The first quarter of the twentieth century contains a fascinating chapter of modern Iranian history. It was a period of the death agony of the Qājār state; a period of revolutionary upheaval, sociopolitical disorder and disintegration, and cultural and literary transformation, a moment both of joy and of sadness, achievement and failure, which, in an unusually clear way, illuminated the long distance between what there was, and what was desired to be. This period may be analysed in three parts: the first decade, which covers the period of the Persian Revolution; the second decade, which can be described as a period of interregnum, when, in the well-known phrase, power was lying in the streets waiting to be picked up; and the remaining five years which was a period of dual sovereignty, characterized by a ruthless struggle for political power.

Although the activities of the first press established in the Ottoman Empire for theprinting of Turkish books, that of İbrahim Müteferrika which operated between 1927 and 1974, have been well documented, less is known about the circumstances under which printing in Turkish was revived later in the centurey. Two letters preserved among the papers of the British botanist and patron of science, Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820), however, throw interesting light on an abortive attempt to restart Turkish printing in the Ottoman capital under British auspices in 1779.

The dowry is the movement of women and goods in the same direction (Goody 1973: 18). Or, as Tambiah puts it, ‘Wherever dowry is paid, wealth is not transferred in one direction and women in the other, for both wealth and women travel in the same direction’ (1973: 62). This one-sided exchange is rather curious as one side in the transaction gets all the values while the other seems to give them all away. A person who gives a dowry as a father has once received a dowry as a groom. As a consequence of his once being a receiver he has an obligation to his daughter to be the giver of a dowry. Unlike other types of wife-giving and wife-receiving, in this system it is individuals and not lineages or families who give and receive women. As a consequence alliances between families are not formed.

At a time when orientalism is under attack both from within and without the profession, the publication of Marshall G. S. Hodgson's three-volume work, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization1 is an event of major importance. So rich is its subject, so complex and ambitious its analytic scheme and serious its moral purpose that it is difficult in brief compass to give an idea of the book. In the following pages, I discuss those aspects of the work that seem to me most important for an understanding of its achievement and significance. In the end, I shall argue, The Venture of Islam must be seen as the most ambitious and successful effort to salvage the orientalist tradition to date.

Marx, the prophet of revolution, may no longer haunt conservative politicians, but Marx, the theorist of revolution, continues to both attract and arouse social scientists. In the words of one student of politics, the social sciences, especially political sociology, can be described as a ‘century-long dialogue with Karl Marx.’ And as one prominent historian of ideas has aptly stated, Marx can properly be called the midwife of twentieth-century social thought, ‘for in the process of discarding what they had found invalid in Marxism and explaining what aspects of it had proved helpful, the innovators of the late nineteenth century took their first steps towards constructing a more general theory of social reality.’ For example, Emile Durkheim developed the paradigm of ‘mechanical and organic solidarity’ to counter the theory of class struggle. Vilfred Pareto and Gaetano Mosca stressed the dichotomy between ruling elites and ruled masses to supplant the concept of socioeconomic classes. Robert Michels formulated the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ to warn that popular organizations, such as the Social Democratic Parties, would bring in not the era of democratic socialism but the autocracy of bureaucratic socialists.’ And Max Weber, of course, devoted much of his career to showing that the dynamics of class conflict should be studied concomitantly with the heavy weights of conservative ideologies, traditional religions, ethnic castes, and bureaucratic institutions.

The Greco-Turkish War was one of the major aftershocks in the wake of World War I. In attacking war-ravaged Turkey, Greece sought to realize her goal of a new Hellenic presence in Asia Minor. This action, together with British, French, and Italian designs upon Anatolian territory, threatened Turkey's existence as a nation.

On the morning of Tuesday, 29 May 1453, the warriors of Mehmet II poured through the shattered walls of Constantinople. Later in the day their commanding general, Zaǵanos Pasha, accepted the keys of Galata, the walled town standingon a promontory on the shore opposite the Golden Horn, signaling the end of Genoese domination.

From the dawn of Islam to the present, the political history of 'Umān followed a different path from that of the rest of the Arabian peninsula. Until recently, the country was practically unknown, an almost forgotten outpost of a once prosperous maritime Arab civilization.

Owen Lattimore, the premier chronicler of China's inner-Asian frontier, designated by the term ‘frontier feudalism’ a particularly significant and recurrent process in the social history of that area. By it he meant the pattern in which nomadic Turko-Mongol chiefs either sold their allegiance as ‘wardens of the march’ and border guardians to Chinese emperors in return for titles and land investitures, or else conquered territory along imperial frontiers in their own names. Ineither case, the chiefs' authority over his followers then changed from a kin-oriented tribal base to a patron–client-oriented feudal base, as his followers became peasantized and lost their ability to move away from the chief – anability that underlay what Lattimore viewed as the much more fluid tribal–nomadic social order and polity. To Lattimore frontier feudalism was an important vehicle in the establishment of social and political stratification along ethnically differentiated lines (as tribesmen settled down as rulers of a subordinate peasantry).It also created articulation between state and tribal polities and served as a major factor in the sedentarization of nomads (Lattimore 1962a, b). In this connection one recalls the proverb recited to Genghis Khan's son and successor, Ogotai, by an adviser: ‘The empire was created on horseback, but it cannot be governed on horseback’ (Grousset 1970: 257).

The two footnotes that follow were inadvertently omitted from p. 144 of Alexander Schölch's review of Studies on Palestine during the Ottoman Period, Moshe Ma'oz, ed., IJMES 10 (1979):

One of the more important developments in Iraq since the 1958 overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy was the nationalization of the Iraqi Petroleum Company on 1 June 1972. The nationalization of the IPC was the culmination of a long-standing power struggle between the IPC and the Iraqi government. This analysis is concerned with that power struggle and the consequent nationalization of the IPC.

During the mandatory period following World War I Britain's attempts to implement the provisions of the Balfour Declaration and establish a ‘National Home’ for the Jews in Palestine encountered stubborn resistance from the local Arab population. As dissatisfaction mounted in the late 1930s, militant nationalists were able to mobilize popular support for the Arab cause and foster the growth of an opposition movement directed against the British. The most visible and significantleader of this movement was the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini.