Historians of Muslim societies have observed that, in principle, the strict application of the Islamic rules of inheritance would result in the progressive fragmentation of capital. Although technically correct, the observation fails to take into account the fact that the Islamic inheritance rules are but part of a larger and flexible Islamic inheritance system that also includes bequests, gifts inter vivos, family endowments, dowries, fictitious sales, and other modes for the devolution of property. This larger system has served Muslims, rich and poor, for over 1,400 years, although it operates differently in different places. The most important component of the Islamic inheritance system arguably has been the family endowment, known among the Malikis as ḥabs (popularly, habous) and elsewhere as waqf ahlī. This institution came into existence in the first Islamic century, in part because the Islamic inheritance rules proved too constraining, and soon became an integral component of the Islamic legal system. It allows a proprietor to transform immovable property such as a house or field into a perpetual endowment for one or more beneficiaries and subsequent generations of descendants; the property thereafter may not be bought, sold, or inherited. The founder designates the initial beneficiaries and defines the strategy according to which usufructory rights pass from one generation to the next. Thus, the founder may control the devolution ofendowment revenues for many generations after his or her death.

In the first half of the 1970s, Egypt turned away from the Soviet Union and initiated an economic open-door policy. Since then, the United States, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank have encouraged comprehensive reforms that would make Egypt an outward-looking market-oriented capitalist economy in which the private sector plays a dominant role. While the Egyptian economy had gone in that direction between 1974 and 1990, it had fallen far short of what they were looking for. In lengthy negotiations with the IMF, Egypt had, in spite of strong pressure, remained unwilling to implement many elements in this orthodox reform package. At the same time, most observers agreed that the government's own policies were not successful: living standards declined while the foreign debt grew rapidly, undermining the country's political independence. Analysts attributed this resistance to reform in the face of foreign pressure to a mix of domestic and foreign factors.

When commentators discuss the Israeli political system, they invariably single it out as the exception in a region otherwise lacking in democratic and representative regimes. Although political philosophers and theorists remind us that the test of de mocracy hinges on, among other things, the way a society treats its minorities and guarantees them civil and political rights in the face of majority opposition, the de bate over what constitutes justice, equality, and freedom is unlikely to be resolved in a discussion centered on abstract principles and their absolute meanings. It is one thing for a society to profess egalitarian values and another to measure the extent to which these values are perceived and experienced by those immediately affected by them. This does not mean that there are no universal standards of justice against which to measure performance of the law. Our point is that the experiential dimen sion of the law is equally relevant, for it mediates between the meaning of the law as derived from abstract principles and the way it is implemented in daily life.

As elsewhere in the developing world, the Arabian peninsula has undergone sweeping changes since World War II, with the important difference that the process here has been blessed with unprecedented prosperity and not marred by economic difficulties. To say that the effects of modernization upon the local societies differ as a result from what can be observed in other countries would be to state the obvious. Yet, when it comes to understanding the position and status of contemporary women in the Arabian oil producing countries, prosperity and the particular circumstances around it are rarely considered as crucial variables. The women's situation often is evaluated, mainly if not exclusively, in light of the religious injunctions and traditional norms that govern the female condition in a Middle East that, by the same token, appears curiously monolithic and timeless. There seems to be an assumption that Arabian women are not part of the societies in which they live, and that, by virtue of some unique cultural principle, their condition remains unaffected by the vectors of change that have turned upside down all the other areas of life around them. Hence the general tendency to assess women's opportunities and constraints in terms of what the Qurʾan and Islamic tradition dictate, not in terms of secular and more immediate concerns they may share with the rest of the society. Aside from assuming a spurious dichotomy between the women and their societies, such an approach disregards the historical and material specificity of particular areas in the Muslim world. It also arbitrarily and a priori defines the character of the meeting between “Islamic tradition” and “modernity,” instead of leaving it open to empirical investigation.

The year 1844–45 in Damascus province was a dry one, aggravated by a brutal winter frost. Reports of ruined crops and disputes over precious water sources reached the city, where as yet there was still enough to eat. But the city was by no means immune to the drought. It was felt in varying ways, like rising prices and, of all things, a shortage of leeches. Barbers could not get enough of them to meet medical needs, and their prices had risen sharply. So the barbers began smuggling them. An Ottoman market official (mültazim), on noticing that government leech sales for that month had dropped from 45,000 to 7,000, ordered police (tüfenkçi) to confiscate the creatures from barbershops and sold them himself for profit. Conflict between the official and barbers exploded, and each side made its way, as rural peasants and tax collectors had in the crisis, to the ultimate court of appeal in the province, the Majlis Shūrā al-Shām al-ʿAlī, or high advisory council for Damascus province.

An Iranian born in 1906, when the constitution was granted, would have had to wait until he was thirty-four to find a history of what was happening at the time of his birth. Kasravi's first volume appeared in 1940 and Malikzada's in 1948. Censorship was not the cause of this strange delay. Could it be that disillusion with the outcome of the movement ran so deep in the minds of intellectuals that no one wished to relive the story by writing it? The newly established Pahlavi state tried to glorify the ancient heritage of Persia and to shift the historical landscape from the immediacy of the constitutional era to the politically irrelevant past of pre-Islamic Iran. It is somehow peculiar—and perhaps a measure of the time—that an author of the Iranian constitution, the Mushir al-Daula (Hasan Pirniya) undertook, when in political retirement, to write not a history of the constitutional movement but a monumental work on ancient Iran. Kasravi speculated about the reasons for the nonexistence of a reliable history. The opportunist elitist reformers (“carpetbaggers”) who shifted sides during the movement “were reluctant to see the history of that movement truthfully written.” The Mushir al-Daula was one of them. Kasravi complained that when he began publishing his history, the sons, relatives, and followers of these men objected to his critical historical evaluation.