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.

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.

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.

From Paris in June 1928, Edmond Rabbath (1901–91) sent to Saעdallah al-Jabiri (1893–1947) his recently published L'évolution politique de la Syrie sous mandat. While the book is an early exploration of the legal underpinnings of the French Mandate, it is also the first nationalist history of Syria. Adopting a now familiar historiographical trope that the Ottoman past was a period of decadence and unjust alien rule, Rabbath organized recent episodes from the turbulent history of the Eastern Mediterranean since World War I, including Faysal's Arab kingdom, the Syrian Arab Congress, the rebellions of Salih al-עAlawi and Ibrahim Hananu, and the Great Syrian Revolt, into a linear narrative of an unfolding modern national consciousness.1 With a Preface by a prominent figure from pre-war Ottoman politics in the Levant, Shakib al-Arslan, the book outlined the logic in which much of inter-war Syrian opposition to French colonialism would be phrased:2 France must adhere to the letter and spirit of the League of Nations' mandate and emancipate the Syrians upon their achievement of national maturity. With some reservations, Rabbath argued that this maturity had already been attained.3

Like a mega-earthquake, the end of the Cold War sent lasting shockwaves throughout the international system. Outside the former communist bloc, the epicenter of this earthquake, nowhere else were those tremors more dramatic in their impact than in the Middle East—a region of long-standing geo-strategic standing and a legacy of incessant foreign conquest and intervention. The end of the Cold War exposed clearly the structural weaknesses of the region and drastically reduced its system immunities. As at previous turning points, the Middle East faced formidable constraints as well as luring opportunities. Middle East at the Crossroads is a collection of articles addressing the contours of this new environment and its challenges for both Middle Eastern states and the major powers. It is a welcome addition and an important contribution to Middle Eastern studies.

In Legislative Politics in the Arab World, Abdo Baaklini, Guilain Denoeux, and Robert Springborg provide a long-overdue and important step toward understanding legislative institutions in the Arab world. In the first part of this work, they redirect scholars' attention to Arab legislatures, which they argue both reflect and affect the “dynamics of democratic transition and consolidation in the Arab world” (p. 6). In the second part of the book, they provide detailed case studies of legislative institutions in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, and Yemen. Throughout the book, they leave us with the simple but important message: “Arab legislatures matter.”

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.

There are forty single-member districts in Bahrain. If a candidate wins a majority of the total votes cast in the district in the first round, he or she is elected. If no candidate receives a majority, the top two vote-getters compete in a runoff election one week later. Political parties are banned, but political “associations” act as parties, supporting lists of candidates, coordinating campaign activity, and publishing platforms. Districts are configured to overrepresent the Sunni minority.

Cyrus Schayegh's “‘Seeing Like a State’: An Essay on the Historiography of Modern Iran” tries to show how historians of the Pahlavi era “have been gripped by the image of an omnipotent, completely autonomous state and how, each one . . . turned this image into what I call methodological statism” (p. 38). He discusses critically several works by historians and political scientists while mentioning more favorably a few works by anthropologists and sociologists and then indicates what he considers a better approach to Pahlavi history. Although I agree with some of his criticisms and am glad to see a serious discussion of historiography, I think he overstates the sins of historians and fails to distinguish between historians and political scientists, whose discipline leads them to emphasize the state.

This article lays the groundwork for a more systematic history of the Ottoman gendarmerie (jandarma), with special emphasis on the men in the corps and their working conditions. Through this paramilitary police institution, 19th-century Ottoman bureaucrats aimed to extend their authority into the provinces, which at that time could be described as only marginally under Ottoman sovereignty according to contemporary definitions of the term. From the late 18th century on, extending state sovereignty to recognized territorial boundaries emerged as a vital need for most European states as well as the Ottoman Empire. Along with other modern military and civil institutions and modern administrative practices, introducing various types of paramilitary provincial police forces enabled governments in Europe to enhance and extend their authority over territories where it had been limited. The gendarmerie thus emerged in both Europe and the Ottoman Empire as integral to modern state formation and its technologies of government. While acknowledging the Pan-European context of the gendarmerie's emergence and its theoretical ramifications, the present article is concerned more with the Ottoman context within which this police corps was established, evolved, and took on a uniquely Ottoman form.

In 2005 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization accepted Lebanon's archaeological site of Nahr al-Kalb into its Memory of the World Programme, turning it from national heritage into a globally memorable text. I argue that it is not the content of the commemorative inscriptions but the mode of repeated commemoration that makes it possible to reinterpret potentially divisive markers of Lebanon's past into icons of national unity and a shared humanity. By focusing on the intersection of public monumentality, repetition, and the construction of community identity based on the logic of resemblance, I show that governmental elites at times of political transition need to make public interventions into the past to bolster their legitimacy, new commemorations are confined by rules and conventions of public memorializing, and the logic of resemblance inherent in commemorative processes can be used to convert a fragmented history into a memory of unity and strength

As environmental history migrates to the Middle East there is natural excitement about new research methods such as molecular biology and soil science. But the Braudelian project of describing “man in his intimate relationship to the earth which bears and feeds him” may be complicated by echoes of the region's literary past.

Research on Middle East militaries is imbalanced. In recent decades, scholarly interest in Israel and Turkey has expanded, while the Arab states have more often than not been overlooked. In this essay, I suggest how to address the “gap” in the study of Arab militaries by drawing parallels with militaries in non-Arab states, which have received considerable attention.

Like much of the “developing world,” Syria experienced urban population growth at historically unprecedented rates in the 1950s. Such rapid urbanization, like all transformative historical phenomena, animates (and, to a certain extent, reifies) a host of dreams and anxieties in those who experience it. To get an inkling of how “Syrians”—as individuals, groups, or representatives of institutions—felt about these changes, one has to look beyond the ubiquitous and frequent pronouncements of intellectuals and government officials extolling the virtues of modernity and the liberating effects of science and technology.