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.

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.