Sunni radicalism surfaced before the Iranian Revolution of 1978. It arose out of conditions specific to Arab countries and the manner in which those faithful to the Suuna reacted to these conditions. In the quater century between the appeareance of the ideas of Sayyis Qutb, the father of Sunni radicalism, and the end of the 1970s, not only were the Sunni radical movements devoid of Iranian-Shi⊂i influence, but almost no reference was made in these movements to the fact that Iranian Islam was simultaneously undergoing a process of radicalization. A mixture of ignorance and apathy predominanted. The most one can find are several references to the organizational lessons of the Fidaciyan al-Islam, an Iranian phenomenon of the early 1950s; it seems that whatever inspiration the radical Sunni movements in Arab lands sought from the outside came from Sunni circles in India andPakistan.

Kuwait is one of the gulf countries that has imported large numbers of temporary migrant workers over the last decade or so. The import of such workers was necessitated by the ambitious development plans that were made possible by the oil bonanza after 1973. Even prior to this influx, however, more than 70 percent of the labor force in Kuwait consisted of foreign workers. As the country has gone through economic and other changes, its goals concerning the magnitude and structure of the migrant worker population have undergone substantial revisions. These changes are reflected in such indicators as number of migrant workers; occupational and industrial distribution of the labor force; demographic, ethnic, and educational characteristics of this labor force; and related wage levels. An examination of the above changes is the objective of the present study.

During the last three decades, there has been an increasing drive in developing countries towards integration, characterized by an equally apparent tendency towards the institutionalization of this attitude. This is a direct result of the realization that their future development as well as their ability to break the vicious circle of their dependence on the developed world depend on the extent of their success in attaining collective self-reliance. It was this realization and the futility of past integration efforts that motivated the six Arab Gulf countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to establish in 1981 the Gulf Co-Operation Council (GCC) in an attempt to find a common basis on which economic development could be carried out on a regional basis.

In the decade before the military coup of July 23, 1952, an increasingly militant workers' movement was an important component of the social and political upheaval that undermined the monarchy and ended the era of British colonialism in Egypt. The ebbs and flows of the labor movement coincided with successive upsurges of the nationalist movement. Working class participation in the nationalist struggle infused the movement for full independence and evacuation of British military forces with a radical social consciousness, and since workers’ strikes and demonstrations were often directed against foreign enterprises, the labor movement was commonly considered to be a component of the nationalist movement. The working class was a social battering ram destabilizing the old regime, and many nationalists encouraged and legitimized labor militancy.

The historiography of the Sanusiyya, if one can apply such a term to the literary crop of roughly a century dealing with this North African tarīqa (pl. turuq, Sufi brotherhood), falls into three distinct categories. The earliest writings appeared in the 1880s, thirty years after the tariqa had taken root in Cyrenaica (then the Ottoman province of Benghazi). The works of French authors such as Charmes, Rinn, Duveyrier, Le Chatelier, and co-authors Depont and Coppolani were all marked by the concerns of the French colonial and protectorate authorities in Algeria and Tunisia. According to Duveyrier, a Saharan explorer of repute and the crudest exponent of this group's views, not only were the Sanusis a band of fanatics given to murdering innocent missionaries and explorers, but they were also in the vanguard of the turuq inspired by the Pan-Islamic rhetoric of the Ottoman sultan and aligned against French colonialism in Muslim North Africa. Only this combination of factors could account for the pervasive and determined resistance to French policies in the region. Along with the Sanusiyya, Duveyrier singled out for attack a North African sheikh and confidant of the Ottoman sultan, Muhammad Zafir al-Madani. Charmes, Rinn, Le Chatelier, and Depont and Coppolani, while less vitriolic in their tone, certainly had the same general approach. The analysis of this “Algerian school” was dismissed at the turn of the century by two eminent Orientalists, Christiaan Snouck Hugronje and Carl Heinrich Becker.3 A generation later, European fears of the turuq diminished in the wake of World War I, as new ideologies and forces came to dominate a transformed Pan-Islamism. This notwithstanding, some of the suppositions of the early French authors were adopted by later scholars and have since been quoted and requoted.

In the field of international relations, the 1979 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan has raised major issues concerning regional security and superpower relations. By introducing Soviet military forces in a traditionally nonaligned country, the Kremlin initiated a more aggressive pattern in its foreign policies. This occupation was the Soviet Union's first territorial expansion by direct use of military power since World War II.