Arab World
Al-Ghosaibi, Arabian Essays
Ghazi al-Ghosaibi, Arabian Essays (Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).
If Dr. al-Ghosaibi was as competent a minister of industry as he is a judicious essayist, then Saudi Arabia may be somewhat more fortunate in its rulers than might otherwise appear. A poet and observer of international affairs, al-Ghosaibi has produced a set of reflections on literature and education, Middle East politics and Arab society, that are elegant and often perceptive.
Oil Politics in the Arab World
Giacomo Luciani, The Oil Companies and the Arab World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984).
Yusif Sayigh, Arab Oil Policies in the 1970s (London: Croom Helm, 1983).
Abdulaziz al-Sowayegh, Arab Petro-Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984).
David Howdon, ed., The Energy Crisis Ten Years After (London: Croom Helm, 1984).
Books on Arab Economies
Samir Amin, The Arab Economy Today (London: Zed Press, 1982).
Ismail-Sabri Abdalla et al, eds., Images of the Arab Future (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983). (Translated from Arabic)
Adda Guecioueur, ed., The Problems of Arab Economic Development and Integration (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984).
Robert Aliboni, ed., Arab Industrialization and Economic Integration (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979).
Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism
Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1860-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
This is the latest in a growing number of studies which discuss the social origins of political ideologies in the Arab East. Philip Khoury sets himself the task of explaining the development of Arab nationalism in Damascus through an analysis of the class-conditioned political behavior of the city’s landowner-bureaucrats.
The Arabian Peninsula Opposition Movements
The contemporary opposition movements in the Arabian Peninsula have their origins in two processes of radicalization in Middle Eastern politics. The first was the rise of radical nationalists, Nasserists and Baathists, and of communist parties in the 1950s and 1960s, and the second is the spread of the radical Islamic groups in the latter part of the 1970s. The political organizations now engaged in opposition politics in the peninsula spring essentially from these two competing trends.
Labor Migration in the Arab World
The Arab world comprises 18 states and was inhabited, in 1980, by more than 150 million people. [1] Two factors vital to economic development—population and oil—are, however, distributed in an extremely uneven manner among these states. The abstract possibility of mutually beneficial cooperation between the population-rich and the oil-rich is not being realized. Instead, we are seeing a process of increased inequality and deterioration in the productive and human resources of the Arab world: first, between the oil-rich and population-rich states; and second, between the Arab world as a whole and the industrialized economies from whom the real wealth of the Arab countries (mediated through oil revenues) is coming.
Hiro, Inside the Middle East
Dilip Hiro, Inside the Middle East (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982).
The Hammamat Declaration
In early April 1983, a group of 35 Arab intellectuals, academicians, professionals and political activists met at the Hammamat cultural center in Tunis to discuss the crisis of human rights and democratic freedoms in the Arab world. No officials or representatives of any Arab government attended, and the gathering was not sponsored by any government or political organization.
George Hawi, Problems of Strategy, Errors of Opposition
Criticism and Defeat: An Introduction to George Hawi
A secondary objective of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon was to strike at the forces of the Arab left, which since 1967 had made Beirut their intellectual and, in many cases, operational center. Israel did not fully achieve this objective, just as it failed in several other of its war aims. Nonetheless, the invasion marks an end to a certain period in the historical development of the Arab left, and particularly the Lebanese left.
Issawi, The Arab World’s Legacy
Charles Issawi, The Arab World’s Legacy: Essays (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 1981).
Charles Issawi is well known for his important work in the social and economic history of the Middle East, and a number of his contributions are reproduced here. One finds, among other things, discussions of medieval demography and trade, and of capitalist penetration and industrialization in more recent times.
The Arab Economies in the 1970s
The 1970s were undoubtedly the most dramatic and important years in recent Middle Eastern history. The decade began politically with the death of Nasser, the formal withdrawal of the British from the Gulf and the first sharp increase in the price of oil. Oil — its production and marketing, its revenues, its social impact — was at the center of the economic transformation of the region. By the end of the decade, most Arab oil regimes (with the exception of Saudi Arabia) had nationalized their reserves and producing facilities and taken formal control of pricing and rates of production. Huge sums of money accrued to the major oil exporters, encouraging mammoth infrastructural investment and equally massive labor migration to the Gulf states and Libya.
