Three years from now, on January 1, 1993, Western
Europe will be "born
again." The 12-state Euro-
pean Community (EC) will
turn into the Single Inte- grated Market (SIM). This new creation will unite some 320 million people with a com- bined gross domestic product of about five trillion dollars and will stretch from Cork to Calabria, from the Atlantic to the Ae- gean. As a trading bloc, it will surpass all others in the world. Even today, the (exter- nal) exports of the EC dwarf...
Frank D. McConnell
Apopular joke defines com- professionals-is at the center of a vitu- edy as the second oldest perative debate that has been raging on profession, which, like the American and British campuses for at least first, has been ruined am- a decade. ateurs. The debate may sound like an esoteric I would suggest that the academic squabble. But it has serious im- truly oldest profession is poetry-or plications for the future of humanistic storytelling, or mythmaking, or whatever studies...
For all the academic ink de- voted to the subject of revolu- tion, history is rarely discon- tinuous, rarely an affair of dramatic leaps or breaks. While rhetoric and the emo-tional environment can shift quickly, the actual workings of a society usually change at about the same rate as the pro- verbial freight train. Just the same, there are occasional turning points in any na- tion's life, when the engine crests a hill or enters a deep curve. The train remains a' train-momentum intact-but thanks...
Inever knew anyone quite like my father, but then I never really knew
my father either. He was a man
without a single vice, but with a
hundred foibles. He was a "de-
voted" husband in a miserably un- happy marriage. He was embarrassingly proud of me and advertised my small aca- demic triumphs by stopping fellow Tul- sans on the street to show them newspaper clippings, and he thermofaxed my letters home to give to passing acquaintances. Yet he never once praised me to my face: Wh...
two percent annually through the early 1980s. The
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency estimates that the So- viet military now consumes a staggering 15 to 17 percent of the Soviet gross national prod- uct. (US. military spending amounts to six percent of GNP.) Yet, Aslund notes, "it is difficult to find any informed Soviet citizen who believes in earnest that it is less than . . .22 to 30 percent."
Looking back at the Soviet's last major attempt at economic reform, in 1965, Aslund says...
could a present-day Manhattanite of the century, had been more than dou-
somehow be transported back to the bling every 20 years and by 1850 stood at
mid-19th century, he would find little to slightly over half a million. The "Empire
surprise him in the New York City of that City," as some insisted on calling her, al-
-
time. Although its teeming boardinghouses ready had the reputation of being a
and tenements, hotels, pleasure haunts, cosmopolis-of being, owing to the l...
all Muslims through- out their 1400-year-old history: Who is the rightful ruler of an Islamic state? What constitutes a proper state and soci- ety under Islam? And, indeed, is there one and only one correct conception of state, society, and leadership under Is- lam? The questions are far from aca-demic. To many of the one billion Mus- lims living today, they are often matters of life or death.
Our contributors here offer three ap- proaches to the ongoing Islamic debate. Bernard Lewis considers...
when there is a crisis-when hostages are taken, or a bloody jihad is waged, or an ayatollah pronounces a death sentence upon a "blasphemous" novelist. Few Westerners recognize that beneath such head- line events lie ancient, tangled conflicts that go to the heart of Islamic faith and civilization, often threatening to divide it.
One such conflict-between worldly and spiritual authority-finds apt expres- sion in the 16th-century Persian painting featured on this page. It depicts an early...
Ever since they made a revolution and seized power 10 years ago, Iran's clerical leaders have considered themselves to be engaged in a unique experiment to create an exemplary Islamic state, based on Islamic law and superior to both capitalism and communism. "We should be a model to the world," Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, former speaker of Iran's Majles, or parliament, said tw...
-including the some 40 nations in which Muslims constitute the majority of the population-is a rich assort- ment of peoples and cultures. It is united, in tact, only by the prevalence of poverty. Beyond the borders of the desert oil king- doms, Muslim societies are poor and devel- oping, confined by their lack of political, economic, and military resources. They face the ample, simultaneous difficulties of modernization: sprawling, densely popu-
'
lated cities immobilized by traffic; u...