Egypt is a less developed country that made use of foreign capital to accelerate its rate of economic development and growth.

In 1960 Egypt embarked on long-term economic development planning. A Five-Year plan (1960–1965) was followed by a Seven-Year plan (1965–1972). In planning for economic development, Egyptian authorities relied heavily on foreign capital.

Admission. Scholars wishing to work in the Archive should write directly to the director of the Department of Youth, Sports, and Cultural Affairs, Cyprus Turkish Federated State, Lefkoşa, Cyprus (for the present, at least, c/o Mersin 10, Turkey). They should define the nature of their proposed research clearly and precisely, although not so specifically as to limit their research; a brief statement regarding their academic background should be included. Limited photocopying and microfilming may be permitted by the director of the Archive. Photocopying is available at the Archive, although it is expensive by American standards. Microfilming is also available locally.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 has unleashed a flood of books on the causes and consequences of the rise of political Islam and the failure of Western-supported modernizing states. Ervand Abrahamian's new book is important because it is the first detailed academic work that deals with the conditions of the prisons and the horrors of the criminal system—the torture, the forced confessions, and the executions—in the newly established theocratic state. This book is a testimony to the horrors of self-righteous ideological regimes whose ruling elite claims a monopoly on truth and the knowledge of what is best for its citizens. This is a chilling book that should be read by all scholars and non-scholars who care about human rights.

This is the slyest, and therefore smartest, assessment of Islamic fundamentalism currently available. The author, a prolific Lebanese political theorist, has offered in this, his fourth monograph on the subject, a well-argued, highly original thesis. Moussalli asks one basic question: does Islamic fundamentalism have a philosophical basis? “Yes, it does,” he replies, “but it is not the same basis for all Islamic fundamentalists.” He then proceeds to demonstrate how particular Islamic fundamentalist theorists have addressed issues such as ideology and knowledge, society and politics, from their own philosophical perspective. The argument is markedly tilted toward politics, as each of the six chapters examines either a facet of political philosophy or the discourse of a particular theorist on the Islamic state. The first three chapters are framed as general overviews, first of the fundamentalism–modernism dyad, then of the epistemological divide between divine revelation and human reason, and finally of the discursive dichotomy between the Islamic state and democratic pluralism. The next three chapters shift to dominant theorists, the three “heroes” of Islamist ideology. Chapter 4 examines Hasan al-Banna on the Islamic state; Chapter 5, Sayyid Qutb. Chapter 6 takes up the most prominent current Islamist: Hasan al-Turabi. Not since Hamid Enayat's Modern Islamic Political Thought (Texas, 1982) has any scholar made such a comprehensive effort to trace the patterns of similarity—and the evidence of conflict and disagreement—among the major ideologues of Islamic fundamentalism.

On 15 July 1935, a group of residents in the small port town of Aqaba sent a rough handwritten petition to the prime minister of Transjordan. Its clumsy script betrayed the humble origins of its signatories. Inscribing their destitution in virtually every clause, the petitioners wrote: Because we, the common people and notables of Aqaba and its bedouins (ahālī wa-wujūh al- al-Aqaba wa-urbānuha) are in a state of poverty, our town being very poor, and since our poverty and our wretched conditions are not hidden from Your Eminence, our desire is for the cancellation of the municipality of Aqaba. Our town does not merit a municipality because it is poor and small, and many of its people have migrated over the past two years to Maan for the sake of making a living, and only the very poor remain in it. And the municipal administration of Aqaba has cut off from us the bedouins and others we depend on. Last year, they estimated the municipal budget at £P 60 [Palestine pounds] and it was not collected justly. Therefore we ask the mercy of Your Eminence in cancelling the municipality.

The principal focus of Zeev Sternhell's screed is Labor Zionism, although like other Israeli so-called new historians, he touches on relations with the country's Arabs, tensions between the Ashkenazi elite and Sephardi under-class, the Yishuv and the Holocaust, and attitudes toward and perceptions of Diaspora Jewry. The author, whose professional field has been European history, mainly France and Italy, was motivated to undertake this study by “serious doubts” (p. ix) about the generally accepted ideas sanctioned by Israeli historiography and social science. Using his skills as a professional historian, he probed Zionist and Israeli government archives and reread original texts to compare what he perceived as social and political realities with the ideology guiding policies. Sternhell is critical of traditional Israeli historiography because of the damage it has caused by separating Jewish history from general history. The consequences, he asserts, are “truly appalling” (p. x), resulting in paralysis of any real critical sense and perpetuation of “myths flattering to Israel's collective identity” (p. x). This has led many historians of Zionism “to lock themselves up in an intellectual ghetto” (p. x), leading to ignorance and emotional blindness.

Using a vast array of government documents, newspapers, journals, memoirs of political prisoners, and reports issued by the Special Representative appointed by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), Reza Afshari provides a rich, sensitive, and very sympathetic presentation of the experiences and voices of victims of human-rights violations in Iran. This timely book is organized into eighteen chapters and is, to a large extent, the story of two decades of interaction between the UNCHR and Iranian officials. It discusses reports issued by the Special Representative of the UNCHR on the conditions of human rights in Iran and documents their violations in 1979–2000. In addition to gender discriminations and threats to the liberty and life of secular intellectuals, each of the following rights is discussed in a separate chapter: the right to life; freedom from torture and cruel punishment; liberty and security of person and freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention; a fair trial; freedom of conscience, thought, and religion; freedom of opinion, expression, and the press; participation in the state's political affairs; and the rights of women to equal opportunities in public life.

In this important book, Laurie Brand asks whether the all-too-brief political openings in the Middle East and North Africa had a positive or a negative impact on women's rights and whether the many Islamist and women's rights groups influenced that impact. She begins with a thoughtful statement describing her background and philosophical orientation vis-à-vis her study (pp. xv–xvi). Many authors of scholarly books find this very difficult to do, but it is helpful for serious readers and should be an expected practice. She also takes care to define her terms. “Women's status” here means women's legal status and women's rights to organize. She prefers to use “conservative forces” for “Islamism” or “Islamic fundamentalism,” though this varies in the text, and “conservative” for “traditional.” “Progress for women” means reproductive rights and access to divorce, though, as she notes, many women would ask for clean running water, good educational facilities, decent working conditions, and increased wages before reproductive rights and access to divorce. It is of course difficult to separate civil and political rights from social and economic rights; which comes first is like the chicken and the egg conundrum.

Due to the illegal movement of goods and people, the Khuzistan-Basra frontier, like many other borderlands in the region, represented a liminal space for border dwellers and the Iranian state. Although scholars have written about the migration that was endemic to the early nation-building period, the consequences of this movement in the latter half of the 20th century require further exploration. Well into the 1970s, Iranian migrants and border dwellers complicated citizenship, evinced by the Pahlavi monarchy's failure or refusal to offer them their rights. The Iranian archives prove that, decades into the nation-building project, local dynamics continued to exert tremendous influence on Iranians and even superseded national policies.

This article discusses the modalities through which religious and secular nongovernmental medical organizations frame their work in relation to their constituencies. It argues that their discourses exemplify a differentiated approach to social work that can be explained in the context of massive aid disbursed to the occupied Palestinian territories. To understand how the political economy of aid impacts the framing of socioreligious movements, this article focuses on a case study of health organizations operating in the Hebron district, where a mixed matrix of charitable organizations, Islamic institutions, and zakat committees work along secular nongovernmental organizations. In the past decade, there seems to have been a revival of charitable organizations, which may shed light on current political victories of the Islamic sector. If Islamic socioreligious movements have been successful in promoting discourses of common good that attract more popular support than secular organizations, it is precisely because such discourses are in open (and sometimes conscious) tension with liberal conceptions such as good governance, strong civil society, and democracy promotion that are relayed generally by secular and professionalized nongovernmental organizations

In August 2001, a conference on the state of Middle East women's studies took place at the Rockefeller Foundation Center in Bellagio, Italy. Apart from the gorgeous surroundings, the conference was memorable for the breadth and scope of the high-quality papers presented by scholars teaching in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Many participants were active in the Association for Middle East Women's Studies. Some went on to establish the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Hawwa, and Brill's women and Islam monograph series. Most of us also publish in disciplinary journals and present papers at a variety of conferences.

Near the beginning of his classic work of historiography, The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretive Essay, Moroccan thinker Abdallah Laroui inserts a footnote about a study of the region by a Harvard-based American author who refers to North Africa as “no idea producing area,” a statement that Laroui thoroughly dismantles in a couple of sentences. In this short note at the start of a book written forty years ago, Laroui pinpoints the central problem in U.S.-based studies of the Arab region. The historically contested nature of knowledge production in the field cannot be ignored in any attempt to address the question of critical theory's influence on Arabic literature in the American academy.

This article argues that the Aden Protectorate constituted one of the westernmost parts of India in terms of its political–legal identity and its place in the cultural project of imperial India. Although the port of Aden was governed as part of the Bombay Presidency until 1937, the tribes of the Aden Protectorate were treated as independent native states similar to the princely states of India. Using the sultanate of Lahj as a case study, the article shows the extent to which the colonial state used the Indian model to elaborate a history of the sultanate as an independent political entity, a status that was then institutionalized in historical texts, ethnographic knowledge, and state rituals. The article concludes with an analysis of the protectorate's participation in the 1903 Coronation Durbar in Delhi as a means of demonstrating its place in the British imagination of a socially and politically fragmented India that extended beyond geographical South Asia.

The study of Arab nationalism, and indeed of all nationalisms, is beset with particular problems. One is the imprecision of the main concepts involved, starting with the definition of nation. Another is the confusion, inherent in the very word “nationalism,” between two quite different objects of study—nationalism as a movement, as a social and political force, and nationalism as an ideology. The first allows objective, historical analyses of how a particular movement arose and developed in such and such a country, of the social groups that supported and/or opposed it, and, not least, of how states have sought to define and utilize it. The second is an aspiration, an ideological and normative claim, one with a strong tendency to control public debate; it has an inherent tendency to distort the history of the supposed “nation.” The special claims nationalists make for their particular nation cause a third problem: although modern history has yielded hundreds of cases of nationalism, as movement and ideology, nationalism occasions analysis that is singular, treating the nation in question as unique and avoiding comparison.