ABSTRACT
Contemporaneously, however, the social and economic component of the Arab idea was receiving its articulation and implementation elsewhere in the Arab patrie. It will be recalled that, in the summer of 1961, the U.A.R. enacted a number of socialist decrees whose ultimate objective was to translate into reality a vision which the advanced ranks of the Arab intelligentsia and political leadership had been projecting for quite some time. Although the vision itself may have been blurred, and its verbalization may have left something to be desired, nevertheless, it was a very real one and had guided several of the movements of political and social protest in the Arab world for almost a generation. What gave it a peculiar quality in 1961, perhaps, was the nature of the political leadership then in control in many Arab areas, for in several of these areas the major control of events was securely in Arab hands. Nationalist leaders could not only enunciate programs of social and political action but could also control the necessary organizational machinery required to implement them. And, because of the specific background and composition of that leadership, its search for support-popular or intellectual-compelled it to draw on sources of inspiration and guidance derived, to a greater extent than was true of earlier generations, from the Arab cultural background. For only by doing so could it in fact pacify and quiet the increasing anxieties of its ultimate judge-the Arab constituency.
