The study of the Ottoman state in tĥe latter part of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth demands a broader analytical framework than hitherto used if its transformation and the social and political history of the Middle East, the Balkans, and even North Africa, which were parts of the Ottoman State at one time or other, are to be properly evaluated and interpreted.

Analysis of the late unreformed state of those offices of the Sublime Porte out of which the Ottoman Foreign Ministry was to develop makes clear, as we have shown in an earlier article,1 that the possibilities for reform of the traditional bureaucracy were generally limited by two sets of determinants. One set, readily perceptible at what might be termed a macrohistorical level, consists of those largely exogenous forces which dominated the entire later history of the empire.2 In contrast, the other set derives from the legacy of the old bureaucracy itself. Determinants of this class can be identified only by close examination of that legacy, which in turn had been shaped by the nature of the traditional state, as well as by those patterns of social organization and economic outlook which over the centuries had characterized Ottoman society in general.

A boycott may be denned as ‘The refusal and incitement to refusal to have commercial or social dealings with offending groups or individuals’.1 More specifically, international economic boycotts are devices by which one or more states (or their citizens) attempt to inflict economic hardship upon a target nation. The method of coercion takes the form of a disruption of the target state's normal foreign trade and financial flows. In the vast majority of instances, the imposition of a boycott is a political act, designed to influence the practices and policies of the offending country, utilizing economic weapons as the coercive force. A boycott may be deemed successful if it attains the ends desired by its initiators. As a rule, economic sanctions must be effective (i.e. cause economic damage) in order to succeed; however, it is quite possible, indeed, often probable, that boycotts may be effective without being successful.

There is much controversy among Ba'thists as to whether Zaki al-Arsuzi or Michel 'Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar were the real founders of the Ba'th. The answer to this question is academic because the Ba'th was an idea representing national aspirations long before it took the shape of a political party. Its origins go back to the Arab revolt of 1916 and Faysal's ill-fated attempt to unite greater Syria under the Hashemite crown. When the French forcibly expelled Faysal from Damascus, they also frustrated a generation of Syrian nationalist youth who for a fleeting moment stood up for liberation and unification. During the interwar period, pan-Arab patriots agonized over their plight under the Mandate and nourished visions of ‘resurrecting’ the ancient glories of the Umayyads.

It is well known that the Hashemite Dynasty in Iraq was the creation of the British in 1921. Less well known are the circumstances that led to the hasty installation of Faisal as king and the emergence of ‘Independent Modern Iraq’.The 1920 revolt forced the hesitant British to enact a solution which for thirtyseven years was maintained by force. During this time, the British were obliged to force-feed an artificial and outmoded system that was barely capable of holding primordial sentiments in check. The state apparatus that the British set up as a means of containing these sentiments was not a genuine structure developed to meet expressed needs, nor did it serve to forge the various segments of the society into an organic nation.

The dictionary definition of ‘homeostasis’ is: ‘the tendency of an organism to maintain a uniform and beneficial physiological stability within and between its parts; organic equilibrium’. As applied to a political organism, it denotes the tendency of that organism to ‘maintain as much of its former condition as is practically possible’, however determined the attempts to alter its shape. In a paper presented to the meeting of the Middle East Studies Association of North America in 1967. I suggested that the principle of homeostasis was inherent in the Persian polity.Iran's ancient civilization has produced social attitudes and deeply ingrained characteristics which do not admit of rapid change,except by means of the disruptive force of violent revolution. The 2,500-year tradition of the Persian monarchy, a tradition fostered and preserved under a succession of alien rulers — Arab, Turk, Mongol, Tatar and Afghan - has given to the Persian polity, and to Persian society, an organic stability which places Iran in a category completely apart from most other countries in the Middle East, and from the majority of the so-called 'emerging' and 'underdeveloped'nations in general. As E. G. Browne noted at the time of the Persian Constitutional Revolution in 1906, the chief characteristics of the Persians are: (i) the stability of the national type and (ii) the power of national recovery.

Class analysis stands as one of the ancient and classic theoretical approaches to the study of politics and society. Stratification by class has been traditionally utilized by scholars and statesmen to explain patterns of political conflict and processes of social change. In modern American political science, however, this approach has yet to receive the attention and application that have marked traditional formal-legal and contemporary structural-functional analysis. The sharp reaction that developed against the former took the immediate shape of the group and elite approaches which to a large degree continue to displace or disguise class analysis.

Great power rivalry in nineteenth and early twentieth century Iran and the Qajar dynasty's dependence upon British and Russian support have long attracted the attention of western scholars. Recent scholarship also has begun tocus on internal power shifts in response to these conditions. An important element in these processes, but one which has been relatively unstudied, is political change within the great tribal confederations, especially the Bakhtiyâri. A number of elements contributed to the political transformation of the Bakhtiyâri. To begin with, the heightening of political activity in the tribe coincided with a decline of central power and authority and the growth of Anglo-Russian rivalry in Iran. Also significant was the concentration of powerand wealth within one princely family of the Bakhtiyâri. In addition a number of economic and strategic factors played a role in creating a new alignment of power among the Bakhtiyâri and Tehran and Great Britain. Chief among these elements were the increasing strategic and economic importance of the Bakhtiyâri winter pasture area in Khuzistan following the discovery of the oil fields there and the new national political role played by the Bakhtiyâri following the Persian Revolution.

Persian poetry in the twentieth century is undergoing changes that would have been scarcely imaginable a century or even half a century ago. The dispute of ancients and moderns rages in Persian literary circles, and exponents of both traditional and modern styles are regarded as traitors by both sides. I should be foolhardy to join battle in this domestic struggle, and the purpose of this memoir is only that of setting on record the outlines of the life and poetical works of a poet generally regarded as the greatest Persia has seen for a long time.

The continuing tensions between ethnic groups and nationalism of the dominant population since independence have attracted world attention to the fact that in the Middle East serious ethnic problems exist regardless of the strong integrative character of the Islamic religion and culture. For centuries Islam has had the effect of moderating if not, obliterating racial differences among the peoples of the Middle East. However, although race is not a social problem in Muslim countries, ethnic differences are.

Despite rapidly growing industrialization and large migration from the countryside,Turkey today remains primarily agricultural, with a farming area larger than that of any other southern European country, and an agricultural population consisting of just under 70 per cent of the approximately 35 million people in the country. Although reduced in importance, so that its contribution of 40 per cent of the total domestic product in 1963 was reduced by 1969 to little over 33⅓ per cent, agriculture still accounts for some 90 per cent of the country's exports.

In the present political climate of Arab-Israeli relations, arguments are frequently brought forth by disputants on each side concerning what each regards as the fundamental relations between Muslims and Jews, not as political but as social communities. Muslims insist that Jews who have lived in their midst have always fared better than those living in Europe and that their opposition is not to Jews as a religious, but as a distinct political, grouping. Zionists, on the other hand, consider as humiliating the treatment Jews have received in the Muslim countries from which most of them have emigrated, and often regard the Muslims as fundamentally anti-Semitic despite the latter's protestations to the contrary. Fact and myth, particularly in the hands of each side's propagandists, have become inextricably tangled, and attempts to tease them apart often fall victim to accusations that the author is less interested in a judicious presentation of the data than in serving some private and ulterior motive. Indeed, since most of the Jews have either left their homes in the Arab nations or found their positions drastically altered by the present conflict, it has become almost impossible to study first-hand the ways in which Muslims conceive of and relate to the Jewish minorities living in their midst as part of that society and not just as an extension of the Israeli nation or the community of world Jewry.

Since 1957, Najîb Mahfûz has been regarded as the most outstanding author of Egyptian fiction. He has won critical acclaim and widespread popularity. Mahfûz's works deal with Egyptian society, and even his symbolic or surrealistic stories, which have universal significance, are distinctly Egyptian in their settings, conflicts and characters.

The murder of ‘Uthmân was an important turning-point in Islamic history, and the story of how opposition in the provinces, particularly Egypt, combined with opposition at Medina itself and brought about the Caliph's death has been repeated many times. Accounts in sources such as al-Tabarî's History and al-Balâdhurîs Ansâb al-ashrâf bring together much transmitted detail concerning this dénouement. Caetani's monumental Annali dell'Islam serves as an extensive compilation of such detail, and Wellhausen, Levi Delia Vida, Gibb, Veccia Vaglieri and Petersen are only some of the other modern scholars who have commented on the event. Perhaps Professor Gibb best expresses the current view of the background to it in his thought-provoking article entitled ‘An interpretation of Islamic history’, where he sees in the caliphate of 'Uthmân a conflict between two main parties, the Meccans and the ‘tribesmen’. He points out that the Meccan merchants had been swift to seize the opportunities of wealth which arose in the immediate post-conquest phase, and goes on to say that in the course of 'Uthman's caliphate there arose at Medina ‘growing resentment at the rapid affirmation of Meccan political control… and the economic exploitation of the empire. Open discontent was first expressed by several religious personalities, whose conscience was shocked by the worldliness and grasping materialism displayed in the name of Islam. But these only provided a rallying-cry and a cloak for the material grievances of the tribesmen and Medinians, who swung into line behind them.’ Gibb therefore sees a total of four alignments, of which the Meccans and the tribesmen were the main parties, while the Medinans and the so-called religious party were secondary in importance.

Together with those centuries of the Ottoman empire's florescence, the age of the independent Mamlûks(648–922/1250–1517)ranks as one of the best-documented periods of medieval Islamic history. Not only is its historical writing proper of an amazing bulk and richness, but the Mamlûk period produced encyclopedic compilations covering almost every branch of the Islamic sciences. In particular, there arose a flourishing minor genre of manuals of financial and secretarial practice, reflecting on the one hand the economic and commercial richness of the Mamlûk lands, and on the other the importance of the Mamlûk chancery and its truly international sphere of operations

The history of literature in Persian has not been sufficiently studied although it is almost twelve centuries old, and was at times in widespread use in Afghanistan, Eastern Turkestan, India, Turkey and the Caucasus, as well as in Iran and Central Asia. The comparatively late development of Iranian studies and the condition of source materials are to blame for this situation.