On 22 May 1990, the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) and the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) carried out their old pledge to unite into a single Republic of Yemen. This historic event occurred less than three years after the YAR, seemingly secure and comfortable in its separateness, celebrated its silver jubilee in 1987. This article traces and assesses political development and socioeconomic modernization in the YAR over this more than 25-year period, and hazards some guesses on the implications of these changes for current efforts to implement Yemeni unification.

During those eventful days of early January 1979, after Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran had finally announced his intention to leave the country and the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini had made his return from exile contingent on the shah's departure, a hemistitch by Hafez, the 14th-century Persian poet, suddenly appeared next to an array of revolutionary slogans on display in the streets of Tehran: “Div cho birun ravad fereshteh dar āyad” (When the demon departs, the angel shall arrive). The basic binary oppositions of demon/angel and departure/arrival fit the realities of the situation the country had found itself in; a perfect correspondence had been made between the simple, single idea enshrined in the abstract language of a medieval poetic phrase and the intricate political posturing involved in a modern-day revolution in the making. Furthermore, the stark discourse of antagonism underlying the opposition had become as absolute, as uncompromising as the idea of a total revolution.

Students of Islamic history have long demanded that more attention be given to social and economic affairs, and it cannot be denied that substantial progress is being made inthe field. Nevertheless, many gaps remain that will have to be filled in by detailed investigations of various periods and regions, notions, nad relationships. An attempt will be made in this article to elucidate the functioning of a faction, or ṭā⊃ifa in Central Asia in the second half of the 15th century. This ṭā⊃ifa was the system of patronage and protection installedby Khwaja Ahrar, a famous shaykh of the Naqshbandi silsila.

The deportation of the majority of the Armenian population from the Ottoman Empire during World War I and the massacres that accompanied it are of commanding interest. The paucity of scholarly contributions in this area, however, has impeded the development of interest in the subject, thereby contributing to the nebulous state surrounding the conditions that led to the disappearance of an entire nation from its ancestral territories. Some maintain that this nebulousness is compounded by the intrusion of political calculation.1 At issue is whether or not the disaster was intentionally organized by the Ottoman authorities, and whether or not the scope of Armenian losses bore any relationship to that intention.

On 11 November 1851, Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848—96), the 20-year-old Qajar ruler of Iran, dismissed from the post of premier his guardian-tutor (atābak) and brother-in-law Mirza Taqi Khan Farahani, Amir(-i) Nizam, better known to posterity as Amir Kabir. He allowed him to continue in the post of commander-in-chief of the army (amārat-i niẓām), however. “Since the office of the grand vizierate in volves too much labor,” the shah wrote to Amir Kabir, “and the burden of such a task was arduous for you. we have relieved you of this duty. You must continue as commander-in-chief with full confidence.”1 Only two months later, on 10 January 1852, Amir Kabir was secretly put to death in the Fin royal garden near Kashan, where he had spent the last days of his exile.

One of the central issues in the debate on the transformative impact of European economic expansion on agricultural structures in the Ottoman Empire concerns the formation of large agricultural estates. It has been argued that the growing demand for raw materials on the world market fostered efforts at the integration of small landholdings into larger units of production and an increasing commercialization of agricultural produce. This commercializaiton coincided with a tendency toward crop specializaiton and a regional differentitation between the rural areas.