ABSTRACT
I am honoured to have been asked to edit, and then introduce, the English translation of The Future of the Arab Nation. This work, which first appeared in Arabic in 1988, represents a serious and sustained effort by a group of committed Arab social scientists to outline some of the possible future paths which could be taken by the Arab world over the next twenty-five years. Such an exercise is well worth doing both in its own right and as a source of a counter to some of the recent projections by Western futurologists who analyse the Arab states simply in terms of their oil-producing potential.
