The sounds and activities of an increasingly globalized human world often drown out the noises of the debates in scholarly journals and intellectual magazines about the coming wars among civilizations. This globalized theater of life is paradoxical, conflictridden and often destructive of many human values, but it is fundamentally an increasingly one-world context. Its struggles and conflicts cannot be best understood by viewing them as if they were wars between essentially different and separated entities.

The political and economic upheaval in the Libyan Jamahiriyah since 1969 had a profound impact on the country’s educational institutions, its research facilities and the local academic community as well. Revolutionary Committees at the local universities and the relocation of ministries and research institutes led to the dispersal and sometimes destruction of research and data collections. This was exacerbated by a general suspicion of Western-style research and by the forced return of scores of young scholars as the Qadhdhafi regime increased its confrontation with the West.

Although muslims make up less than two percent of South Africa’s total population, they are a well-established community with high visibility. In 1994 South Africans will celebrate 300 years of Islam in South Africa. The introduction of Islam to South Africa is usually attributed to Sheikh Yusuf, a Macasser prince exiled to South Africa for leading resistance against Dutch colonization in Malaysia. But the first Muslims in South Africa were actually slaves, imported by the Dutch colonists to the Cape mainly from India, the Indonesian archipelago, Malaya and Sri Lanka beginning in 1667. The Cape Muslim community, popularly but inaccurately known as “Malays” and known under the apartheid system as “Coloureds,” therefore, is the oldest Muslim community in South Africa. The other significant Muslim community in South Africa was established over 100 years later by northern Indian indentured laborers and tradespeople, a minority of whom were Muslims. The majority of South African Indian Muslims now live in Natal and Transvaal. Indians were classified as “Asians” or “Asiatics” by the apartheid system. The third ethnically identifiable group of Muslims in South Africa were classified as “African” or “Black” by the South African government. The majority of Black Muslims are converts or descendants of converts. Of the entire Muslim population of South Africa, some 49% are “Coloureds,” nearly 47% are “Asians,” and although statistics regarding “Africans” are generally unreliable, it is estimated that they comprise less than four percent of the Muslim population. Less than one percent of the Muslim population is “White.”

Traditional iranian dastgāh music, as fostered in the courts and the homes of the aristocracy, draws from many sources, including regional music styles, religious genres of melody and chant and popular songs that have been reworked by master musicians and their students. In different regional capitals, musicians acquired their repertoire from their master teacher through a process of listening and repetition and also drew from local sources of music, incorporating these into their own unique version of this repertoire of traditional melodies and melodic fragments.

The Committee on the Selection of the Best Dissertation of the Year on a Topic of Iranian Studies of the Foundation for Iranian Studies has cited two dissertations with Honorable Mention. Azin Movahed’s, The Persian Ney: A Study of the Instrument and its Musical Style, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was cited for its unique contribution to a better understanding of an ancient and honorable Persian musical instrument and its interaction with modes and ranges of music and its possibilities and constraints for creativity and improvisations. Charles T. Kurzman’s, Structure and Agency in the Iranian Revolution of 1979, University of California at Berkeley, was cited for its highly original contribution to a better understanding of “the role of agency in revolutions in general and the various religious and nonreligious agents in the Iranian revolution in particular.” The Committee did not award a prize for 1993.