Faced with the possible censoring of the film adaptation of ʿImarat Yaʿqubyan, the book's author, ʿAlaʾ al-Aswani, responded, “Why aren't Italy, France, or the United States defamed by movies dealing with homosexuality?” Implicit in his defensive question is a perceived distinction between First World gay rights and social conservatism in the Third World. My paper considers this conventional coupling of gay rights and civilizational discourse in the global reception of ʿImarat Yaʿqubyan. Against the author's remarks, I argue that the story is remarkable for staging an interplay between the putatively opposed characters of Hatim Rashid, an openly gay newspaper editor, and Taha al-Shazli, a young man lured into a terrorist group. By uniting these two characters along parallel tracks, ʿImarat Yaʿqubyan queerly couples the seemingly antagonistic forces endemic to the civilizational discourse of gay rights and offers us a means for imagining new constellations of queer politics.

“I have heard, Salim,” said my master, “that you are a good dancer and singer. I wish you to show my guests what you can do!”

I thank Professor Nikki R. Keddie for her constructive critique and am using this opportunity to clarify a few points. First, let me reiterate that I do not consider statist approaches to be “wrong,” but “one-sided,” and that I am not calling for their disposal but for “trying out new sources and perspectives then fusing them with state-centered perspectives into a broader panorama of Pahlavi Iran” (pp. 38–39). I see neither “sins” nor “an ongoing struggle between ‘statists’ and ‘antistatists.’” Such language would undercut a productive debate now and disregard the fact that in the long run—as some excesses of the cultural turn in the 1980s and many historians' subsequent search for new historiographic syntheses demonstrate—the pendulum always swings back.

The first twelve months following the arrival of the American Protestant missionaries to the shores of Syria, the eastern Mediterranean haven of religious dissidence, constituted the “bright spring time of the mission” as one observer put it. Soon thereafter in 1824 the ecclesiastical authorities of the Maronites, “Romanists”, and Uniat Meichites awoke to the danger threatening them and began to resent their presence. The reason for the short honeymoon is not difficult to perceive: when the missionaries took stock of the situation it soon dawned upon them that they could function in one of two ways, “either silently in the bosom of native churches to revive religion or attempt a reformation of rites and ceremonies”. They chose the second course, and the end result was both hostility to their activities and a feeble Protestant community at best, unable to survive without outside protection and support.

Writer's block is not a new concept, but I should like to consider it in a new context: the realm of the young and rapidly developing Francophone literature of the Maghreb. I am suggesting that the writer's malaise before the blank page is a sign of a highly developed authorial relationship with one's language and materials and that the recent increase in the number of (1) testimonials in which Maghrebian writers bear witness to their sense of impotence when facing the purity of the white page and (2) reactions symptomatic of that frustration is evidence of development in the literature in question.

In the past two decades, the rate of growth of agricultural output in Egypt has been quite low and, in particular, has fallen behind the country's population growth rate. Most observers seem to agree that despite certain natural constraints, such as limitation of arable land, the sector's performance could have been much better if the Egyptian government had chosen to pursue more supportive policies toward agriculture. There is, however, much less agreement over the specific policies that have been most responsible for the sector's past stagnation. Several recent studies have emphasized the role of price policies, pointing out that the government has taxed agriculture heavily by keeping the relative prices of most major crops quite low. Others, on the other hand, have held the government's investment policies responsible, arguing that the sector's resources have remained undeveloped because of insufficient public investment in research, extension, and infrastructure. While the debate over the relative importance of these sets of policies has generated a number of valuable contributions to the understanding of Egyptian agriculture, the past analyses of the sector's production system have not sufficed to settle the differences. One of the main problems is that, so far, most studies have concentrated on outputs and prices of individual crops and have thus failed to provide comprehensive analyses of the sector as a whole.

The success or failure of land reform programs in the past has been, in general, evaluated on the basis of whether agricultural output increases or decreases following their adoption and the implementation of their principal provisions. Yet this approach ignores other factors, such as the effect of prices on output, making it likely that the influence of land reform is under- or over-estimated. In this paper, we suggest that it is possible to isolate the effect of price on output from those of reform programs by using the Nerlove supply model. By applying this method to periods before and after the initiation of such programs, we can identify any change in the market responsiveness of the affected cultivators. In testing this approach, the output of major crops in Egypt, Syria and Iraq—countries which have seen major land reform efforts in the post-war era—was analyzed. Post-reform responsiveness was compared with that of earlier periods and with that of cultivators in two neighboring countries—Jordan and Lebanon—which underwent little reform.

It is perhaps premature to spell out priorities of research in the history of Libya, since bibliographies of what has already been written have not been systematically read, nor even adequately compiled and indexed. The following observations and analyses are, of necessity, based on a cursory reading in a list—compiled by the author on the history of the Arab world and Ottoman Empire (sixteenth through nineteenth centuries)—of some 500 studies done since the 1950s by Arab scholars and historians. The fifties are taken as the period which signalled the achievement of political independence by the Arab States. I realize that individual scholars will be able to make exceptions here or ther to the observations, generalizations, and criticisms which are made in this study. The very exceptions, however, point to the dearth of modern critical scholarship on the history of Libya from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. However, the exceptions which one could point out as models for research to be done, do not in and of themselves amount to trends in research. To date, available histories of Libya are, in the main, focused on political if not outright dynastic history. The focus is usually placed on the peculiarities and the anomalies of political history rather than the primary similarities which make for comparative history. In the remainder of this paper we offer a novitiate's priorities for research under five headings.