The aim of the present essay is to explore some of the relations between the socioeconomic and political transformation which occurred in Syria during the eighteenth century and the development of a new view of the world and the self as it came to be expressed in the writings of several Arab historians at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Of particular interest in this context is the question of whether and when a clear departure from traditional patterns of society and thought can be discerned.

It is indeed an interesting endeavor to investigate the impact of economic policies on social stratification. Doing so enables us to see to what extent economic policies bring changes in class structure in a society. We take the case of Syria to study its economic policies and their accompanying impact on the evolving pattern of the Syrian elite from the late 1950s to the early 1980s and then look at accompanying impact on class structure.

The two poles or aspects of this paper are (1) economic policies themselves and (2) their impact on class structure. The question that we are going to raise in the first pole is the following: what is the nature of the economic policies? This refers to land reforms, industrial and commercial reforms, and foreign trade controls.

1.1. Among the most obscure aspects of the past of Arab towns, that of the number of their population at different periods of their history must be mentioned. A better knowledge of their demography would no doubt bring more accurate answers to the main problems of urban evolution (expansion or decline, prosperity or decadence) as, through lack of well-founded figures, they have often been resolved by authors from general impressions or even from a priori attitudes. The first really serious statistics go no earlier than the end of the eighteenth century (Description de l'Egypte) for Cairo. For earlier periods, the only available sources for a long time were the evaluations provided by chronicles or travel accounts which proposed more or less fanciful and often divergent figures, the more reasonable evaluations often being a question of chance, or being considered so only because they confirmed the users' prejudices.

During the 1960–1972 period Egypt was committed to a socialist, centrally planned model of economic development. Economic growth goals were expounded in optimistic consecutive five-year plans. When it became apparent that these goals would not be achieved, the second five-year plan was expanded to seven years (1965–1972). private investment had been effectively discouraged after the nationalization of privately owned industry during 1960–1963. In order to finance ambitious development plans, Egypt borrowed heavily during 1960–1972. Approximately $2.3 billion was borrowed mainly from the U.S.S.R., the European Economic Community, and the United States. The plans' large capital development projects were undertaken with dismal results. A major factor causing these failures was the low absorptive capacity of Egypt during that time. This severely restricted the amount of capital that could be put to constructive use in any given time period and prevented Egypt from realizing her goal of doubling national income in ten years (1960–1970).

The history of political change in Libya during the nineteenth century has been obscured by subsequent events in the Middle East and North Africa. A relatively unimportant province of the Ottoman Empire, it went to the least important European colonial power in the region – Italy – and the Italian tenure destroyed much of the legacy of Ottoman reform. Even contemporary observers in the nineteenth century usually viewed the province through a prism whose primary focus was elsewhere, leaving distorted and partial accounts of the changes wrought by the Ottoman administration. This lacuna in the literature has hindered comprehensive assessment of the Ottoman reform period and, perhaps as seriously, distorted interpretation of Libya's subsequent political history.

As conceived by classical Muslim jurists, ijtihād is the exertion of mental energy in the search for a legal opinion to the extent that the faculties of the jurist become incapable of further effort. In other words, ijtihad is the maximum effort expended by the jurist to master and apply the principles and rules of uṣūl alfiqh (legal theory) for the purpose of discovering God's law.1 The activity of ijtihad is assumed by many a modern scholar to have ceased about the end of the third/ninth century, with the consent of the Muslim jurists themselves. This process, known as ‘closing the gate of ijtihad’ (in Arabic: ‘insidād bāb al-ijtihād’), was described by Joseph Schacht as follows:

In a region which has witnessed so many violent seizures of power, violations of constitutional legality, and myriad varieties of dictatorship over the past few decades, it is often easy to forget that many parts of the Middle East enjoyed elements of democracy, including freedom of speech and assembly, a free press, and hotly contested elections, as far back as the late Ottoman period.

The myopia of nations regarding the availability of petroleum in unlimited amounts led to an irrepressible conflict between oil-producing and oil-consuming nations. This conflict, culminating with the energy crisis of 1973, created both benefits and costs for all parties dealing in oil. In the future, OPEC and the consuming nations will have to resolve the conflicts between costs and benefits resulting from any strategy chosen concerning the future price and quantity of oil.

The profile of Egypt at midcentury is quite typical of Third World countries: Two-thirds or more of the population lived and made a living off the land, more than half of the national labor force was rural, the contribution of agriculture to GNP was one-third the total, and that of industry less than 15 percent. Land distribution was extremely unequal, less than one percent of landowners possessed more than one-third of the cultivated land and many of them were absentee landlords. The credit system and extension services were inadequate if available at all. Finally, population pressure on the land was relentless.

With the conclusion of World War I, the Armenian cause in the United States enjoyed a brief season of hope and vitality. American support was an offshoot of international sympathy for Armenian suffering and an unshakable sense of optimism. In a burst of national goodwill, the United States seemed intent on freeing the Armenians from centuries of persecution. Americans from the halls of Congress to the church pews of Mississippi joined together in the effort. They delivered speeches, wrote letters, exchanged ideas, and donated millions of dollars. Within less than a decade, however, the Armenian cause was irreparably splintered and largely forgotten.

The growth and transformation of Middle Eastern manufacturing industry has been little studied for the period before the advent of tariff autonomy, and thus protectionism, in the early 1930s The reasons for this are various but must have much to do with the many difficult problems involved. There is an obvious lack of data, particularly about the activities of the craft or small-scale sector which, even to this day, is regularly under-counted by government statisticians. There are also serious problems of definition which hage generally been ignored by the vast majority of economic historians who remain content to analyse manufacturing activity in terms of such simple dichotomies as modern/factory/capitalist versus traditional/workshop/pre-capitalist, a method which not only masks the fact that there are a whole range of activities which do not fall into such apparently neat categories but also — to introduce the major theme of this essay — makes it impossible to examine the complex interrelationship between plants of different size and degree of capitalisation. Finally, much of what passes for a ducussion of manufacturing activity has, in fact, got muddled with the much larger debate about the whole process of industrialisation, about whether particular areas of the Middle East could have developed their own industrial base before 1930, and about why they might have been prevented from doing so.

The arrival of Lashin1 on the Egyptian literary scene in the 1920s marked a turning point in the history of the short story: he was an outstandingly vigorous pioneer who developed the genre and brought its formative years to a close. His writings represent the culmination, in both form and content, of the work of previous writers and of his contemporaries. He was also the major figure of a versatile literary group, Jama⊂at al-Madrasa al Haditha (the Modern School), which played a decisive role in developing the Egyptian short story, extending its reading public, and shaping the characteristics of the new sensibility of that period. This group did not start as a proper literary school as the name implies, but rather as a gathering of enthusiastic young writers whose common dream of issuing a paper of their own, to express their views and publish their unconventional works, took almost a decade to be realised.

The change from an agriculturally based economy to one based primarily on industrial and services sectors requires a complex transformation in technology of productions, physical and human capital structure, social and political institutions, and cultural attitudes. Although broad similarities exist, no two countries have traced an identical path. One major economic and ideological concern in such a transformation is the fate of private property in general and land ownership in particular. Furthermore, the degree of redistribution of political power and material wealth of existing or emerging groups constitutes an important characteristic of the transformation itself. Thus, an important and interesting link in the chain of probable events is the occurrence or non-occurrence of land reform. The nature and degree of land reform, if it happens, or the variety of its substitutes, if it does not, provide vital clues to the specificity of the political economy of development.

The legitimacy of stationing British troops on Egyptian soil for the defence of the Suez Canal, and maintaining a base in the Near East, were Britain's special requirements in Egypt. Accordingly, the security of these two vital imperial interests was the motive that dictated Britain's policy towards Egypt. The political pattern in the country, reflecting a continuous struggle between those two significant forces, the popular nationalist Wafd party and an autocratic palace, largely determined the course of Anglo–Egyptian relations.

On New Year's Eve, before the tumultuous events of 1978–79, President Jimmy Carter, while toasting the Shah in Tehran, referred to Iran as an “island of stability” in the Persian Gulf. President Carter's remarks reflected the consensus opinion about Iran not only among United States government officials but among most business firms operating in Iran as well. A typical U.S. corporate attitude was represented by a 1975 Business International (hereafter BI) report about business prospects in the Middle East.

These characteristics (infrastructure development, population size and high absorptive capacity), which favorably distinguish Iran from the Arab Middle East, make the country the prime market in the area for many Western exporters. Political stability, the government's benevolent attitude toward private enterprise, and a well-protected internal market give Iran a similar edge in the eyes of foreign investors. Few international companies will thus want to stand aside as Iran races toward its goal of becoming the Japan of the Middle East.1

The conventional wisdom regarding the cultivation of cash crops (such as opium) is based on the assumption that raising a cash crop implies a certain degree of development of the productive forces of the economy. Having reached that degree, it is argued, the economy is better able to release portions of its land and labour from the production of basic necessities, i.e., food crops, and allocate them to the production of crops which are not immediately and directly consumed, but rather are produced to be exchanged in the market. This approach presupposes a relatively well-developed market economy and the existence of a relatively efficient transport system, both being, among other preconditions, essential for the emergence and development of an economy based on exchange. The main objective of this paper is to show that this model, despite being applicable to the Western European economies at an earlier stage of their industrialization, does not necessarily explain the situation in Iran during 1850–1906 (the period under review). We further argue that the production of opium or other cash crops had little to do with the development of Iranian agriculture or the development of the productive forces in the economy as a whole.

In the course of the nineteenth century, the relationship between Beirut and Mount Lebanon underwent important changes that have affected Lebanon's political life up to the present day. The city and the countryside had always been to some extent mutually dependent. They became more closely tied in response to the economic and political transformation of the region in the age of European penetration. This growing interdependence increasingly took the form of Beirut's ascendancy over the Mountain. While in earlier centuries it was the Mountain which had extended its sway over the city, in the nineteenth century the process was reversed. But Beirut's triumph as the dominant partner in the relationship was not an unmixed blessing: While bringing prosperity to the city, it also transferred to Beirut many of the unresolved tensions of the Mountain, preparing the way for the city's sectarian rivalries and tensions in more recent times.

What has been called the Revolution of 1952 was not really a revolution; a revolution should start from the bottom, not the top. The 1919 Revolution was different; it created the Egyptian man, while the 1952 revolution killed him. The 1919 Revolution … achieved … the British evacuation, while the 1952 revolution brought with it several defeats. The leaders and members of the 1919 Revolution faced torture in prisons, while the leaders of the 1952 revolution built palaces with money from secret sources and sent hundreds of people to military prisons.