Students of Middle East Studies in this country will, for generations to come, continue to sing the praises of the dean of American Arabists and Islamicists, who passed away last Christmas Eve. For there is hardly a scholar of the Middle East in this country whose academic career or intellectual development has not been directly or indirectly influenced by him, his students, or his many publications. There is hardly a center of Middle East studies in this country that has not followed the tradition for these studies which he established at Princeton University. In a real sense he was the father of these studies in America. Small wonder that his students and colleagues—following the medieval Islamic tradition in designating the head of an intellectual school—lovingly called him “al-Shaykh.”

This last part of a survey of the state of research on Islamic coins and money is intended as a guide for the non-specialist historian to catalogues and studies of the issues of individual dynasties, regions and periods. Within broad chronological periods (ca. A.D. 632–750, 750–946, 946–1250, 1250–1517, 1517–1900) the treatment is regional. The body of numismatic literature is vast and scattered; this survey attempts to cite only general references and the most recent work for each subject. It must be said, however, that few topics have as yet been adequately treated in the secondary literature. Especially when important conclusions are to be drawn, it is essential to look also at the original sources—the coins themselves.

In many areas of Middle East studies, revolutions—from the 8th century Abbasid to the 20th century Egyptian cases—have been treated as multidimensional phenomena, filled with actors impelled by varying, often conflicting interests and motives. Scholarship has come to perceive these revolutions as products of commingled political, intellectual, social and economic forces, and each event as the unique creation of a particular blend of the various elements. The nature of this mix, in turn, has been seen to determine the subsequent post-revolutionary behavior of the various groups in society. Yet when we focus on the case of the so-called Young Turk “Revolution” of 1908, we find that most studies have been strikingly unilinear in their analyses. The limited approach has colored our view, both of the Revolution and of subsequent events. My purpose here is to examine the historiography of the Young Turk Revolution and then to offer some possible alternative interpretations.

The popular undergraduate political science course on “The Arab-Israeli Conflict” at the University of Michigan has had as its focus since 1975 an enormously successful large-scale simulation game, or simprovisation in Frederick Goodman’s phrase. While the four-credit upper division level course of some 100 students is of the quite standard lecture-discussion section format, the simulation game has been closely integrated into it. The game is the goal towards which the students move and is the educational structure around which the course has been organized.

The concept of simulation gaming was introduced almost as an aside when Clement Henry and I were designing the course, to be taught by Professor Henry, in 1974. The games organized that year were small, short and disjointed, but they were sufficient to demonstrate the educational utility of the idea, if nothing else. The following year, with the central collaboration of Leonard Suranski, the game was moved to the fore and from that point on it has been the focus of the course.