The study of the history of the modern Middle East has reached the state at which scholars now have access to first-rate monographs, such as this one, even about urban centers as modest as Haifa was during the period covered by this book. This is certainly good news, particularly because books such as this one, and May Seikaly's, which covers a subsequent period of Haifa's history, are comprehensive, well written, and thoroughly grounded in local primary sources. We should be grateful in particular to Brill's “Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage” series for publishing this and other monographs covering the local history of different parts of the Ottoman Empire.

The emergence of Islamic television in the Arab Middle East is usually explained as part of a Saudi media empire fueled by neoliberal petro-dollars. This article, by contrast, takes seriously the role ideas played alongside changing political economies in the origins of the world’s first Islamic television channel, Iqraa. Focusing on the intellectual and institutional career of “Islamic media” (al-i’lām al-Islāmī) as a category from the late sixties onwards in Egypt, I argue that Islamic television is part of a broader decolonization struggle involving the modern discipline of mass communication. Pioneering Arab communication scholars mounted a quest for epistemic emancipation in which the question of how to mediate Islam became inextricable from the question of what made media Islamic. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, I show how the idea of Islamic media involved a radical reconceptualization of the Qur'an as mass communication from God and of Islam as a mediatic religion. This positing of an intimate affinity between Islam and media provoked secular skepticism and religious criticism that continue to this day. I conclude by reflecting on how the intellectual history of Islamic media challenges dominant framings of epistemological decolonization as a question of interrogating oppressive universalisms in favor of liberatory pluralisms.

Rudi Matthee's book has several key problems, which I discussed already in my review. Here I will provide evidence for two main issues that I see in the book. These issues are the limited use of Persian primary sources, and a tendency to make very broad claims based on very limited evidence.

This special issue originated in a series of conversations two years ago with IJMES editor Beth Baron regarding the Maghrib's positioning in historical scholarship on the Middle East generally and in our field's flagship journal more specifically. While IJMES has published a number of solo articles devoted to North Africa from a range of disciplines, we concluded that the journal's readers would welcome a corpus of recent work in the historical sciences for the modern period from roughly the late 18th century on. Emphasis upon the modern does not imply that other eras in North Africa's long history have languished for lack of renewed scholarly interest—far from it. The Punic and Roman empires are currently subject to vigorous reinterpretation in order to dismantle dominant colonial and Orientalist interpretations. Moreover, the literature on Muslim Spain and on medieval and early modern North Africa and Iberia, particularly the hotly contested idea of convivencia, has gone from artisanal to industrial production in terms of output. The regionalist frame for the special issue admittedly acknowledges a form of geographically informed “otherness,” but it does so in order to question that distinction. And although the call for papers had invited research whose primary (but by no means sole) focus was the peoples, societies, and states in what we now know as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, regrettably no submissions on Tripolitania/Libya were received.

Predictions of all sorts preceded the June War of 1967, some by the governments themselves, others by newspapermen and academics, many containing a substantial burden of error, others possessing an impressive degree of accuracy and insight. Analysts making these judgments read daily news accounts, noted official government statements, assessed rumors and intelligence leaks, observed levels of military activity, and then tried to estimate whether, when, and with what consequences war might occur.

The course of events in the Middle East since 6 October 1973 has been as surprising and as unexpected as the very events of that day. In retrospect, of course, the surprises of that day have been depreciated and obscured by journalists, scholars, and politicians who have begun to treat the outbreak of the war as part of a chain of natural developments initiated in June 1967, or in May 1948, or in 1897 depending upon their historical bent. But hindsight notwithstanding, no one expected war to break out in the Middle East in 1973. For this reason, the decision to launch a war against Israel must be examined for what it was: a complex calculation encompassing not one or two but a broad range of considerations. The decision to go to war is never a commonplace decision, nor is it one taken lightly or made naturally – not even in the Middle East. Rather, it is a complex phenomenon whose threads must be unraveled in order to be understood.

The Arab oil-based economies in the Middle East are experiencing a period of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity owing to the recent dramatic increases in their oil revenues. The countries, however, have started to encounter considerable difficulty in implementing their overly ambitious development plans. Their economies are exhibiting obvious signs of tension and stress with acute bottlenecks developing in many areas and sectors. These bottlenecks relate basically to their generally narrow resource base, inadequate infrastructure, profound labor shortages especially in skilled and highly trained manpower, and inefficient administrative machinery. The cumulative impact of these factors diminishes the capacity of these countries to absorb their tremendous oil revenues productively.

The archival material in Istanbul, which presents a unique picture of the mechanism of patronage in Islamic architecture, has evoked only sporadic attention from the time of Ahmet Refik's valuable publications of pertinent Ottoman documents. Indisputably, however, the greatest contribution has been that of the late Ömer Lutfi Barkan, whose direction of a team of researchers on the surviving account books for the construction of the mosque of Süleymaniye and its associated complex/külliye (foundation inscription dated 964'1556–1557, though the works almost certainly continued beyond this date) has resulted in the apperarance of a remarkable work, Süleymaniye Camii ve Inşaati, Vols. I, II (Ankara 1972–1979). The documentation covers a period of roughly seven years and gives virtually a day-to-day picture of the sequence of construction and the constitution of the labour force. This is not the only story the documents have to tell, as Barkan first pointed out almost twenty years ago.

This article explores the American role in the Syrian political scene in Cairo toward the end of World War I and in its immediate aftermath. It challenges the absence of the United States and of American actors as primary players in much of the historical writing on the Middle East in this period. It illuminates a neglected episode of regional American diplomacy, argues that the United States was not relegated to the periphery in local debates surrounding the dismemberment of Ottoman Syria, and emphasizes the broader uncertainties that characterized the competition for Mandate territories in the Middle East prior to 1920. In doing so, it takes a close look at the long-forgotten reports of William Yale, the U.S. State Department's “Special Agent” in Cairo in late 1917, and situates them within evolving trends in Syrian-Arab politics. Yale, who surfaced in Egypt after serving with Standard Oil in Palestine, was the key Arabic-speaking American “on the spot” and proved to be an astute if imperfect observer of the diversity of Syrian national sentiment. A survey of his reports allows for a new perspective on Cairo's Syrians and their pragmatic and ideological turn toward the United States as World War I unfolded. Alienated from Britain and France, they looked increasingly to the United States, and the appeal of a postwar American trusteeship over Syria gained currency among émigré intellectuals and aspiring powerbrokers.

This is the first issue of the journal that I edited and sent off to the press, but I did so as part of a team rather than as an individual. I must offer warm thanks to my predecessor as editor, R. Stephen Humphreys, for having done much of the pre-production editing, with his usual attention to detail and search for excellence, and for consulting so closely with me on acceptances. And, of course, I am deeply in his debt for having done such a fine job with the journal for the past five years, leaving to my charge a flourishing enterprise. Thanks, too, are owed to Liz Montana and the others at the Santa Barbara office who shepherded these pieces through the editorial process, as well as to our book-review editors.