ng tribal leaders and members. Before the advent of the Prophet Muhammad (571-632 A.D.), Kennedy said that "despite [their] common language and ethnic homogeneity, the Arabs had no central political organization and administration" (25). By the force of his personality, the Prophet, according to Hitti, replaced "the most vital bond of Arab relationship, that of tribal kinship [with] a new bond, that of faith" (40).
Islam produced theocratic rule throughout the Arab world; however, after the Prophet's death, the main centers of the Arab Empire evolved outside the Arabian Peninsula under the Umayyad caliphs (661-749) in Damascus and the Abbasids in Baghdad (750-1258). Most Arabs became Sunni Muslims, the dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia today, but a significant minority, today about one third of the population, the Shi'a, followed the teachings of Ali, the Prophet's cousin and son-in-law, and remains in eastern regions of the peninsula. Arabs in the peninsula were much more removed from alien influences than their counterparts in Egypt until very modern times.
The Arab conquest of Egypt in 639-641 "by its arabization and Islamization, had the greatest impact on Egyptian life and culture" (Metz Egypt xxiii). Predominantly Sunni Muslim, Egypt retained significant Christian (Coptic), Jewish and Shia minorities. Egypt gradually gained relative political autonomy within the Ottoman Empire and in the late 18th century Mamluk beys gained effective control of military and political structures. After the Napoleonic invasion and occupation of 1798-1801, Muhammad Ali (1805-1849) strengthened the power of the Egyptian state and used it to develop Egypt's agricultural base and infrastructure. Ali and his less effective successors in the 19th century were centralizers. Hunter said that in 1848-1879 "Egypt's civil bureaucracy emerged as the pre-eminent state institution" (145). The development of long-staple cotton as an export crop a...