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Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. INTRODUCTION -- 2. DEVELOPMENT AND CENTER BUILDING IN THE MIDDLE EAST -- 3. LOCAL LEADERSHIP IN URBAN EGYPT: LEADER, FAMILY AND COMMUNITY PERCEPTIONS -- 4. CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN LOCAL DEVELOPMENT POLICIES IN EGYPT: FROM NASSER TO SADAT -- 5. LOCAL PATTERNS OF LEADERSHIP AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ASWAN HIGH DAM LAKE -- 6. SYRIA: THE ROLE OF IDEOLOGY AND PARTY ORGANIZATION IN LOCAL DEVELOPMENT -- 7. NEW INSTITUTIONS AND PROCESSES IN A TRADITIONAL SETTING: EXAMPLES FROM AL-KARAK, JORDAN -- 8. LOCAL-LEVEL POLITICS AND DEVELOPMENT IN LEBANON: THE VIEW FROM BORJ HAMMOUD -- 9. TA AWUN MAHWIT: A CASE STUDY OF A LOCAL DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATION IN HIGHLAND YEMEN -- 10. NATIONAL SEEDS IN LOCAL SOIL: WILL DEVELOPMENT GROW? -- 11. DEVELOPMENT IN RURAL TURKEY: LEADERSHIP OR PATRONAGE? -- About the Contributors -- Index.

This volume collects some original chapters and some reprinted ones by a very well-known
scholar of the Middle East. The chapters tend to be linked to one another by theoretical themes
developed in the introductory chapters. These eleven chapters, plus a concluding one,
"The Middle East at 2000: The Millennial Illusion," appear under three headings.

Democracy has returned to the center stage of American political science. Before World War I, political science assumed the universality of democracy in America. Its educational mission was to inform American citizens of this, its research mission to identify the imperfections of this democracy in order to reform it and to provide academic expertise to strengthen the American state administratively in its democratic mission.' Post-behavioral political scientists in the 1990s also assume the universality of democracy, now on an international and cross-cultural basis. They also wish to inform the American public of this, and when they uncover it they also wish to reform it through their writings and through the support of indigenous intellectuals and scholars. The incentives, coercion and pressure of the US government assist them in their efforts. They are also engaged in the strengthening of the capabilities of the American state in spreading the democratic message abroad. This collaboration of government and scholar from the 1986 announcement of the Reagan Doctrine and the founding of the National Endowment for Democracy until today has been termed "Operation Democracy."

It is said that the old political science attempted to be explanatory and the new political science is interpretive. A key question then is what is the meaning of political interpretation. Does it mean that political analysis is simply subjective and that intellectual anarchy reigns? The old political science had its apparent orthodoxy of the canons of the scientific method. The new orthodoxy refers to these and resembles the old in its underlying liberal, pluralist value assumptions.The old orthodoxy in comparative politics focuses on develop-mentalism; the new orthodoxy emphasizes democratization, market-oriented economics, rational choice theory, and political economy. Developmentalism stressed the importance of the welfare of the individual as well as at the same time the need for secularization and political participation. Developmentalism was also teleological. The goal was to achieve secularization and participation, in the process replicating the advanced industrial states from which the ideas originated. The values implicit in developmentalism were obscured by the old orthodoxy's patina of behavioralism and "scientific objectivity."The new orthodoxy has abandoned behavioralism and "scientific objectivity," but in neither a systematic nor a philosophical way. Instead, the validity of the criticisms seems to be tacitly conceded even while the spokespersons of the new orthodoxy operate within a "new" scholarly and foreign policy culture that shows evidence of having characteristics similar to those of the old.

The study of Middle Eastern politics shares the problems of area studies in general in political science. Area specialists emphasizing the language and culture of other peoples have been pressured by behavioralists to "objectify" their studies and place all peoples in the context of universals of human political behavior. The result is that the specialized knowledge of non-European peoples and regions especially have had an uneasy relationship with the political science discipline. Post-behavioral political science for a time in the 1970s recognized that the purported scientific universals of the discipline were really the ethnocentric ones of the value assumptions of European and American political science. In the 1980s and continuing to the present, these earlier "scientific" or explanatory universals of political science now arguably have been replaced by the no less ethnocentric ones of democratization and "marketization." These concepts are examined in the following essays.Middle Eastern political science has shared the preceding problems but has added to them two additional factors. The first is that the languages and culture of the Middle East are difficult and complex. As a result, the development of a social science consciousness in political research has occurred most importantly only since the 1970s. The second is that the study of Middle Eastern politics is embedded in the historical attitude of American and European culture toward Islam and Arabism. Historically, Islam expanded at the expense of Christian Europe in the eighth century. This adversarial relation continued when European Christians mounted forays into the Moslem Near East in the Crusades of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries; with the fall of Christian Constantinople to Moslem siege in the fifteenth century; and to the near defeat of Christian Vienna by Moslem attack in the seventeenth century.