The profile of Egypt at midcentury is quite typical of Third World countries: Two-thirds or more of the population lived and made a living off the land, more than half of the national labor force was rural, the contribution of agriculture to GNP was one-third the total, and that of industry less than 15 percent. Land distribution was extremely unequal, less than one percent of landowners possessed more than one-third of the cultivated land and many of them were absentee landlords. The credit system and extension services were inadequate if available at all. Finally, population pressure on the land was relentless.

The arrival of Lashin1 on the Egyptian literary scene in the 1920s marked a turning point in the history of the short story: he was an outstandingly vigorous pioneer who developed the genre and brought its formative years to a close. His writings represent the culmination, in both form and content, of the work of previous writers and of his contemporaries. He was also the major figure of a versatile literary group, Jama⊂at al-Madrasa al Haditha (the Modern School), which played a decisive role in developing the Egyptian short story, extending its reading public, and shaping the characteristics of the new sensibility of that period. This group did not start as a proper literary school as the name implies, but rather as a gathering of enthusiastic young writers whose common dream of issuing a paper of their own, to express their views and publish their unconventional works, took almost a decade to be realised.

This article examines the creation of the first privately-owned Muslim banks in the first half of the twentieth century and the legal debates they instigated among Muslim communities. Whether in Bosnia or India, these banks appeared suddenly in the years immediately before the First World War. They were envisioned as a way to free up Muslim capital for productive ends, and as the means to jumpstart a Muslim economic renaissance. Far from masking their interest transactions, the banks' founders and customers pointed to a range of Islamic legal rulings that justified interest levied on deposits and loans. These rulings varied from one geographic locale to the next, and were expressive of diverse Muslim institutional and legal histories. Yet in an age when the formerly diffuse discursive terrain around interest, usury, and the Islamic foundational sources was shifting towards a consensus that rejected any interest/usury distinction, some of these banks faced acute challenges, particularly in India. There, novel notions of interest-free Islamic economics were articulated from the interwar period, which rejected any form of Muslim interest-banking. In time, the earlier iteration of Muslim interest banking became overshadowed by the new paradigm of “Islamic banks” which purportedly eschewed all financial interest.

The first President of the Middle East Studies Association and one of its principal founders, Gustave E. von Grunebaum, died of cancer in Los Angeles, California, on 27 February 1972, at the age of sixty-two. Born in Vienna on I September 1909, he belonged to a family well established in the economic and intellectual life of the old Austrian Empire, which was soon to pass into history but not without leaving to some among the younger generation the legacy of an open-minded cosmopolitanism, a wide participation in Europe's multilingual structure, and a keen enjoyment of style and elegance in the material and spiritual pleasures of life. Von Grunebaum was not given to speaking much about himself, and I do not recall that he ever mentioned to me why he chose Oriental studies as his subject at the University of Vienna, nor did I meet him when he, a Ph.D. recipient not yet 22 years old, came for a year of postgraduate study (1932-3) to Berlin where I had just begun my studies. Soon the second collapse of the world that had nurtured him came with the infamous Anschluss of 1938. Because of his clear perception of the new barbarism as completely antithetical to all the values he cherished, he left for the United States to join the Asia Institute in New York, where Arthur Upham Pope (1881-1969) was making an heroic, and greatly successful, effort to give displaced European Orientalists a new start. While his first five years in the United States were not easy, they brought such compensations as sharing in the intellectual atmosphere of a New York so different, yet in certain respects similar, to that of Europe,uninterrupted work in the quiet of the Oriental Reading Room of the New York Public Library, small and cramped but friendly in addition to containing what was then the best collection of Arabic books in America and, above all, getting married to his Austrian sweetheart Giselle Steuerman as soon as she was able to reach this country.

For several years, whenever time permitted, I have worked on a book, Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, covering the centuries between the conquest of Gallipoli in 1354 and the beginning of the Serb revolt in 1804. As the title of my study indicates, it covers only the Balkan Peninsula, Hungary, and Romania. It is not a history of the Ottomans in Europe, but an attempt to present the story of the people who lived under Ottoman rule.

On 7 April 1971 Professor Roger LeTourneau died unexpectedly at Aix-en-Provence following routine surgery. A founding member of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, and a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Professor LeTourneau had for over a decade taken an active role in encouraging the development of Middle Eastern Studies in the United States, especially in the growth of his field of specialization, the history of North Africa. His influence, both personal and professional, and his contribution to scholarship were exceptional.

This article examines Americans' uses of the Ottoman-Turkish past to justify different approaches to “Third World” development. Such invocations exposed tensions within American liberalism and projected them onto Middle Eastern history. One interpretation criticized Tanzimat land reform to emphasize agrarian democracy as the impetus for the development process. Another, reflecting postwar liberals' predilection for elite authority, relegated democracy to the end of that process by embracing Kemalism as its model. The article concludes by arguing that Ottoman historians influenced the modernization paradigm as much as it did them. H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen transmitted Ottoman reform discourses to social scientists through Islamic Society and the West, which the authors based on reform-era writings at a time when archival research was just beginning to transform Ottoman studies. Cold War intellectuals and bureaucrats appropriated their Ottoman predecessors' temporal and spatial perspectives in the effort to manage Third World change

Before broaching the main topic of this study, there seem to me to be two general issues involving terms in the title which need to be addressed: The one concerns nomenclature, the other the question of genres. A certain vagueness colors most attempts at definition of the term “novella,” something which seems the result of both the way in which the term has developed and the considerable differences of opinion among critics. Thus the Oxford English Dictionary seems to reflect the relatively recent interest in the genre in the English-speaking world by not including the word at all in the main part of the dictionary and by defining it in the Supplement as “a short novel (as in the stories of Boccaccio's Decameron).” As Howard Nemerov points out, however, “the term ‘short novel’ is descriptive only in the way that the term ‘Middle Ages’ is descriptive—that is, not at all, except with regard to the territory on either side.” The index to the English translation of Todorov's Poetics of Prose lists: Novella, see Tale. Such entries as these do at least convey to us the notion that the novella operates somewhere along a fictional spectrum, the two poles of which are the novel and the short story, but that is all.

Despite rapidly growing industrialization and large migration from the countryside,Turkey today remains primarily agricultural, with a farming area larger than that of any other southern European country, and an agricultural population consisting of just under 70 per cent of the approximately 35 million people in the country. Although reduced in importance, so that its contribution of 40 per cent of the total domestic product in 1963 was reduced by 1969 to little over 33⅓ per cent, agriculture still accounts for some 90 per cent of the country's exports.