In retrospect, the United States sponsored coup d'état in Iran of August 19, 1953, has emerged as a critical event in postwar world history. The government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq which was ousted in the coup was the last popular, democratically oriented government to hold office in Iran. The regime replacing it was a dictatorship that suppressed all forms of popular political activity, producing tensions that contributed greatly to the 1978–1979 Iranian revolution. If Mosaddeq had not been overthrown, the revolution might not have occurred. The 1953 coup also marked the first peacetime use of covert action by the United States to overthrow a foreign government. As such, it was an important precedent for events like the 1954 coup in Guatemala and the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, and made the United States a key target of the Iranian revolution.

The aim of this study is to examine the way in which the Iraqi government prepares its expenditure estimates and how and why they tend to differ from the actual outturn figures. One hardly expects to see an exact matching of these two figures given the difficulties in estimation which especially exist in developing countries where data bases may be less than exact and techniques crude. In Iraq this error in estimation was first alluded to by Saadi, and it was tentatively suggested that the expectation of discrepancies should be taken into account in the planning process. Others have suggested that this and other poor estimates should be examined and followed up more closely. However, its continuation and growth have not been otherwise studied.

Few oil-producing economies, and for that matter few primary commodity-producing countries, have experienced as abrupt and severe a loss of foreign exchange earnings as that undergone by Iran in the period 1951–1953 following the nationalization of the oil industry and the subsequent international boycott of Iranian oil. While the literature on Iran during this period is extensive, it has focused largely on the political implications of nationalization and not so much on the economy's adjustment to the loss of foreign exchange. This article argues that the Iranian experience provides an instructive case study–admittedly an extreme one—of the ability of countries exposed to external shocks to adjust to the new realities.

This paper is the result of fieldwork carried out in Kalardasht, a mountainous region of the Caspian provinces. It has two interrelated purposes. First, it is offered as a contribution to the economic ethnography of Iran. Second, it examines the process of continuity and change in the economic structure of rural Iran. Changes in rural communities as a result of transitions in the broader society have attracted much attention in recent years. Here, a number of such economic changes are documented and analyzed for Kalardasht from 1977 to 1985.

The role of the ulama in Iranian politics during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been studied extensively. Particularly the rise of the ulama's social influence and power in the Tobacco Movement (1891–1892) and the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911 has been investigated at length. Much less attention has been devoted to examining the relationship between the ulama and the state after the Constitutional Revolution, and the role of the religious community in Reza Khan's assumption of power and his subsequent accession to the throne in 1925.

Feminist interest in the social origins and the emotional/psychological development of gender roles has led to a new theoretical debate on the critical importance of mothering. The feminist contribution in this area lies in the formulation of a successful theoretical synthesis of Marxist and psychoanalytic insights to explain the development of gendered roles and personalities in contemporary capitalist society. In contrast to conventional Freudian approaches, which posit the universality of the psychological/emotional processes by which the self is developed, the feminist critics emphasize the historically (and socially) specific nature of the family, mothering patterns, and the way such patterns influence the development of gendered personalities in the West.

At the present time of resurgence in Islamic beliefs, the question of the Islamic city has once again come to the fore. In many parts of the Arab world, and especially in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, urban planners with a new found respect for the great achievements of the past are searching for ways to reproduce in today's cities some of the patterns of city building that have been identified as Islamic. They have been influenced, whether wittingly or not, by a body of literature produced by western Orientalists purporting to describe the essence of the Islamic city. The purpose of this article is, in Part I, to examine and criticize some of the basic works in that tradition and then, after deconstructing the concept of the Islamic city, to build up, in Part II, a somewhat different, and hopefully more dynamic and analytic model. The article ends with a brief discussion of whether and in what ways it would be feasible or desirable to build contemporary cities on Islamic principles.

The issue of woman's proper role in society is a lively one in any country today, East or West. Perhaps in no other area has the rapidity of social and economic change touched the lives and values of the average person so deeply. In the Middle East this topic is particularly sensitive because one of the most frequent criticisms leveled at Islam by Western observers is that it degrades women. Male guardianship of women, forced marriages, polygamy, the seclusion of women, and the man's unilateral right of divorce are all, in Western eyes, indications of the inferior status of women in Muslim society and of the inferiority of Islam as a religious and cultural system. Furthermore, Westerners often see it as their duty, whether as mission or strategem, to assist the Muslim woman to liberate herself from these traditional bonds, and especially to remove her veil and educate her.

The Sudan came to know of Communism directly during the 1940s, through Egypt and Herbert Storey. Egyptian Communism had passed through two phases. The first phase was in the 1920s when, under Joseph Rosenthal and his Alexandria Group, it appeared first as a socialist movement and then as a Communist one proper. During this phase it made some impact on some of the Egyptian intelligentsia, a few trade unions, and a small number of workers. It also tried, though unsuccessfully, to join the Comintern so as to act as its official representative in this part of the world, thereby assuming for itself the role that organization had already entrusted to the Communist parties of the European colonial countries. However, the efforts of Egyptian Communism during this first stage received a mortal blow in the mid-1920s at the hands of Saʿd Zaghlūl, the leader of the Wafd party, when he began to see in the activities of the Communists a serious challenge to the hegemony of the Wafd in Egyptian politics.

It is probably fair to say of labels such as “fundamentalist,” “modernist,” and “secularist,” which are in common use today in writing about modern Islam, that we cannot live very easily with them, but that we certainly cannot live without them.

Among the best books I read at this time… was Tarikh al-falak 'inda al-'Arab [The History of Astronomy among the Arabs] by Professor Nallino. I scrutinized it thoroughly, and I learned from it how the leading orientalists did their research, and how they persisted in their investigations, how they actually lived in the subject of their specialization, and how they proceeded carefully and deliberately from the simple to the complex in their research. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that I learned the methodology of research from this book.

The history of the Shi'i Muslims in the isles of Bahrain and the oases of Qatif and al-Hasa has been little studied despite the economic and political importance lent them by the large petroleum deposits in their region. The significance of this community has been further magnified by the rise in the Gulf region of Shi'i radicalism, as in the Iranian Revolution of 1978–1979 and the failed 1981 Shi'i coup attempt in Bahrain. The study of Shi'ism in the Gulf has advanced so little that even a basic chronology and overview of institutional developments are lacking for all but the most recent decades.

The sharifs of Hasanid descent, commonly referred to as the Banū Hasan, who ruled Mecca and its dependencies from the middle of the fourth century A.H./tenth century A.D. until the early twentieth century, can be divided into three major dynastic branches, each of which bears the name of the first of its members to attain the office of emir of Mecca. Thus, the first dynasty of the Hasanid sharifs of Mecca, known as the Jaʿfarids, was founded by Jaʿfar b. Muhammad b. al-Husayn al-Amīr, a descendant in the ninth generation of al-Hasan b. ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, in about the year 357/968, shortly before the conquest of Egypt for the Fatimids of North Africa by their general, Jawhar, in 358/969. Control of Mecca remained in the hands of the Jaʿfarids until the last representative of the line, Shukr b. Abī'l-Futūḥ, died without leaving a male heir in 453/ 1061.

A famous definition of power reads: In studying political organization, we have to deal with the maintenance or establishment of social order … by the organized exercise of coercive authority through the use, or the possibility of use, of physical force.

Tensions between the regime and the army are a crucial component for the understanding of Fatimid history and, as will be shown, they had a mostly destabilizing impact on society and the economy. A host of factors shaped the relationship between the regime, the army, and society. Among these factors, the socio-military composition of the army was especially important. The composition of the army was partly an outcome of deliberate policies of the regime, partly a consequence of local conditions, and partly a reflection of wider Islamic practices. In the case of the Fatimids, the local conditions of Ifrīqiya (Tunisia) and Egypt and the military traditions of the deposed regimes of the Aghlabids and the Ikhshidids must be taken into consideration. Fatimid reliance on the Berbers of Kutāma was not much a matter of a choice; they were the first adherents of the Fatimids and had helped bring them to power in Ifrīqiya. However, from the earliest years of Fatimid rule the Aghlabid military traditions and local conditions were reflected in the composition of the Fatimid army and had an influence on Fatimid policies. Conditions in Egypt played a smaller role in shaping the Fatimid army. Certain elements of the defeated Egyptian army (the lkhshīdiyya and the Kāfūriyya) were incorporated into the Fatimid army while others were disbanded. The Fatimid drive into Palestine and Syria, whose ultimate goal was Baghdad, confronted the Fatimids with militarily superior armies built on the model of the Buyid-'Abbasid and the Byzantines.

Despite his importance, no substantial study has been devoted to the career of Abū 'l-'Abbās Ahmad b. Idrīs al-Hasanī al-'Arā'ishī al-Fāsī (d. 1837); most accounts of him appear by way of a preface to studies of his pupils. And yet through his teachings, pupils, and family, he was undoubtedly one of the key religious figures of the early 19th century Arab Muslim world. Indeed, his influence, direct and indirect, appears to have stretched from North Africa to Indonesia. Three of his pupils from his immediate circle established major brotherhoods, the Sanūsiyya, Khatmiyya, and Rāshidiyya, from which stemmed several other orders.

At the time of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt—the conventional starting point of modern Middle Eastern history—central governments in the Arab world had long been exceedingly weak. The situation began to change after 1800: At an early stage, Egypt was brought under firm control, and toward the end of the century the Ottoman regime began to tighten its grip on its Arab subjects. In some places, however —the Arabian peninsula, for instance, or Morocco—it is only within living memory that the authorities have acquired the kind of power over their territories that a modern state is expected to have.

None of the editions of Hajji Baba of Isfahan nor the monographs and articles on its author, James Morier, that have come to my attention so far has made any comments on the introduction to this book. This introduction is couched in the form of a letter to the Reverend Doctor Fundgruben, Chaplain to the Swedish Embassy at the Ottoman Porte, and is dated London, 1st December, 1823. Doctor Fundgruben is characterized as being preoccupied with “hieroglyphic lore” and as the author of the book The Biography of Celebrated Mummies.