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　　We had the first meeting of "Issues and Points" on September 27, focusing on the question of relationship between Arab Nationalism and Islamic Revival in the Arab world, with a presentation of Dr. MATSUMOTO Hiroshi.

In our A Group of Unit 1, we plan to organize five kinds of meetings. They are: (1) Themes and Issues, (2) Thinkers, (3) Areas and countries, (4) Book review, and (5) Primary sources. We had the first meeting of "book review" in last June, and this was the first meeting on "Themes and Issues."

　Dr. MATSUMOTO argued in his presentation that Islamic revival appeared as an alternative to Arab nationalism after it began to decline, being defeated in the third Middle East War of 1967, and that it has corelations with governmental policies of emphasizing Islam in most Arab countries. He discussed mainly cases of Egypt, Algeria and Morocco in this regard, and explained Islamic situations in Tunisia, Sudan, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Yemen from the 1960's to the 90's.

　Why Islamic revival has been inversely proportional to the decline of Arab nationalism? To this qeustion, he addressed by illustrating the case of Egypt and its "structural changes" in the 70's. As a whole, the presentation brought a number of stimulating points, and we had heated discussions.

　Islamic revival has, in certatin cases especially in the 80's and after, has anti-regime dimensions. His thesis that this is related to universal claims of Arab nationalism and its disillusionment as well as the weakness of Islamic modernism led to a very interesting discussion. Another important issue was the difference between republican and monarchial states in terms of corelations of Arab nationalism and Islamic revival. We found a necessity to elaborate the question of monarchy in contemporary Islamic thought, and agreed to have a seminar on "Islam and Monarchy" in the future.

　The presentator also pointed out that there are Japanese Thnink Tanks which conduct studies on Islamic revival. Not only purely academic works but also these studies should be incorporated in the body of knowledge in the field.

　　As this year is regarded as a "year to find themes and questions," this first meeting of "Issues and Points" found a number of important questions, indespensable for our studies on contemporary Islamic thought. This will continue to the second and third meetings in the series.
Please come back to discuss these issues with us! There will be more of interesting presentations.