A la fin du XIVe siè de l'Hé il est opportun de dire un mot de la position de l'Islam vis-à-vis de l 'évolution. On croit àtort qu'il est une religion immobile et qu'il est essentienllement conservateur, Au contraire dans sa longue histoire, il a passé par des périodes où son mouvement était éclatant. Certes y-a-til dans son enseignement des étéments immobiles, mais il y en d'autres qui sont assez mobiles et vivants. C'est sur cette distinction que nous voulons nous arrêter un peu.

Over the last twenty years there have been several interesting attempts by scholars working both in Turkey and elsewhere to offer a critical examination of the workings of the competitive party system in Turkey, and to relate changes in the parliamentary arena to the tensions created in a rapidly developing society. This emphasis on the social and economic background to political change has tended to turn attention away from the constitutional and legal arrangements on which the proper functioning of parliamentary democracy also depends. What follows tries to assess the impact of one of these factors — the electoral system — on Turkish political development since 1950. It closes with some suggestions about the possible effects on Turkish politics of some hitherto untried systems of election.

In the fall of 1969 the Libyan monarchy was overthrown by a group of young military officers headed by Mouamir Quadafi. In the months prior to the revolution the tribal-based Monarchy had found it difficult to cope with the stress of rapid social and economic change, and had found itself immobilized by the conflict between Libya's traditional tribal and religious elite and a small but influential modernizing elite composed of students, technocrats and younger military officers. This new elite, a byproduct of Libya's oil wealth, had become particularly distressed by the arbitrariness and inefficiency of the Monarchy, the severe maldistribution of the oil revenues, and the existence of what they felt to be a poorly planned and managed development program which had largely failed to penetrate Libya's predominatly rural areas.

Two frameworks of interpretation of history and society have long struggled with each other in the West and in the Islamic world: one is the modernization theory of the American type, aligned at times with the older orientalism, the other is some form of political economy. In the 1970s, the theory of political economy made a belated arrival in American intellectual life and still has scarcely the prestige it has in France, Germany, Italy, or the Islamic countries.

In discussing the intellectual and religious history of the modern Muslim world, the attention of both Western and Middle Eastern scholars has hitherto focused on those who were, directly or indirectly, heavily influenced by Western thought and practices. For Egypt, the center of Arab intellectual life, we have studies of at-Tahtawi, Abduh, Rida, Mustafa Kamil, Lutfi as-Sayyid, and those close to them; for Turkey studies of the Young Ottomans, the Young Turks, Zia Gökalp, and those influenced by Ataturk's Turkish nationalism; and for Iran of Malkum Khan, Afghani, various Babis, Al-e Ahmad, Shariati, and other Western-influenced thinkers. Naturally, there are large differences in the thought of those qualified here as Western-influenced; even the most traditional aiim usually reflects Western influence in a mediated way. The point is, however, that there has been little analysis of thinkers and leaders who appear to be primarily traditional, whether they be ulama educated entirely in madrasas and carrying out primarily traditional functions, or heads of Sufi orders operating mainly within their own traditions. This concentration by Western and Middle Eastern intellectuals on leaders who were able to a large degree secularized and Westernized has been based on certain generally unspoken assumptions about progress and development. The assumptions are that progress and development include Westernized, secularized educational systems and an increasingly Western lifestyle with a decreased role for both ulama and Sufis, whom it is not particularly important for one concentrating on trends with a viable future to study or understand. Even those who did study “traditionalist” movements such as the Egyptian Muslim Brethren tended to see them as a trend with no future.