In recent years the political roles of the People's Assembly, the Arab Socialist Union, town and village councils, labor unions, and other Egyptian governmental structures have been analyzed. Interestingly enough, most observers would probably agree that the Egyptian parliament is for the most part a rubber stamp; that Egypt is a partyless and not a one-party state; that it lacks a viable system of local government as distinct from the prevailing system of provincial administration; and that labor unions are official but not truly behavioral entities. In short, the Egyptian policy is dissected with conceptual tools borrowed from traditional institutional analysis, while it generally is recognized that Egyptian politics are not institutionalized, or, to use Moore's term, are ‘unincorporated’. This contradiction merits comment.

For several years, whenever time permitted, I have worked on a book, Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, covering the centuries between the conquest of Gallipoli in 1354 and the beginning of the Serb revolt in 1804. As the title of my study indicates, it covers only the Balkan Peninsula, Hungary, and Romania. It is not a history of the Ottomans in Europe, but an attempt to present the story of the people who lived under Ottoman rule.

To the people of the province of Syria, Midhat Pasha's appointment as their governor on 13 November 1878 was no ordinary event. Midhat was well known there, largely as a result of his involvement in the deposition of Sultan 'Abd al—'Azīz (1861–1876) and the declaration of the Constitution on 23 December 1876. He was frequently referred to as ‘the father of the free and the deposer of sultans.’ He came to the province of Syria with a well-founded reputation, having served three times as governor in the provinces of Bulgaria, Danube, and Baghdād, and twice as grand vizier, the second most important position in the Empire. The optimism and hope his appointment generated in the province were as genuine and deep as were the corruption and deterioration there. Lisān al-Hāl reflected this optimsim when it said: ‘Syria has had enough oppression and misery. It has been up till now a marketplace for governors and functionaries: they come to it empty-handed and leave with tired shoulders because of the heavy treasures they carry away. Undoubtedly, Midhat Pasha came to it as a tradesman, his merchandise being justice and reform.’

No problem has perplexed students of modern Ottoman history more than that of determining the state of the empire's population during its last century. Foreign travelers and diplomats and various nationalist leaders claimed that the Ottoman government had no census of its own. They made self-serving estimates of its population to support their own political or diplomatic ambitions, using at best methods such as multiplying by preset figures the number of males found in neighborhood coffeehouses or Sunday religious services, or simply accepting the estimates of local priests. In the face of this, the Ottomans did no more than publish their figures without providing supporting data or bothering to explain their census procedures. As a result, the Ottoman census system and its data were largely ignored in the outside world, and the rough and inaccurate estimates of foreigners were generally accepted in preference to the official figures.

The chronicle of Rabbi Elijah Capsali (ca. 1483–1555), which concerns itself with the history of the Ottoman Empire, turns up as a subject for discussion from time to time. Capsali, rabbi of the Candia community in Crete, wrote the chronicle entitled Seder Eliyahu Zuta during the plague of the spring and summer of 1523. It is divided into four parts and 166 chapters and includes an introduction in which he explains the reasons for writing it and mentions his sources. As yet, however, the importance of this chronicle has not been sufficiently emphasized. The interpretation presented by Uriel Heyd at the Sixth Turkish History Congress held in Ankara in 1961. dealt with a number of aspects such as the sources of Capsali and Jewish references in the text, but only in their most general form. In this paper I examine the importance and limitations of the chronicle more thoroughly.

Since the famous tenth-century man of letters Abū Hayyān al-Tawĥīdī (Ca. 320/932–414/1023) named four specific contemporary writers as the authors of the otherwise anonymous encyclopedic work Rasā'il Ikhwān al-Safā', it became almost traditional for both medieval and modern scholars to accept his story as fact.

One of the more serious and threatening, yet unsolved, problems in theology is uncertainty about the meaning of time. Clearly, the theologian of an omnipotent and absolute God must reconcile His transcendence with the human worshiper's graphic and personal particularity. To come to terms in the matter of spatial dimension is, moreover, relatively easy when compared with the problem of the temporal dimension. Compounding the woes of the theologian (or perhaps causing them) is the abject poverty of all languages in proper terms for time and aspects of time. In describing time, all theologians resort to the use of an artificial vocabulary – so unfortunate because it makes the communication of already unfamiliar ideas doubly difficult.

The graduate history program of ‘Ayn Shams University has produced some of the finest scholarly studies in the field of Egyptian history in recent years. The program has been particularly receptive to the shift toward a social and economic approach within the discipline of history. It is noteworthy that for a number of years this program has been directed by two historians who were not themselves trained in this specialization. Dr. Ahmad ‘Izzat ‘Abd al-Karīm (the founder of the program) is an institutional historian, and Dr. ‘Abd al-Raḥlm Muṣṭafa (the current chairman) is a political historian