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Fuad Baali and Ali Wardi, Ibn Khaldūn and Islamic Thought-Styles. A Social Perspective (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1981). Pp. xii + 155. Bibliography. Index.

After a foreword by CERMOC's director, geographer Andre Bourgey, Michel Seurat proposes an historical background explaining the failure of various industrialization drives, from Mehmet Ali to Iraki Bath. He emphasizes the predominantly political dimension of the problem. A well-documented and well-argued essay by Francois Rivier deals with contemporary industrial policies in the main Middle East non-oil-dominated countries (Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon). The paper gives a good account of the present economic achievements and shortcomings of the countries under study. Two shorter contributions deal with manpower problems. Sociologist Selim Nasr collects and comments on interesting, but somewhat old, data and figures on industrial workers in the Middle East. Demographer Philippe Fargues studies the impressive demographic unbalance in the Peninsula oil states and comments upon the role played by immigrated workers. As an interlude, we are presented a "cartographic file": 22 industrial maps of the Middle East drawn by J. P. Bertrand; a useful and stimulating contribution, somewhat depreciated by the lack of colours. The five essays in the second part of the book deal with more delimited questions. Two "country studies": "Irak," by Makram Sader and "Saudi Arabia," by Boutros Labaki, give economists' accounts of hazardous experiences of industrializing through oil income. They are followed by Aida Boudjikanian's monography dealing with the role of the Armenian community in Lebanon's industrial life, and Nadine Picaudou's essay on the Palestinian bourgeoisie observed through its relation to industry: two interesting and often original contributions to Middle Eastern sociology of development. The book ends up with another "field study" essay by Jean Hanoyer (who has been working for years on Eastern Syria) which shows the significance of the emergence of industrial enterprises in the Deir Ez Zor region. Most scholars working on the contemporary Middle East will find good reasons to read at least part of this book, as they will most certainly find useful information or original points of view pertaining to their own field of interest. All will probably agree with the book's basic philosophy that industrialization in the Middle East is all but a success story; politics and politicians being much more to blame than nature's greediness.