Before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 27, 1979, a study of the economic relations between the two countries might have been based on the proposition that each country would maximize the gains to itself from the set of economic transactions consisting of bilateral trade, transit trade, and capital assistance to Afghanistan, its term structure, and repayment rates and schedule. Further, it could have been argued that the division of the gains from these transactions would have been a function of the demand and cost conditions in each country, as well as the relative bargaining positions of a small versus a large country, which could have been influenced by the availability of alternative sources for commodity trade and the supply of capital from the rest of the world.

Population movements have always played a major role in the life of Islam and particularly the Middle East. During the nineteenth century, however, the transfer of vast numbers of people from one region to another profoundly altered the social, ethnic, and religious structure of the Ottoman state—that is, the Middle East and the Balkans. The footloose tribes of eastern Anatolia, Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian peninsula were spurred into motion on an unprecedented scale by economic and social events, and the Ottoman government was forced to undertake settlement measures that had widespread effects. The Ottoman-Russian wars, which began in 1806 and occurred at intervals throughout the century, displaced large groups of people, predominantly Muslims from the Crimea, the Caucasus, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean islands. Uprooted from their ancestral homelands, they eventually settled in Anatolia, Syria (inclusive of the territories of modern-day Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel as well as modern Syria), and northern Iraq. These migrations continued until the time of the First World War. In addition, after 1830 waves of immigrants came from Algeria—especially after Abdel Kader ended his resistance to the French—and from Tunisia as well. These people too settled in Syria at Damascus.

Writers analyzing recent economic change among the Bedouin of South Sinai have not yet investigated institutions and events beyond the limits of their informants' memories. Marx, Perevolotsky, and Ben David refer, quite rightly, to the period following the Second World War as a time of economic change in Sinai. They note that in that period tribesmen tended to become unskilled laborers in new enterprises such as mining, road-building, and services, all generated by central governments that were then becoming exceedingly involved in Sinai. This trend, together with the growth of contraband in the 1940s and 1950s, modified traditional Bedouin economy by inducing a movement away from occupations based on the use of natural resources. A change in life-style followed, manifested primarily in a tendency to settle in villages such as El Milga and Abu Sileh near the Monastery of Saint Catharine, El Wad near El Tor, or Bir Zreir near Nweiba (see map).

A striking feature of medieval Persian poetry is the abundance of nature imagery that permeates every poetic genre, and especially imagery relating to gardens. The royal gardens and parks evoked in the descriptive exordia of the qasīda, the luxuriant gardens of romance that provide settings for tales of love, the spiritual gardens of mystical writings, the flowery haunts of rose and nightingale in the courtly ghazal—all provide eloquent testimony to the importance of the garden in Persian culture.