In the decades before Nasser’s seizure of power and the Suez crisis, Alexandria was a magnet for the wealthy, the gifted, and the glamorous from around the world. The whole city looked seaward, its port one of the busiest in the Mediterranean, its spirit ecumenical, its life luxuriant and sensual. Alexandria was barely an Egyptian city, and the Egyptians who live there now inhabit the gently crumbling remains of a foreign world, whose palatial villas, Venetian apartments, art-nouveau cafes, Moorish hotels, and cinemas conceived in thirties deco, are haunted by a departed cast. “I lived a great, extravagant, and colorful life in wartime Alexandria,” recalled Lawrence Durrell, whose Alexandria Quartet is one of the greatest protraits of a city in modern literature. Michael Haag, who has lived in Alexandria, and has known Durrell and others who lived there during its cosmopolitan heyday, has retraced their footsteps to present an absorbing account of the places and the people of this most remarkable of cities. ‘’Michael Haag mixes memory and biography, politics and cultural studies in clear and seamless prose.’’—The New York Review of Books

The Prolegomena of Ibn Khaldun of Tunis (A.D. 1332–1406) are in many ways the most remarkable product of Islamic thought. Not only did Ibn Khaldun sum up the accumulated knowledge and leading doctrines of his civilization, but in many fields he broke new ground and anticipated the findings of Western social scientists of the last two centuries. The passages have been grouped to illustrate Ibn Khaldun’s views on historical method, geography, economics, public finance, population, society and state, and the theory of being and theory of knowledge. This selection is intended for students of thought, rather than specialized Arabic scholars, and for those interested in the intellectual background of the Arab world.