In order to achieve socioeconomic progress in a developing society, it is important that modern technology, which is Western in genesis and has evolved over the past three centuries, be imported and applied. Modern technology requires not only the instrumentalities of technology and pure science as a body of knowledge and a dominant institution, but also a social and psycho-social structure at least compatible with, if not reinforcing of, the drive towards better technology and scientific inquiry. Developing societies, however, usually have an institutional apparatus and value system which are indifferent to, incompatible with, or hostile to, modernization. A process of modification, adaptation and reform of many social institutions and values is necessary in order for these societies to appreciably benefit from the introduction of science and technology. People and organizations must also restructure their modes of behavior in productive processes so that the full productivity of modernization can be obtained. The transfer of science and technology from modern to pre-modern societies is really a process of social change within the developing society, and not solely the physical importing of equipment and scientific-technical manpower, useful as these are in the modernization process.

In noting that Joseph Massad's identity as a Palestinian Jordanian should be central to any critical evaluation of Colonial Effects, I am taking seriously his claim that writing the book entailed, for him, a gradual “coming to terms” with this identity. I am also reapplying Massad's own interpretive method. “Throughout the book,” he tells us, “you will notice that I identify the geographic origins and the religious and ethnic backgrounds of people. This is done deliberately” (p. 16). Why? Because such specificity is needed to “interrogate” the claims people make about “Jordanian national identity and Jordanian national culture” (p. 16). I find it bizarre that Massad would cry “foul” when I conclude that his own (self-announced) “subject position” influenced his thinking on these topics.

The year 1929 was a particularly disruptive period for the city of Kabul (perhaps the only comparable time was when the mujahedin fought over it in the 1990s). In January of that year, under pressure from a band of Tajik rebels who entered Kabul almost unopposed, the ruler of Afghanistan, Amir Aman Allah, abdicated his throne and fled the capital. The man who occupied his office was a former soldier-turned-highwayman from the village of Kalakân some twenty miles north of Kabul. He was named Habib Allah (and is so called throughout the work under review), but he is better remembered by the epithet “Bacha-i Saqqaw,” or “Water Carrier's Son,” his father having once served in that role for the military. A Tajik, he was the first non-Pushtun to occupy the throne since the birth of Afghanistan in the 18th century. He would hold it for only nine months.

After the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist narrative dominated the histories and historiographies of Middle Eastern and North African Jewries. Accordingly, Jews and Arabs were largely kept as distinct binaries divided by the intellectual walls that separated Middle East studies and Jewish studies programs. Local North African and Middle Eastern scholars also silenced or overlooked the Jewish dimension of Middle Eastern societies in the same manner that Israeli scholars ignored the historical connections between Arabs and Jews that existed both before and after 1948. The exclusive, sacred yet ebbing, nationalist paradigm has been plagued with historiographical fissures in recent decades, allowing a new wave of intellectual engagement by a young generation of Jewish and Muslim scholars who began to put the Jew and the Arab back into local and global histories formed through complex social, cultural, economic, and political networks.

In Failing the Crystal Ball Test, Ofira Seliktar, a political scientist at Gratz College, seeks to account for the “policy and intelligence debacle” (p. x) associated with the pre-eminent crisis of the Carter years. It is her hope that by understanding what went wrong with policy toward Iran, future policy-makers will be able to reduce the risk of similar disasters elsewhere in the relatively unstable conditions of the post-Cold War world. To achieve her objective, she focuses on the three-year period from the beginning of 1977 to the seizure of the United States embassy in November 1979. Seliktar, whose previous work has centered on Israel, bases her study on the multi-volume series of American documents seized at the embassy and published in Iran during the 1980s. These materials cluster around the last several years of U.S.–Iranian relations prior to the takeover of the compound. In addition, she has relied on an extensive list of secondary works in English.

This book is a most welcome addition to the literature on Russian–Israeli relations. Although Yaacov Ro⊃i, in his study Soviet Decision Making in Practice: The USSR and Israel 1947–1954 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1980), covered the 1947–53 period thoroughly, and although there is an extensive body of literature on Russian policy toward Israel (and the rest of the Middle East) after the 1967 war, a gap has existed for many years in the scholarly coverage of Russian–Israeli relations from the death of Stalin in March 1953 until the June 1967 Six Day War. Yosef Govrin, a retired Israeli Foreign Office official who specialized in relations with the USSR, has gone a long way toward filling this gap. Having the advantage of access to the Israeli archives and internal political debates, Govrin presents a balanced picture of the Soviet–Israeli relationship, pointing out where, in his opinion, both Israel and the USSR made mistakes in developing their ties. He also goes into great detail on the question of Soviet Jewry (more than half of the book), noting how Israel's efforts to get the Soviet government to allow Jews to emigrate to Israel was a serious complicating factor in the relationship, although the primary cause for the USSR's breaking of diplomatic relations with Israel in June 1967 (Govrin was first secretary of the Israeli embassy in Moscow at the time) stemmed from Moscow's backing of the radical Ba⊃athist regime in Syria, which helped precipitate the 1967 war.

Scholars often acknowledge reproductive behavior as a core issue in Israeli politics but they seldom examine how public policies affect family size. Israel has designed no official government fertility program, but the country's leaders are nevertheless obsessed with Jewish natality. Israeli women are bombarded with regulations affecting access to contraceptives and abortion procedures and with all sorts of unsubtle massages about the importance of mothering as a factor in the state's continuing vitality and fulfilling its national purpose. Jacqueline Portugese explains Israel's ongoing efforts to encourage a high Jewish birthrate by focusing a feminist lens on public discourse, popular culture, and particular policies, all of which, she argues, have a highly pernicious impact on women. Despite the differences in feminist perspectives on the issue of fertility, they share a critical stance toward state regulation of the family, and all aid Portugese's narrative in uncovering and explaining the large repertoire of relatively intrusive regulatory mechanisms at the disposal of the government. The special insight of Fertility in Israel lies in its clarifications of the connections between seemingly benign welfare benefits and tax incentives and denying women autonomy with regard to the decision to bear children.

The Soviet Union's collapse and the end of the Cold War have been accompanied by a declining interest in Marxian-inspired theories of political economy in the study of core–periphery relations. Concepts such as dependency and imperialism have been replaced by market forces and structural adjustment. Similarly, post-modernism's impact has been to erode interest in historical theories, especially those with a teleological bent. Thus, Robert Tignor's study, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire, is refreshing in raising issues that have not been central to the recent intellectual agenda in the study of non-Western societies.

During the British Mandate period Zionist health organizations and professional groups made an extensive effort to educate the Jewish public in health and hygiene. This article analyzes the Hebrew popular-scientific discourse of hygiene. It looks at the inculcation of hygienic models of conduct as part of a project of modernization and Westernization. As the analysis demonstrates, Zionist identity was constructed as modern and Western in opposition to the Orient and Oriental ways of life. At the same time, “Occidental” and “Oriental” were unstable and sometimes ambivalent categories in the hygienic discourse. Not only the value of the categories sometimes differ (as Jews were depicted both as European settlers and as natives of the Orient), but also East European Jews appeared both as objects and as subjects of a “civilizing mission.” As a consequence, the construction of difference between European Jews and Orientals was not always grounded in different practices attributed to each of these groups but sometimes in the different value attached to the same practices when performed by members of different groups.

Asma Barlas's objective in this book is to uncover the essentially egalitarian message of the Qurءan by defining the best methodology for reading the Qurءan and by applying this methodology to better understand its message concerning the ontological and social status of women. In Part I, she draws on the work of previous scholars to fashion a critique of interpretations that conflate the Qurءan with secondary texts such as a hadith and tafsīr, texts she views as instrumental in the incorporation of misogynist beliefs and customs into Islam. She calls for a reaffirmation of the primacy of the Qurءanic text but read in a new way—holistically and as a historically situated text. A Muslim who does not question the divine origin of the Qurءan, Barlas insists on the individual responsibility of its readers correctly to uncover its meanings through the use of their intellects, using the tool of ijtihād rather than the blind acceptance of traditional interpretations.

The dislocations associated with modernity have driven scholarly, literary, and philosophical inquiries in various directions since the 19th century: Marx's materialist critique, Ranke's historical empiricism, Baudelaire's flâneur, Simmel's studies of urban anomie and alienation, Durkheim and Weber's sociology, and so on into the 20th and 21st centuries, and now reflected in this issue of IJMES on queer studies. Although there are vast differences among them, they share a compulsion to explain what appeared as massive reconfigurations of time and space. The proliferation of subjective possibilities was pegged to an acceleration of the former and compression of the latter; accordingly, on our radar appear the bourgeois, middle class, and worker in the long 19th century and gay, lesbian, and transgender in the late 20th, two moments of rapid globalization and subject proliferation. We are to believe that in the fullness of time all will be free and all will be good. However, in the here and now some must be unfree and some bad. The modern distinction between free and unfree, good and bad, subjects relies heavily on uninterrogated assumptions about the spatial origins, temporality, and trajectory of modernity.

The tribe presents a problem for the historian of the modern Middle East, particularly one interested in personalities, subtleties of culture and society, and other such “useless” things. By and large, tribes did not leave their own written records. The tribal author is a phenomenon of the present or the recent past. There are few twentieth century tribal figures comparable to the urban personalities to whose writings and influence we owe our understanding of the social, intellectual, and political history of the modern Middle East. There is next a larger problem of record keeping to contend with: the almost complete inaccessibility of official records on the postcolonial Middle East. It is no wonder that political scientists and anthropologists are among the best regarded custodians of the region's twentieth century history; they know how to make creative and often eloquent use of drastically limited tools. For many decades, suspicious governments have inhibited historians from carrying out the duties of their vocation. This is one reason why the many rich and original new monographs on Saddam Hussein's Iraq are so important. If tribes are on the margins of the records, and the records themselves are off limits, then one might imagine why modern Middle Eastern tribes are so poorly conceived in the scholarly imagination.

Forced migration has come to be the defining feature of the contemporary Middle East, a region that is both the source of and host to some of the largest forcibly displaced populations in the world. In 2015, 65 percent of the world's 19.4 million refugees—including the 5.5 million Palestinian refugees—as well as 30 percent of the world's thirty-eight million internally displaced persons were in the Middle East, while one out of every four refugees worldwide was from Syria. Seeking security and stability, millions of people from the region are on the move within and across social spaces that are at once strange and familiar, and in which they themselves are familiar and strange to others. In 2015, Turkey became host to the world's largest refugee population of over two million, while Zaʿatari camp in Jordan has grown rapidly to become one of the world's largest camps since the Syrian civil war began. With 7.6 million people—or 35 percent of the population—internally displaced, Syria now has the highest number of internally displaced persons in the world. Iraq has produced multiple overlapping displacements, resulting in one of the largest refugee resettlement programs of the past decade. Thousands of Syrians, Libyans, and Iraqis have undertaken perilous journeys across the Mediterranean Sea to seek asylum in Europe and elsewhere. Palestinian refugees are now in a fourth generation of exile, making their plight the longest running unresolved refugee situation in the world.

In February 1939, the Syrian government received two documents from ʿulamaʾ protesting two decrees of the French High Commission that were intended to reform personal status law in Syria: decree 60/L.R. of 13 March 1936 and decree 146/L.R. of 18 November 1938. The first was a petition signed by Muslims from Homs to the Syrian prime minister (pictured); the second was a letter from the Damascus Association of ʿUlamaʾ to the Syrian interior minister.

This issue of IJMES opens with a special section on the Arab uprisings of 2011. For the first feature of the section, titled “Reflections: Middle East Studies at the Barricades,” we asked scholars from different disciplines to provide brief reflections on how the events might or should change scholarship on the region, or the questions that scholars ask. The contributors responded with a range of suggestions for future scholarship and a variety of critiques of past scholarship. We will not attempt to summarize these critiques here. Instead, we would like to play devil's (or scholar's) advocate, by pointing to a few ways in which past scholarship on the Middle East has produced insights for understanding the unfolding events.