It is indeed an interesting endeavor to investigate the impact of economic policies on social stratification. Doing so enables us to see to what extent economic policies bring changes in class structure in a society. We take the case of Syria to study its economic policies and their accompanying impact on the evolving pattern of the Syrian elite from the late 1950s to the early 1980s and then look at accompanying impact on class structure.

The two poles or aspects of this paper are (1) economic policies themselves and (2) their impact on class structure. The question that we are going to raise in the first pole is the following: what is the nature of the economic policies? This refers to land reforms, industrial and commercial reforms, and foreign trade controls.

The history of political change in Libya during the nineteenth century has been obscured by subsequent events in the Middle East and North Africa. A relatively unimportant province of the Ottoman Empire, it went to the least important European colonial power in the region – Italy – and the Italian tenure destroyed much of the legacy of Ottoman reform. Even contemporary observers in the nineteenth century usually viewed the province through a prism whose primary focus was elsewhere, leaving distorted and partial accounts of the changes wrought by the Ottoman administration. This lacuna in the literature has hindered comprehensive assessment of the Ottoman reform period and, perhaps as seriously, distorted interpretation of Libya's subsequent political history.

With the conclusion of World War I, the Armenian cause in the United States enjoyed a brief season of hope and vitality. American support was an offshoot of international sympathy for Armenian suffering and an unshakable sense of optimism. In a burst of national goodwill, the United States seemed intent on freeing the Armenians from centuries of persecution. Americans from the halls of Congress to the church pews of Mississippi joined together in the effort. They delivered speeches, wrote letters, exchanged ideas, and donated millions of dollars. Within less than a decade, however, the Armenian cause was irreparably splintered and largely forgotten.

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.

On New Year's Eve, before the tumultuous events of 1978–79, President Jimmy Carter, while toasting the Shah in Tehran, referred to Iran as an “island of stability” in the Persian Gulf. President Carter's remarks reflected the consensus opinion about Iran not only among United States government officials but among most business firms operating in Iran as well. A typical U.S. corporate attitude was represented by a 1975 Business International (hereafter BI) report about business prospects in the Middle East.

These characteristics (infrastructure development, population size and high absorptive capacity), which favorably distinguish Iran from the Arab Middle East, make the country the prime market in the area for many Western exporters. Political stability, the government's benevolent attitude toward private enterprise, and a well-protected internal market give Iran a similar edge in the eyes of foreign investors. Few international companies will thus want to stand aside as Iran races toward its goal of becoming the Japan of the Middle East.1