The emergence of feminist thought in Egypt at the turn of the last century has often been remarked upon, but there has been little rigorous analysis of its social context and background. As keen an observer as Gabriel Baer has ventured to write that in nineteenth-century Egypt “evidently the traditional structure of the family and the status of women did not undergo any change at all.” On the face of it, however, it seems highly unlikely that the expansion of the urban and rural middle classes, the emergence of private property, the period of state capitalism, and the onset of colonial rule could have left women unaffected.

The fellah has never used tractors, reapers, binders, and threshing machines, and it is unlikely that he ever will. He is too poor, and in any case feels no need of intermediaries between him and the soilH. H. Ayrout, The Egyptian Peasant, 1963.

Father Ayrout might be surprised by the Egyptian countryside today! Agricultural mechanization has been spreading rapidly, especially since 1973. Although national tractor censuses are notoriously unreliable because of the problems of treating old machines, current official estimates place the number of four-wheeled tractors at 25,000. Over 1,000 tractors have been manufactured at the Nasr works in Helwan every year since 1973; the number of tractor imports has quadrupled in the same period (see table I).

Studies of legislatures in developing countries have to contend with a great deal of cynicism owing, in part, to a political controversy concerning the role of the legislative institution in the Third World. The executive branch, which is generally dominant in developing nations, often uses the legislature to legitimize executive actions. Legislators who agree to serve the executive in this fashion often exaggerate or misrepresent the importance of the legislature in their political system. Conversely, opposition groups, who are frequently excluded from the political process in Third World countries, denigrate the role of legislatures and often exaggerate their ineffectiveness. Scholars have mostly ingnored the role of legislatures in the process of development.

It is ironic and perhaps telling that the one national independence movement largely ignored by historians of the Arab Middle East is the Syrian nationalist movement. The irony, of course, is that the birthplace of Arab nationalism was Syria; it was to Damascus that Arab nationalists in Palestine, Iraq and elsewhere looked for inspiration, guidance, and moral support in the interwar period; and out of the Syrian movement sprang the radical nationalism of the Ba'thists. Intellectual histories of the precursors, birth, and content of Arab nationalism abound, and, insofar as these histories deal with the birthplace of Arab nationalism, they must discuss Damascus and Syria just prior to and during World War I. But once the intellectual birth of Arab nationalism has been discussed, interest in the history of Syria wanes to be revived only after World War II, with the emergence of Ba'thism and the military in politics. What follows is by no means a comprehensive analysis of the nature and organization of the Syrian national independence movement; rather, it is a preliminary investigation of some salient characteristics of the politics of Syrian-Arab nationalism in the early years of the French Mandate.

Islamic military slavery has been the subject of a number of studies in recent years. The central theme of these scholarly works has been the dominant role played by Turks, imported as slaves and trained as cavalry, for whom the term “Mamluk” is used to denote both racial background and occupation. A second aspect, which has not been as systematically studied, is that most Muslim armies were composed of cavalry and infantry units organized into units based on racial identities. The theory was that their racial affinities were the cohesive element within a unit; that the natural rivalries between these groups would bring strength to a ruler's position as they tried to outdo one another on the field of battle; and that these racial jealousies would create a balance which would prevent any one military/racial group from dominating the government.

As a field of study, the Middle East, like its predecessor the “Orient”, continues to exist more concretely within a vast realm of Western texts, both artistic and ethnographic, than it does on the ground. This ingrained disparity between representation and social reality has motivated some scholars to examine this literature as the manifestation of physical or ideological domination. In Edward Said's Orientalism the interpretation of this literature becomes a search for determining social and political forces, the evidence of which, like the nineteenth-century anthropological notion of “survivals”, resides in each text as an implicit network of unconscious images and metaphors. Similarly, Abdelkebir Khatibi, investigating the historical and ethnographic texts of Jacques Berque, views this literature as determined by the requirements of an exigent and compelling, but inherently flawed, Western metaphysic; an “onto-tháologie” which, in confronting questions of essence and existence, must formulate an “other” to realize its “self”.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim International Journal of Middle East Studies, Volume 12 (1980), no. 4. On page 449, note 2, an article by R. S. Humphreys is cited as “Islam and Political Violence in saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria.” the correct title is “Islam and Political Values in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria.”