The Ottoman background of the modern Middle East -- The Islamic city -- Ottoman reform and the politics of notables -- A note on revolutions in the Arab world -- Sufism and modern Islam : Mawlana Khalid and the Naqshbandi order -- Sufism and modern Islam : Rashid Rida -- The middleman in a changing society : Syrians in Egypt in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries -- Lebanon : the development of a political society -- Lebanon from feudalism to nation-state -- Lebanon : historians and the formation of a national image -- Ideologies of the mountain and the city : reflections on the Lebanese civil war -- Middle Eastern nationalism yesterday and today -- 'The Arab awakening forty years after'.