When discussing the Kuzari of Halevi, Leo Strauss comments in a footnote that “One cannot recall too often this remark of Goethe (in the Noten und Abhandlungen zum besseren Verständnis der West-östlichen Divans): ‘Das eigentliche, einzige und tiefste Thema der Welt — und Menschengeschichte, dem alle übrigen untergeordnet sind, bleibt der Konflikt des Unglaubens und Glaubens.’” It will be argued here that the influence of such a conflict on Islamic philosophy has been much exaggerated, especially by the highly influential approach that Strauss brings to such a mode of thought and its means of expression.

The purpose of this article is to present an analysis of the pre-1958 political system in Iraq based on explanatory factors which are relevant to an understanding of the nature of similar pre-radical regimes in other Arab States and to an understanding of how and why such political systems were transformed. In order to understand the qualitative nature of the systemic change in the Arab States in the twentieth century it is essential to move away from concepts like “traditional” and “modern” and the rise of “new men” or “new social forces.” To explain how one kind of political system changed to another one requires the abstraction of those features which indicate the positive rather than residual attributes of that earlier system. Indeed some recent studies have attempted to do this, with analytic and conceptual awareness.

The fall of Baku to combined Ottoman-Azerbaijani forces on 15 September 1918 ended the British involvement in Transcaucasia during World War I and resulted in the death of thousands of Armenian civilians. The responsibility for the fall of the city has been hotly disputed since that fateful day. One view, held by General Lionel C. Dunsterville, the commander of British troops committed to the defense of Baku, blames the local forces, especially the Armenians. The Armenians were undisciplined, uncooperative, lazy, and unreliable in battle; they abandoned their positions as soon as they came under enemy fire. In short, with some exceptions, they were cowards who expected the British to do all the fighting. Under these conditions the small British contingent could not stop the enemy indefinitely. On the night of 14 September, when the local forces showed little inclination to resist a new attack, Dunsterville brought his men back to the safety of the Persian port of Enzeli, thus saving them from certain death. Another view, held by the leaders of the Baku Armenians, ascribes the fall of the city to British perfidy. These critics of British policy claim that Dunsterville did not keep his promise of a large British force for the defense of Baku. The effective British force did not exceed one thousand men and it was secretly withdrawn from the city in the heat of the battle, leaving the local troops, who were fighting valiantly, to their fate. This, the Armenians claim, was nothing less than treachery.

When Winston Churchill visited Palestine in March, 1921, the debate over the future of Palestine and the recriminations over the broken promises of the past were at a fever pitch. It had become clear that British control over Palestine would be formalized by a League of Nations Mandate which would then irnplement the provisions of the Balfour Declaration. In Haifa, a delegation of Muslim and Christian Arabs met with Churchill to express their views on the intensifying conflict in Palestine. Churchill was given a prophetic warning, the accuracy of which has been of profound significance in the recent history of the Middle East:

Today the Arabs belief in England is not what it was.… If England does not take up the cause of the Arabs, other powers will. From India, Mesopotamia, the Hedjaz andPalestine the cry goes up to England now. If she does not listen, then perhaps Russia will take up their call some day, or perhaps even Germany.

The late Professor Paul Wittek (1894–1978) had an oddly ambivalent attitude towards England. From 1940 until his death he left London only rarely, for short visits to the continent, where (we understood) he would declare that England was the only place to live; but once back across the Channel he would, in conversation and in his seminars, resume his criticisms, ranging from the British Government's unwisdom in promoting the dismantlement of the AustroHungarian and the Ottoman Empires to the irrationalities of the English language. The first research which he undertook after coming to (what was to be) his adopted country was the critical study of seventeen Turkish documents, dating from 1553 to 1594, preserved, in English or Latin translation, in the two editions (1589/1590 and 1598–1600) of Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations … of the English Nation. In 1940 he found in the Bodleian Library some original Turkish documents belonging to this early stage of Anglo-Turkish relations, and over the next wartime years prepared a monograph covering the period 1553–1588, that is, from the isolated ‘safeconduct or priviledge’ granted by Siileyman in Aleppo to Anthony Jenkinson to the return from Istanbul of the first resident ambassador William Harborne.

About the great Russian orientalist, Vasilii Viadimirovich Barthold (1869–1930) much has been written, but, at the same time, not enough. Listed in an annotated bibliography of Barthold's works, compiled by I. Umniakov, published in 1976, are 141 titles of works about Barthold (up to 1976) not including reviews of individual works. Most are short biographical and bibliographical notices, but also included are about thirty works in Russian and other European languages containing a biography of Barthold and a characterization of his scholarly works. To this one can add nine obituaries written by distinguished orientalists, and prefaces to the volumes of his collected works that were published between 1963 and 1977. Some of the publications contain a general survey of Barthold's works; others are devoted to different groups of works (on islamology, archaeology, epigraphy, and others); but no one has given a detailed analyysis of Barthold's works as a whole. I do not pretend to carry out this task, but aim simply to point out some features of Barthold's works which seem to me especially characteristic and to pinpoint the place of this scholar in the history of Russian and international oriental studies.