evidence of development in the literature in question.

This research paper provides an historical analysis of urbanization in Egypt and its relationships to her incorporation into the world capitalist economy during the last two centuries. My major concern is to discover more about the following issues: (1) the historical reasons for the structural disjunction of the peasant population from rural areas; and (2) the dynamics of rural–urban migration and the problem of overconcentration of population in a few major urban centers.

The status of women in Arab society, and in other developing areas, is an important subject in which interest is growing. Not only has heightened awareness of feminist issues fostered a general concern for women's emancipation for greater independence and equality with men, but it is also increasingly recognized that the circumstances of women bear a significant relationship to the potential of a society to achieve broader developmental objectives. Relevant considerations include a need for women to enter the salaried labor force, which will increase the productive capacity of the nation; the fact that educated and employed women tend to have fewer children, which is also a major policy objective in many developing countries; and a need to assure that women's critical role in child rearing and early socialization is exercised by individuals who are educated, socially active, and high in self-esteem, which will increase the likelihood of positive personal and civic orientations being inculcated among the young.

Social scientists have studied small-scale manufacturers both on a theoretical and on a regional basis relative to their occupational prestige, values, way of life, and political affiliations. Lately, this topic has also been of interest to international lending institutions that have adopted policies that promote small-scale firms in less-developed countries. Part of the reason for the change in policy stems from the inefficient production of large-scale firms and their disappointing performance in reducing unemployment. Some of the studies have found small- scale firms to be more efficient in inputs. Small-scale firms are viewed as generating needed employment opportunities in countries that face pressures of fast-growing labor force populations.

This paper presents a macroeconomic model for a small developing oil-exporting economy: Kuwait. The model is a simultaneous system of difference equations. Historic effects of changes in revenues from oil exports on the country's economic conditions are simulated. The model is then used to forecast these conditions through 1990, and to test two fiscal policy alternatives under the assumption that revenues from Kuwait's oil exports will remain constant from 1986 to 1990. The following are key words: developing economies; oil-exporting economies; Middle East economies; Kuwait; Kuwait's economy; policy models; macroeconomic models; econometric models; macroeconometric models; forecasting models; and policy models.

At the end of the 1950s Khi¯lid Muhammad Khālid, whose importance for the history of modern Islamic thought and sentiment can hardly be overestimated, propagated the rather preposterous thesis that the terms “tyrant” (derived from Greek lyrannos) and “Türān,” the customary (Persian) word used for the homeland of the Turks, were etymologically and, as a corollary, also semantically akin. What was so irritating about this anti-Turkish libel was not so much its insipidity as the reaction or, more to the point, absence of a reaction to such and similar statements in the Arab public. The lonely voices of historians such as Salālh al-Dīn al-Munajjid and Abdallah Laroui, who from very different ideological vantage points chided their Arab audience in the late 1960s for foolishly blaming all their troubles on the Turks, remained unheeded for a very long time.

Until now, there has appeared no party in the Arab world that can compete with the SSNP for the quality of its propaganda, which addresses both reason and emotion, or for the strength of its organization, which is effective both overtly and covertly. By virtue of its organization, this party succeeded in creating a very powerful intellectual and political current in Syria and Lebanon.

The oil price increases in the 1970s caused a transfer of wealth from importers to exporters and resulted in three major consequences. It led to a series of shocks in the economies of the industrial countries. It reduced further the slow pace of growth in the non-OPEC LDCs, and it distorted the sectoral growth in OPEC itself. Such unwarranted results have attracted the attention of both scholars and decision makers.

Many Middle Eastern governments are seeking to liberalize their trade policies. There is a desire to abandon policies based on import substitution through protectionism, and instead concentrate on export promotion. Advisors from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) urge governments to be less interventionist, and to create an environment where the provate sector can have freer rein. It is hoped that private entrepreneurs can revitalize the economies, and play a major role in emport promotion. Egypt, for example, has had an open door policy since 1974 following the years of government intervention and control under Nasser. Syria has also liberalized its import regime, and would like to encourage private sector exports, and Ba'thist socialist ideology has been less emphasized in recent years.

Periods of cultural florescence seem to coincide with times of political decline far too regularly in the history of medieval Iran and Central Asia for the link between them to be merely incidental. One of the most outstanding examples is the period of the rule of the Turko-Mongol Timurid dynasty in the 9th/15th century, which has been dubbed a “Timurid renaissance” by Western scholars. Another is the period of the political domination of the Buyid dynasty of Dailamite origin in the 4th–5th/10th–11th centuries, which Adam Mez popularized as the “renaissance of Islam.” Still another is the period of the Muzaffarid, Jalayirid, Sarbadarid, and Kartid kingdoms which arose in the 8th/14th century after the fall of the Mongol Ilkhanid empire. Although the appropriateness of the term “renaissance” as applied to the Timurid case in particular has raised reservations among scholars, it does underscore the point that his period was characterized by an extraordinary surge of activity in all areas of cultural and intellectual endeavor, something already noted by its contemporaries.

Zionist historiography of the Mandatory period accords a considerable place to the problem of land purchase and colonization. In the early 1930s, the Zionists feared that Britain would put restrictions on land purchase and that great difficulties would ensue from ordinances designed to protect the tenantcultivators in the event of eviction. The historian's eye has also been caught by the ambivalent position of the Arab national leadership which, while publicly demanding an end to Zionist expansion, privately continued to sell land to the Jews. But the literature hardly deals with the tenants themselves—the human center of the land debates and the subjects of considerable social interest in themselves.

Arab nationalism arose as an opposition movement in Ottoman Syria, Palestine, and Iraq around the turn of the century. It remained a minority movement until the Ottoman collapse in 1918, but after the Ottoman defeat it became the overwhelmingly dominant movement in these territories where, except for some Lebanese, all successful politicians were Arab nationalists during the interwar years. Just what Arab nationalism meant to its proponents at the time, however, has been difficult to determine. The period only dimly figures in studies of Arab nationalism. Full studies have been devoted to survivors from the past, Rashid Rida⊃ and Shakib Arsian, to Sati⊂ al-Husri (al-Husari), a relative newcomer whose greatest prominence was to be in the 1940s and 1950s, and to the Muslim Brothers, who arrived on the scene even later, whose influence was to lie in the future, and who, like Rida⊃, were not considered to be primarily Arab nationalists. Otherwise, hardly a scant handful of pre-World War II Arab nationalist writers, and these from the late 1930s, receive even casual mention.

The loss of Palestine and the resulting dispersal of Palestinian refugees has had a profound impact on the development of Arabic literature. If independence and revolution in most Arab lands served to catapult poets and writers into new literary themes and forms, the psychological jolt of defeat combined with the sudden physical presence of refugees who could not help but witness that defeat helped decisively to move writers away from earlier romantic themes and flowery language in favor of themes and styles considered to be more realistic. The 1950s and 1960s in particular were times of concern for social realism, and among the educated class there was a growing impatience with art that did not treat the important changes that shook the Arabs at the time.

This paper is a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Islamic ideology and female employment in Iran today. I examine the Islamic regime's ideology regarding women's roles (as well as the inconsistencies within it) and contrast it with women's employment patterns. I also compare the employment patterns today with those before the Revolution. The paper shows that much of the initial rhetoric discouraging female employment and attempting to impose an ideology of domesticity has not been successful. Although labor participation rates have declined for women, they have declined even more for men. The female share of the urban labor force has not altered, and government employment for women is actually higher today than it was before the Revolution. This paper suggests a discrepancy between ideological prescriptions and economic imperatives.

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 “uymaq system” (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 largely political conceptualizations—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 the mixed economic bases of the Iranian social formation, to which we shall return after a look at the standard Marxist approaches.

The Sahel of Tunisia is part of the arid zone that extends from Morocco to Afghanistan. People in this region profess the religion of Islam. Their views on the links between divine power, human actions, and rain are based on the Quran and are expressed in the rain prayers (salat a1-isrisqa') prescribed by the Prophet and therefore common to all of them. This article refers to North Africa, centering on the village of Sidi Ameur in the Sahel of Tunisia.