Africa's largest country, Sudan, is first and foremost part of the Arab world, sensitive to the political tides which sweep the Arab peoples from the Atlantic to the Gulf. Like other members of the Arab League, Sudan was taken by surprise by the defeat of 1967. It was shaken by the tidal wave that later engulfed Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria; and on 25 May 1969, a military regime took over in Khartoum. Its ideology was Arab nationalism infused with socialism; its social base, the army and the urban classes; and its model, the Nasserist experiment.

In recent decades, most historians have begun to shy away from the once predominant idea of post-16th-century decrepitude in the Ottoman Empire1 and come to recognize the remarkable resilience and recuperative ability of the Ottoman imperial structure even into its final century.2 Against the gathering momentum of this trend of reinterpretation, it is, ironically, chiefly the Ottomanist specialists themselves who have shown the greatest resistance. The “experts,” as a consequence of their quite proper immersion in indigenous sources, are better exposed to and, hence, more likely to become ecmeshed in the culturally determined value system of the subject of their study. This article is an attempt to identify some of the sources that contributed to the formulation of the decline topos and related topoi.

In the field of international relations, the 1979 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan has raised major issues concerning regional security and superpower relations. By introducing Soviet military forces in a traditionally nonaligned country, the Kremlin initiated a more aggressive pattern in its foreign policies. This occupation was the Soviet Union's first territorial expansion by direct use of military power since World War II.