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.

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.

The Ulema are the power that holds the Sultan and his people together—the medium of control. But they seldom meddle in politics. This premise was expressed by Ameen Rihani, an Arab traveller, in 1928, before either Sultan 'Abd al-'Aziz became king or Najd and its dependencies became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Was Rihani correct in his conclusion? Is he right today? This article will endeavor to explore the term ulama in the Saudi context in the twentieth century. Later, an attempt will be made to discuss the participation of Saudi ulama in a number of key cases in the history of Saudi Arabia.

The house of Saud along with the house of Muhammad b. 'Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of the Unitarian movement, were parties to a unique coalition in the eighteenth century. The coalition embraced the Unitarian movement, or Wahhabiyah, founded in the mid-eighteenth century, and members of the Arab noble house of Saud of Najd.

During the morning of December 8, 1942, a large group of university students paraded through the streets of Tehran to the parliament building on Baharistan Square to demand higher bread rations and prompt action on critical problems by an incompetent government and an inactive parliament. Spectators and organized groups from South Tehran added their numbers to the already large crowd. Police forces withdrew from the square and the demonstration became a riot. The crowd occupied the parliament building and moved toward the commercial district, smashing windows and signs and looting stores along the way. On the morning of December 9, students again instigated a march to the parliament building, but this time army troops firing machine guns met and dispersed them. Although city shops were closed on December 9, some reopened on December 10, and all reopened on December 11; normality had returned. The bread riot claimed over 20 people killed, 700 wounded, 150 arrested, and 150 stores sacked and burned.

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.

Bandali al-Jawzi (1871–1943) has been regaining popularity recently, particularly among his native Palestinians and Muslim nationalists of his adopted home, the Soviet Union. In 1977, for instance, the Union of Palestinian Journalists and Writers, in cooperation with the Oriental Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, commemorated Jawzi as an outstanding Palestinian author. At that time a collection of various of his articles on the Arabic language and history was published in Beirut, as well as an edition of his only book, Min Tārīkh al-Harakāt al-Fikriyyat fi'l-Islām (The History of Intellectual Movements in Islam), first published in 1928. It is this recent exposure which was to take its rightful place in Islamic intellectual history.

Prosopography, or collective biography, as this field of study is sometimes called by scholars dealing with periods later than Greek and Roman antiquity, is a relatively simple and unsophisticated research technique. Basically, it consists of assembling and comparing biographical data for all individuals belonging to a clearly circumscribed group of people. Frequently, but not necessarily, the individuals in question held public office of some kind. This technique recommends itself by the fact that it can be applied even to periods on which very little evidence is available, such as the Roman Republic But on a different level, prosopography can also contribute to our understanding of societies with a fairly rich documentation. Thus, quite a few items among the more recent literature cited by Lawrence Stone in his book on the causes of the seventeenth-century English revolution might be described at least in part upon prosopographical techniques. In the same vein, the research technique has been used by a number of scholars to shed some light upon the institutions and society of the Ottoman Empire.