Scholars who are committed to single disciplines occasionally appear to lose sight of the fact that these disciplines are conventions, designed to enable the scholar to neglect, while clearly signifying his neglect, many aspects of life in order to concentrate on a few. We historians tend, I believe, to give ourselves license to warn our readers rather less explicitly of our neglect than do economists, political scientists, sociologists, or anthropologists. Yet, we have trained ourselves to pay particular attention to certain facets of the human experience. Some of us compromise with the positions of those we occasionally think of as our more exacting colleagues in the social sciences by adding to the term ‘historian’ various adjectives– ‘social’, ‘economic’, ‘cultural’, or ‘political’.

It is too soon to measure the influence of G. E. von Grunebaum on developing trends in Islamic scholarship. But it is not too soon to assess the legacy of his writings. The assessment is bound to suffer from subjectivity and perhaps even border on the presumptuous. And I must confess at the outset that in this paper I have not ruled out a degree of inferential and impressionistic judgment, which in the end may only reflect my own limited vantage.

Modern views on pre-Islamic poetry have not markedly advanced our understanding of the structure of the poem beyond the views of the critics of the first three centuries of Hijra. In fact, if anything, modern views are more rigidly formulated, show a greater tendency towards generalizations, and are far less perceptive, as well as being based on a degree of knowledge and familiarity with the poetry inferior to that of the early critics. Ibn Qutayba's famous passage which attempts a description of the process through which the poet developed his poem remains one of the most perceptive statements on the subject. He, at least, had the objectivity and modesty to attribute the view expressed in his passage to ba'd ahl al-adab (a person, or people, of knowledge in the field of language and poetry). Ibn Qutayba does not claim that the statement he quotes was based on an analysis of the properties of the corpus of the poetry. However, the most interesting aspect of this statement is that it interprets the structural properties of the poem in psychological terms. It does not label the process a conventional device imposed by the tradition and by the poets' lack of desire to break away from that tradition. The interpretation the statement offers is also functional, in that it asserts that the process of growth in the poem is not arbitrary and illogical but purposeful, conscious, and pertaining to the total structure of the poem. In this sense Ibn Qutayba's remark is also structural, because it considers the structure of the poem in relation to the structure of other poems in the tradition.

Notwithstanding five generations of legislators and administrators bent on westernizing the economies of the Ottoman Empire and of its successor states, Islamic patterns were so intimately woven into the fabric of community and society in the Levant that every aspect of economic endeavor beyond the area of daily contact with the West continued to be cast in the mold of the all-encompassing Sharî'a until after the Second World War.1 Nowhere was this clearer than in rural Palestine, where an economic organization framed in Islamic concepts, operating in Islamic terms, and embodying the problems and the promises of the Islamic view of doing business and carrying on production, withstood a century of confrontation with Western settlers, traders, and administrators and a quickly expanding implanted sector.

During the final century of its existence, the Ottoman state, seeking to adapt and survive in a European-dominated world, launched a series of far-ranging reform programs touching nearly every aspect of Ottoman life. The financial basis of these programs rested on a predominantly agricultural economy characterized by Ottoman and foreign observers alike as backward and impoverished, yet possessing vast potential.Generally, these observers also agreed that Turkey's function in the industrializing world was to supply agricultural produce and raw materials. The expansion of Turkish agricultural production would not only help satisfy increasing European demand but also, by raising Ottoman revenues, both ensure the continuation of the Ottoman Empire and provide the additional funds required by the modernization efforts.

Le mot arabe sultân se rencontre plusieurs fois dans le Coran au sens de pouvoir.* A titre d'exemple, je vous cite quelques versets coraniques provenant de l'excellente traduction de M. Blachére: ‘Quiconque a tuée injustement, nous donnons à son proche, pouvoir [de la venger]’ (Coran, XVII, 35/33). ‘A l'exclusion de ceux des Errants qui te suivront, tu ne disposes d'aucun pouvoir sur mes serviteurs’ (Coran XV, 42). Et encore, au sens de puissance: ‘Je n'avais sur vous aucune puissance, sauf de vous appeler et que vous me répondiez’ (Coran, XIV, 26/22).