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The events that took place in Iraq in 1941, commonly called Rashid Ali al-Kaylani or the Revolution of 1941 by the Iraqis, were very important to the subsequent political development of that country. They led Iraq to war with Britain, and most of what happened after that date, including the July 14, 1958, Revolution, can be explained in one way or another as an extension of what happened in May 1941.

The U.S. Military's turn to culture in the 21st century occurred largely because of its inability to achieve its stated objectives in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through conventional military force. Building on a long history of military strategies concerned with the cultural differences of others, the U.S. military crafted a warfighting strategy in 2006 based on a counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine of using cultural knowledge to battle the enemy. Charting how and why culture was embraced as a 21st-century “weapons system” shows us how technopolitical systems inside the military-industrial complex are envisioned, built, and then dismantled. Close tracking of these changing 21st-century strategies of war reveals, deep within the counterterrorism discourse, a fundamental belief in American exceptionalism. The principle that emerged from this ideological environment is that the enemies to be fought are not only terrorists or the ideologues of al-Qaʿida but also the countries and cultures that produced them. The implementation of this principle, despite its obvious failures, reveals the ideological underpinning that has justified the incredible destruction and securitized implementation of warfighting.

In 1762, a ghost ship appeared off the Tunisian coast between Tabarka and Bizerte during the spring equinox, notorious for treacherous weather. According to a local chronicler: “Perceived in the distance was a ship with masts but no flag flying that approached the shore, then drew away. It was the month of April [1762] and unusually cold . . . the next morning, we saw the vessel veer toward land while a violent tempest raged.” Wrecked on the rocky shoreline, it funneled unimaginable wealth to pastoralists, villagers, and scavengers from far and wide. The ship proved to be without passengers or crew whose fate remains unknown until this day.

I came of age in the early years of the “War on Terror.” As a young student activist, my initial arguments against the wars in 2001 and 2003 followed a common logic, responding to disinformation, ahistorical narratives, and false claims about Iraq, Afghanistan, and Muslims. Like many who work in the fields of Middle Eastern studies, this work was driven by the belief that exposing the narratives of the target nations to be wrong would in turn expose the false premises behind the wars. I have by now spent my entire adult life researching, writing, and teaching about the “War on Terror” with a specific focus on the war on Iraq. My hope was that “humanizing” and providing more insight into the views of the people “over there” would alter popular ideas in the United States and steer American state actions in a different direction than intervention.

Hanna Batatu's long-awaited study of Syria's peasantry is an extraordinary accomplishment. An exhaustive historical survey of Syria's rural society and the social formation of its current leadership, the book is encyclopedic in its scope and mastery of detail. It is also strikingly ambitious in its effort to link contemporary Syrian politics and the leadership of President Hafiz al-Asad to the transformations that reshaped rural Syria in the 19th and 20th centuries. Syria's Peasantry brings to an English-speaking audience a depth of knowledge that was previously available mostly through the Arabic-language publications of Syrian scholars such as ⊂Abdallah Hana. However, although Batatu's achievement is considerable, Syria's Peasantry is nevertheless flawed, and its ambition is not always realized. It is driven by a vision of peasant society, of Asad, and of Syrian politics that many readers will find unsatisfying, if not problematic.

Stéphane Valter's book raises a legitimate question: how did the Baעthist regime of Syria (since 1963), and especially Hafiz al-Asad (from 1970 to 2000) succeed in remaining so long in power? Crude brutality, as documented by Middle East Watch (Syria Unmasked: The Suppression of Human Rights by the Asad Regime [1991]), was not enough. Neither were the threats and expectations of external wars, as Fred Lawson argues in Why Syria Goes to War (1996). Coercion had to be blended with some sort of legitimacy to explain the durability of a regime that could not be labeled totalitarian.

It is fair to say that some of the most vibrant work—and most challenging questions—surrounding “agency” and its intelligibility have come out of feminist scholarship on the “Muslim world,” broadly defined. This piece considers the transdisciplinary lives of agency as analytic tool, its uses and limitations, its particular proximity to gender-critical research, and, in turn, seeming synonymization with women.

At the time of its first modern census in 1993, Oman had one of the world's highest fertility rates (6.9 children per woman) and over half of the population was under the age of fifteen and yet to enter its peak childbearing years. In response, Oman introduced a Birth Spacing Program in 1994, encouraging couples to space births by at least three years and making a wide range of modern contraceptives available throughout the sultanate. Although the program was ostensibly designed to promote reproductive and child health, it clearly had a demographic agenda. By 2006, the fertility rate had dropped to 3.2 children per woman and the contraceptive prevalence rate had increased sharply. However, these changes cannot be attributed solely to the Birth Spacing Program and must be seen in the broader context of delayed marriage and extraordinary gains in social well-being, health, and female education.

In the fall of 1969 the Libyan monarchy was overthrown by a group of young military officers headed by Mouamir Quadafi. In the months prior to the revolution the tribal-based Monarchy had found it difficult to cope with the stress of rapid social and economic change, and had found itself immobilized by the conflict between Libya's traditional tribal and religious elite and a small but influential modernizing elite composed of students, technocrats and younger military officers. This new elite, a byproduct of Libya's oil wealth, had become particularly distressed by the arbitrariness and inefficiency of the Monarchy, the severe maldistribution of the oil revenues, and the existence of what they felt to be a poorly planned and managed development program which had largely failed to penetrate Libya's predominatly rural areas.