As far as I am concerned I remember that the first elements of Arab consciousness began to filter into my mind as a student in secondary schools, wherfrom I went out with my fellow schoolboys on strike on December 2nd [sic] of every year as a protest against the Balfour declaration whereby England gave the Jews a national home usurped unjustlu from its legal owners.

Afghanistan's Khalq leaders who seized power in April 1978 inherited a mixed legal system and a bifurcated legal elite. In theirn ideological commitment to revolutionary chanfe, the Marxist government sought to employ legal institutions to further far-reaching social and political aims. The ruling group intended to curb the power of local jurists and the authority of Islamic legal reasonin through secularizing administration of the law. These policies testified for many to the regime's underlying hostility toward religion, and its determination to displace autonomous provincial leadership, both motives for rebellion by tribal insurgents and Islamic nationalists in 1979. This essay, which was researched and written before the fall of the Daoud government, examines Afghanistan's legal cadres, their education, recruitment, and performance. The persistance of Islamic influences in these processes, along with the adoption of modern practices, should convey the depth of traditionalism in the nation and also the capacity of the Afghans to accommodate new concepts not hastily or callously imposed.

For nearly three centuries after the famous Battle of Poitiers (Tours), which is usually regarded as the high-water mark of Arab/Muslim expansion into Western Europe, the Muslims continued to maintain a series of relatively isolated presences in regions of Western Europe outside the Iberian Peninsula. Although these presences have tended to be forgotten within the larger picture of Muslim/Christian relationships during the medieval period, the researches of some nineteenth and twentieth century scholars would seem to indicate that they left behind a considerably larger legacy than has previously been suspected.

Post-World War II studies of Egypt's economy devote considerable attention to her population growth and agricultural development. Such attention is necessary in that Egypt, (though) so limited in its habitable land, has experienced a quadrupling of population during the present century; and, as its most important sector is still agricultural, more than half of that population is concentrated in rural areas. Therefore, studies have focused on the effects of population pressure on the distribution of agricultural income, on the agrarian reforms of 1952 and 1961, and particularly on population growth and policies.

The Latāfat-nāma (Book of Eloquent [Praise]) is a Central Asian Turkic panegyric poem from the early fifteenth century. Its author, Khujandi, a poet with a bilingual (Turkic and Persian) background and with a religious, probably Sufi, upbringing, composed this work in Khorazmian Turkic on the model of Khorazmi's Mahabbat-nāma and dedicated it to Mahmūd Khan, son of Küchük Muhammad and ruler of Khorezm in 1411 and 1422−1424.