Great cities, no less than small books, have their fates. Some are capable of self renewal from seemingly unsalvageable shards of their older phases, like Alexandria; some continue to add new rings to their girth, preserving alike the evidences of alternating greatness and mediocrity, like Cairo; some disappear entirely into memory and literature, like the Round City of al-Mansûr, which today has as little to do with its living descendant, Baghdâd, as do the City of Brass or Qur'ânic Iram. Despite an absolute dearth of archaeological spade-work on the site, and a correspondingly absolute dependence on written sources, the scholarly literature dealing wholly or in part with al-Mansûr's Baghdâd is by now fairly extensive. For the most part, this literature has restricted itself to discussion of technical and architectural problems, or to those of historical and social geography. This paper proposes to look into the symbology of the city's immediately striking plan, the cross within the circle, as another instance of the imago mundi, a fitting pattern for this capital of the world-bestriding 'Abbâsid Empire. In the course of investigation, some treatment, however summary, of a number of folkloric/literary motives was found requisite, all, it is to be hoped, tending toward the definition of a clear and plausible design.

If the Islamic Community was founded to constitute the nucleus or model of the ‘good society’ on earth, why has it so manifestly failed to do so? This is the problem which haunts all thinking Muslims, confronting them with an insistent, nagging, exasperating demand to which self-respect requires an answer. The simple Muslim answer, which points to the ideal, says that it is ‘because we, the Community, have ceased to live now for many centuries in faithful obedience to the Sharî'a and in conscious striving to live up to its ethic’. Another mocking Western answer points to practice in the world of Islam: ‘because you Muslims did not learn to control your inward violences you were forced to submit to tyranny in political life and allowed your social institutions to be ravaged by lust and greed’. For the true Muslim, however, neither answer is satisfactory. To the Westerner he reacts with a natural surge of hot and outraged pride: ‘What kind of social ideals do you imagine your practice holds out to the world? We at least have nothing to learn from atheists, infidels, hypocrites and Hollywood’, he says. But when he contemplates the simple Muslim answer, he becomes aware that here too something is wrong. Only the most simplehearted believer can continue to take the entire Sharî'a system on trust, although there are many Muslims who want no change because the existing system suits their interests.

In Mount Lebanon, 1860 and the years immediately preceding it witnessed the turbulence of social and economic change. These were years of sporadic civil disorder culminating in a paroxysm of religious strife. These events and their antecedents have elicited enlightening studies from social scientists and historians.2 By comparison, the years immediately following 1860 were less disturbed, and might initially even appear less interesting. Under closer scrutiny, however, they provide revealing and instructive insights into the mechanics of change and the continuing history of the social and political formation of the specifically sectarian policy that is the core of the Lebanese fact.

If, as Ghazâlî presumes, the fact of creation can serve as evidence of the existence of God, and if, as he attempts to show, creation is the only binding, reasoned proof of God's existence, Ghazâlî must, to fulfill his program of reconstructing the intellectual basis of Islam, somehow find arguments adequate to prove that creation did in fact take place. He must disprove what was in his time the still vital claim that the Universe had not come to be but had existed forever differing in no essential way from the world we know today.