Recordings of Middle Eastern music are too numerous to list and discuss individually here, but certain exemplary recordings and labels will be noted in this report.

Generally speaking, there are two types of recordings of Middle Eastern music available in the United States. One type is intended for general audiences and includes popular music sung by internationally known singers such as Um Kalthum and Fairuz, and orchestral ensembles playing what has become known as “Belly dance” or “Oriental dance” music. Intended for relatively easy listening, very little information is offered about the performances; the main attraction being the artists themselves or the accompaniment to dance. The second type of recording is generally more informative and concentrates on the music as well as the musicians. The division between the two types is certainly not clear cut and many recordings may be described as a little of each.

Every student of pre-modern Islamic political, social, economic, or cultural history is aware in a general way of the importance of numismatic evidence, but it has to be admitted that for the most part this awareness is evidenced more in lip service than in practice. Too many historians consider numismatics an arcane and complex study best left to specialists. All too often, historians, if they take coin evidence into account at all, suspend their normal critical judgement to accept without question the readings and interpretations of the numismatist. On the other hand, numismatists, in the past especially but to a large extent still today, are often amateurs, self-taught through practice with little or no formal historical and linguistic training. This is true even of museum professionals in charge of Islamic collections, no matter what their previous training: The need to deal with the coinage of fourteen centuries, from Morocco to the Philippines, means that the curator spends most of his time working in areas in which he is, by scholarly standards, a layman. The best qualified student of any coin series is the specialist with an expert knowledge of the historical context from which the coinage comes. Ideally, any serious research on a particular region and era should rest upon as intensive a study of the numismatic evidence as of the literary sources. In practice, of course, it is not so easy, but it is easier than many scholars believe, and certainly much easier than for a numismatist to become a fully qualified historian in every field of Islamic civilization.

Since Islamic coins characteristically bear no images, they have ample room for inscriptions; a typical coin of the Classical Period bears 50 to 100 words in a total area (obverse plus reverse) of about 10 cm2. Each coin is thus a small document bearing several explicit messages which its makers intended to convey. But inscriptions, like other features of a coin, also carry implicit information unconsciously provided by the makers. Analysis of orthography, grammatical constructions, phraseology, and epigraphical style can illuminate the evolution of the Arabic language and script; the comparative study of titulature brings out changes in the self-image and philosophy of government of rulers; religious inscriptions on coins show what their issuers regarded as fundamental, as opposed to the beliefs attributed to them by hostile or later writers. Such topics must, of course, be studied in the context of the evidence from literature and monumental inscriptions. Coins have the advantage that their evidence is usually firmly dated and placed—and undoubtedly official—although one must beware of the strongly conservative tendency of coin design: inscriptions and designs may reflect traditional practice rather than current attitudes.

In 1976–1977, the writer spent nine months in Tashkent, Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, collecting material for a study of Central Asia in the seventeenth century. Obviously then, what follows is biased in the direction of historical research. It also, of necessity, reflects the author’s own experience and omits mention of resources to which he did not in some measure have access.

The late Hannah Arendt once observed that “violence itself is incapable of speech, and not merely that speech is helpless when confronted with violence. Because of this speech-lessness political theory has little to say about the phenomenon of violence and must leave its discussion to the technicians;” (Arendt, 1963, p.9). This may have been true at the time of Arendt’s writing. The situation, however, dramatically changed when the violence of the sixties began in earnest. The academic market was soon lost in a maze of articles, books, and analyses of political violence from the perspective of not only political theory but practically every discipline in the social sciences and humanities. These new works supplemented the traditional and earlier studies of violence by the Marxist school and others. Thus by the turn of the decade, the student of political violence was faced with the difficult task of trying to evaluate and sift his way through an ever-expanding plethora of concepts, theories, definitions, explanations, and models of political violence which abounded in the field.

It may be surprising that there is so much to say about a period that is supposed to be poor in sources. The impression of a lack of primary and reliable secondary sources for the first century of Islam has been created by the issue of the usability of Arabic literary materials that are admittedly secondary. Indeed, the authenticity of the entire Arabic literary corpus, when it deals with matters in the first century and one-half of Islam, has been undermined by the skepticism of Western scholars based on its internal contradictions, on the partisan biases of the transmitters, on the anachronous projections of later issues and legal theories back to an earlier period, on the fictional and legendary quality of its anecdotal elements, and on assumptions about the nature of oral composition and transmission. Such criticism has led to a rather late dating of the use of writing for literature and of the use of the isnād especially associated with the Schacht thesis, as well as to views that saw Islamic historical composition originating in commentaries on the Qur’ān and poetry.

The field of colonial Algerian history, once a sparring ground for colonialists and nationalists, is now experiencing a new sort of division, one derived from the contrasting intellectual traditions, Arabic and French, which meet in Algeria. Scholars of both these traditions have sought to “decolonize” Algerian history, to understand it from the point of view of the Algerian Muslim. Both approaches have made significant contributions to our understanding of colonial Algeria. Yet they have a shortcoming: both were originally developed in dealing with historical environments quite different from colonial Algeria. Thus, they face serious problems of adaptation.