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...
looking at the
revolution it was not: Contrasting the American and the French
revolutions, he sheds light on both. Political scientist and biogra-
pher Maurice Cranston examines the long-term effects of the
Revolution. Surveying its global legacies, Cranston uncovers a sig-
nificant irony: He finds a revolution whose consequences in its
own country were radically different from those it would pro-
duce, so explosively, throughout the rest of the world.
WQ SUMMER 1989
36
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Keith Mi...
iety
CA'S FIRST COCAINE EPIDEMIC
Only a decade ago, many prominent Americans tolerated and even touted the use of cocaine. From Capitol Hill to Wall Street, the young and moneyed set made the drug its favorite "leisure pharmaceutical." Some talked of decriminalizing the "harmless" white powder. But that changed after cocaine overdoses killed several celebrities-including Hollywood's John Belushi in 1982 and college basketball star Len Bias in 1986. Last year, the drug claimed 1...
Latin Ameri- can "magical realists," we also view postmodern television shows (David Letterman for the late-night crowd), eat postmodern food ("gourmet" macaroni- and-cheese served on microwaveable Fiestaware), sport postmodern clothes, and even think postmodern thoughts.
For all that, few of us know what the term really means, while others suspect, along with a Spy magazine writer, that it has "evolved into a sort of buzzword that people tack onto sentences when they're...
citizens), referendums (referred legis- latures), and recalls of elected officials.
Today, about half the states permit initiatives or referen- dums, or both. A 1987 Gallup survey showed that, by a mar- gin of 48 to 41 percent, Ameri- cans favor a Constitutional amendment to allow national referendums. During the 1980s, more than 200 initia- tives and 1,000 referendums have appeared on state ballots, on matters ranging from abor- tion to bond issues.
How has direct democracy worked for the states?...
once watched a man being kidnapped in Beirut. It took only a few seconds.
I was on my way to Beirut Interna- tional Airport when my taxi became stalled in traffic. Suddenly I saw off to my right four men with pistols tucked into their belts who were dragging another man out his front door. A woman, proba- bly his wife, was standing just inside the shadow of the door, clutching her bathrobe and weeping. The man was strug- gling and kicking with all his might, a look of sheer terror in his eyes. S...