In late February of 1986, a week or two before the massive joint celebration of the 25th anniversary of Hassan II's accession to the Moroccan throne and the 10th of his launching of the Green March into the Sahara (the March actually took place in November of 1975, but it was ritually assimilated to Coronation Day for this milestone occasion), the municipal council of a small city in the east-central part of the country issued a decree. Henceforth, the color of all buildings in the city was to be beige: crème, in the French redaction, qehwi, in the Arabic. Paint could be obtained at designated outlets.

Diplomatic historians of all persuasions agree that the Iranian Crisis of 1945–1946 played a considerable part in initiating the Cold War. For revisionist writers, the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that took place during these months resulted from American efforts to carve out a sphere of influence in the oil-producing areas of the Middle East. By the autumn of 1945, according to this view, U.S. firms had gained controlling interests in the consortia holding exclusive rights to work the extensive petroleum deposits located in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain; more importantly, Iranian officials were making repeated overtures to American concerns in an effort to counterbalance established British interests with more dynamic ones based in the United States. When the Red Army prevented the government in Tehran from suppressing separatist movements in Azerbaijan and Kurdistan in December 1945, the Truman Administration manipulated the Security Council of the United Nations into mandating a Soviet withdrawal from northern Iran.

The income inequality gap in prerevolutionary Iran was no doubt a contributing factor to the mass mobilization of Iranians in the 1979 Revolution. The Resolution of the Ashura March (December 11, 1978) demanded the establishment of “social justice, the right of workers and peasants to the full benefit from the product of their labor” and an end to “any form of discrimination, exploitation, profiteering and economic domination which may result in the accumulation of great wealth, on the one hand, and deprivation and poverty on the other.”

During the last decade of the Pahlavi rule in Iran, rising oil income financed a very extensive development program in which both the state and the private sector accumulated huge amounts of wealth in real and financial capital. Having no direct access to the oil riches, the private sector accumulated much of its new wealth by direct and indirect subsidies from the government. Through various mechanisms, the state channeled resources to the private sector in an attempt to foster capitalist development of the country. While the strategy was successful insofar as it resulted in massive investment by the private sector, it was not without its ill side effects. This article is a study of the consequences, both intended and unintended, of one specific conduit for resource transfer—credit subsidy.

Trade is often discussed in an Islamic context with reference made to Muslim merchants. However, the significance of Islam in specific commercial circumstances is difficult to assess. Some historians label trade as “Muslim” because it was conducted by Muslims; others do so because the trade originated and/or concluded with the boundaries of an Islamic state. The label Muslim may also suggest networking, a process more familiar in relation to Armenians or Jews. We can ask if the operative principles of Muslim networks were at all the same as those for the minority groups.

Africa's largest country, Sudan, is first and foremost part of the Arab world, sensitive to the political tides which sweep the Arab peoples from the Atlantic to the Gulf. Like other members of the Arab League, Sudan was taken by surprise by the defeat of 1967. It was shaken by the tidal wave that later engulfed Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria; and on 25 May 1969, a military regime took over in Khartoum. Its ideology was Arab nationalism infused with socialism; its social base, the army and the urban classes; and its model, the Nasserist experiment.