Scholars have often been struck by the traditional and highly personal power relationships and manipulations that underlie the westernized and modernized forms of Iranian political machinery. Such analyses, stressing the continuity between traditional and modern Iran, are most enlightening, but they should not blind us to the very real changes in the power structure that have occurred in Iran between 1800 and the present. One can agree with analysts who stress traditional continuities that the change in power relationships has had rather little to do with the formal constitutionalist structure of Iranian politics since 1906. The real changes in the structure of power over the past century or more have been tied to social and economic changes that have reduced the power of certain social groups and classes while increasing that of others, and also of the central government. This essay will attempt a very brief and tentative analytic overview of the nature of these changes

On 15 June 1826, after some fierce though brief fighting in the streets of Istanbul, Sultan Mahmud II effectively crushed the last serious Janissary uprising in the history of the Ottoman Empire. Two days later the five-centuries-old Janissary corps, which had long resisted change and modernization, was declared legally abolished. In its place there was to be organized a modern army called the Trained Victorious Muslim Troops (Muallem Asâkir-i Mansâre-yi Muhammadiye), or the Victorious (Mansûre) for short.

The Arabian Peninsula has an area of about 1·2 million square miles but only some 11·5 million inhabitants—roughly 10 persons to the square mile.2 In absolute terms, this makes the Peninsula one of the least-populated regions in the world. However, as we will have occasion to indicate further on, the population is not sparse if account is taken of the scarcity of water, the niggardliness of nature except for oil, the low level of economic performance, and the narrow base of development.

In antiquity and in the Middle Ages slavery played a significant role in the military, economic, political and social life of the Near East. Many studies have been made of these aspects of life, but little has been said in the context of Islam about the psychological bonds which, at least to some extent, characterize the relationship between slave or freedman and master. The institution of ‘mutual alliance’ also played an important part in Islamic history, and there were certain similarities between the relation of the ‘ally’ to the patron on the one hand, and of the freedman to the former master on the other. But it is the purpose of this discussion, in part, to point out some basic differences between the two relationships.

One achievement of the philosophy represented by Ghazâlî is disentangling the creation argument for the existence of God from rival forms of design argument which allow or assume the eternity of the world. From its earliest expressions as an isolated insight which might easily be explained away as myth, the notion that the universe had been brought to be out of what is not was gradually tranformed under pressure of severe Aristottelian criticism into a precise concept, and the argument implicit in such a notion metamorphosed into an elegant and sophisticated demonstration. Backed up by the closely reasoned philosophy of being into which it was now integrated, the argument from creation might confidently hope to be proof against attack.