Klaus Schippmann, who teaches archaeology at the University of Göttingen, has participated in several archaeological excavations in southern Arabia. As he states in the Introduction to the book, “very little is known on the subject” of the history of ancient southern Arabia, and he outlines the reasons for this. His aim is to present to a broad audience, including Orientalists, historians of ancient history not concerned primarily with this region, archaeology students, and the general reader, “a consolidated overview of the current state of knowledge” on topics related to the history and culture of South Arabia. The book was originally published in German in 1998; corrections and updating were introduced in the English edition.

The historiography of Muslim communities under Russian domination, whether czarist Russian or Soviet Russian, has until now been presented with a strongly modernist and nationalist focus. The social context created by Islamic belief and the institutions to which it gave rise have rarely been studied except as a foil for the promotion of nationalist, Russocentric, or “modernist” ideologies. The present work is therefore an important corrective. It is a richly detailed analysis of several distinct yet connected communities located just to the east of the Volga River. The book focuses on an agricultural region marked by two north–south river basins, about twenty to thirty miles apart, and roughly parallel to the Volga, about 100 miles to the west. In particular, the work focuses on a group of villages along a major tributary (the Altata River) of one of the rivers, the Bol'shoi Uzen. In this area, Muslims were a distinct minority in the period covered by the study. The principal source for the study is a local history of these communities, the Tawārīkh-i Ālṭī Ātā, written in 1909 and 1910. Its authors were father and son, Muhammad Fatih and Muhammad al-Ilmini. Ilmin was a village in the township of Osinov Gai (also known as Iske Uzen) where the Altata River emptied into the Bol'shoi Uzen. Although the focus of the Tawārīkh-i Ālṭī Ātā is the township and four other villages in it, the al-Ilminis range over the whole watershed of the twin Bol'shoi and Malyi Uzen Rivers, thus including communities in three large administrative districts (uezdy)—Novouzensk, the Ural Cossack Horde, and the Kazakh Inner Horde—in all, an area of about 28,000 square miles located today in far western Kazakhstan.

Anthony Shay's Choreographic Politics fills an important gap in the research of the history of folk dancing, a gap opened by the controversial status of “state folk dance ensembles,” whose performances have often been neglected or despised by folklorists and dance scholars. Staged folk dances have always charmed audiences with the energy they embed in their performances but they have also puzzled them, because it is clear that they are more of a “representation” than a true reflection of a locality's reality. The analysis of “state folk dance ensembles,” then, moves on the edges of folklore and “fake lore,” the art of dance and the ethnography of dance. Choreographic Politics touches on this very sense of illusion and disillusion, focusing on the politics of state folk dance ensembles, a cultural product of the post-war era.

This book deals with the relationship between the Islamic clergy, or ulema, and the Durrani monarch Amanullah who ruled in Afghanistan from 1919 to 1929. The author characterizes Amanullah as a devout Muslim who repelled British influence in Afghanistan and espoused a far-reaching modernization agenda for the country. The narrative is designed to explain why Amanullah lost the support of the ulema who initially backed his reforms but then led a rebellion that ended his reign. He argues that high-ranking clergy in Kabul supported Amanullah and his policies, but lower-ranking clergy active in the tribal hinterland did not. Nawid brings new data to bear on a long-standing and prominent debate about Amanullah's ill-fated reform program.

In one of the great understatements about the literature of Arabian travel and exploration, T. E. Lawrence said that it is not easy to write about Charles M. Doughty. Every one of the famous travelers in Arabia—whether Burton, Palgrave, Doughty, or the Blunts in the 19th century or Bell, Lawrence, Philby, or Thesiger in the 20th—presents some complex problems, but Doughty seems to combine them all. His background, his psyche, his conduct during his voyage, his later life, and above all his masterpiece, Travels in Arabia Deserta, are filled with enigmas and ambiguities.

Devin Stewart has written a thoroughly researched and closely argued analysis of how Twelver Shiעi legal theory developed in response to the institutionalization of Sunni law. He contends that the origins and history of Twelver Shiעi law, sparked by the vacuum in authority brought about by the Occultation of the twelfth imam, was motivated by the need to communicate and debate with Sunni jurists.

This is a successor volume to the author's Egypt during the Nasser Years. Like its predecessor, it is based heavily on interviews with participants in the tumultuous events of those years. Quotations from those interviews are sprinkled throughout the text, giving it a firsthand quality that is rare in academic works. Indeed, the author has succeeded brilliantly in his stated goal to write an “accessible” book, with “theorizing and the use of political science concepts (kept) to a minimum” (p. ix). Although passing mention is made of Gramsci's notion of hegemony, readers are referred to Beattie's volume on Nasser if they are interested in its elaboration. The text is organized chronologically, and although it may illustrate the absence of Gramscian hegemony—hence, the political failure of the Free Officers—the reader is left to decide that for himself or herself and whether and in what ways the absence of “hegemony” might be important. It is, in sum, a highly informed, well-written political history and biography of the Sadat era.

In 1669, after twenty-four years of devastating war, Venice surrendered the island of Crete to the Ottoman Turks. As a Venetian commander described it, Crete was “the most beautiful crown to adorn the head of the Most Serene Republic” (p. 4). It was a grievous loss for Venice, which did not resign itself to the loss of its beautiful crown for another fifty years, until the end of the last Ottoman–Venetian war in 1718. The period of early Ottoman rule between 1669 and 1718 is the subject of Molly Greene's excellent study. Her emphasis throughout is on multiple identities, mixed narratives, hybrid solutions, cross-cutting allegiances, and historical continuity. Along with historians such as Leslie Pierce and Jane Hathaway, she rejects the model of Ottoman decline, styling it a “meat-grinder” (p. 20) of a thesis that focuses on a weak sultanate and ignores both the complexity and vitality of Ottoman imperial governance. She also rejects the notion that the transition from Venetian to Ottoman control in Crete marked a sharp dividing line, an event that helped wring the ambiguity out of the Mediterranean world (p. 5).

The topic of master–servant and patron–client relationships is not new to the multi-disciplinary literature on Morocco. What distinguishes this work from the others are the context and approach as well as the societal positions of the two parties to this relationship. In this case, the focus is on two social categories: the marginal and subordinate haratin (sing. hartani) and the shurfa (sing. sharīf), or religious elite, in an oasis in the Dra Valley in the south.

Alon Liel, Israel's former representative in Ankara and a former director-general of Israel's Foreign Ministry, provides an evaluation of Turkey's relations with the Arab world, Iran, and Israel from an Israeli perspective. Thus, the book is primarily intended for an Israeli audience. The book is divided into three sections, which are further subdivided into ten chapters. There is also an introductory chapter, but there is no concluding chapter.

In any monarchy, court gossip is the coin of the realm. Every observer of Saudi Arabia has his or her own theories of who is up and who is down, who is joining with whom and who has betrayed former allies, and who is with America and who is against America among the princes of the al-Saעud. Like most gossip, most court gossip is wrong. The safe rule regarding the family politics of the al-Saעud is that “those who know do not talk, and those who talk do not know.” Joseph Kechichian has therefore tackled the hardest question there is in the analysis of Saudi Arabian politics, and does as good a job as any outsider can hope to do. While those who talk usually do not know, Kechichian has talked to some who do know, including many members of the ruling family. His conclusions about future successions in Saudi Arabia, of necessity are speculative, but they are well informed.

Iran's monarchs have had a special place in the historiography of that country. Before the 1977–79 Iranian Revolution, Iranian and non–Iranian historians devoted hundreds of pages to the lives, habits, courtly life, wars, and customs of Iran's kings, from the ancient Archaemenians to the recent Pahlavis. Following the recent revolution, a spate of works on the late Muhammad Reza Shah filled the bookshelves. Moreover, during the past decade, researchers revived earlier passions for the Safavid family, their financial, commercial, and agricultural practices, foreign policies, and historiography in both article and book form.

In Preparation for a Revolution, M. Şükrü Hanioğlu has brought together extensive research into the working of the Young Turk political-opposition movements against the rule of Sultan Abdulhamid II to create a work that is likely to become a benchmark for historians of late Ottoman history. Moreover, the author has meticulously mapped out the path by which modern intellectual idealism was transformed into actual political transition—a progression largely under-studied for the Ottoman state.

The transition from a state-controlled economy to a market-ruled one always introduces a variety of challenges. These include ideological, political, and social resistance to change, a shortage of resources, structural inflexibility of the production system, and a weak or non-existent private sector. Algeria's attempt at change, which began in the early 1980s, faced all of these challenges—and more. Since the 1980s, the country has been suffering from a serious and multi-faceted crisis, and the political violence that erupted in the early 1990s forestalled economic recovery and contributed to the repeated postponement of substantive reforms. Meanwhile, all of the country's non-hydrocarbon sectors experienced negative growth, and a deep social crisis wiped out most of the progress made in human development since the 1970s.

This fine book provides the first comprehensive account of the Indian merchant communities that arose in Central Asia in the 16th century and continued to occupy an important niche in the local economy until the turn of the 20th century. The subject of India's relations with Central Asia and Russia has often been addressed, but it has usually fallen afoul of methodological and linguistic boundaries that divide the historiographies of the two regions. This is the first work that is equally at home in both Indian and Central Asian history. Levi's greatest contribution is to bring Central Asian sources to bear fully on his argument. He uses Persian-language narrative and documentary sources from Central Asia (housed in the manuscript collections of the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent) and the state archives of Uzbekistan to glean useful new information about life in the diaspora and the activities of its members. He backs these up with accounts of European travelers, which he has mined with great thoroughness for all references to Indian merchants.

A Trade Like Any Other explores the status of freelance women singers and dancers in Egypt. In her Introduction, Nieuwkerk states the twofold goal of her book: to de-exoticize the entertainment trade and to generate more sympathy for male and female entertainers among Egyptians and Westerners alike.

This is a welcome addition to the literature on American foreign policy, the Cyprus crisis of 1974, and the implications the crisis had for American politics and the triangle of American–Greek–Turkish relations. It provides an in-depth analysis of the events that led to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in July 1974 and examines how the Watergate scandal prevented the United States from playing a constructive role in the eastern Mediterranean. The author argues that, while the White House was virtually paralyzed and President Richard Nixon was preoccupied with his struggle to stay in power, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger mishandled the Cyprus crisis. Ioannides's thesis is that the absence of presidential leadership and authority affected the conduct of foreign policy, with grave consequences for U.S. interests in the region.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union has had far-reaching consequences for the character of the international political system, the full impact of which has not yet become totally clear. The systemic changes triggered by the Soviet Union's collapse have been felt globally, but the region that once formed part of the union and its immediate and near neighbors have felt their effect most strongly.

Almost immediately, any visitor to Cairo becomes aware of the city's pollution—the bits of organic and inorganic garbage in the gutters, the noxious exhaust of aging mopeds and buses, the discolored canal water, and the unnatural haze that hangs over rooftops. Surely, Egyptians share this awareness. For the authors of People and Pollution: Cultural Constructions and Social Action in Egypt, however, “the issue is not whether there is an environmental awareness in Egypt, but what the nature of that awareness is, how it varies from one setting to another, and above all where it leads” (p. 1).

Monty Noam Penkower has written a detailed and documented account of the diplomatic relations of American, British, and Palestine-based Zionists with the American and British governments from 1939 to 1945. His theme is that these governments showed a callous disregard for the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust because they refused free immigration into Palestine. The author's scholarship is sound in terms of the people and diplomacy with which he deals. The probable audience for the book is scholars and researchers who are interested in the history of the Holocaust and the response to it by both the Allied powers and Zionist leaders, as well as those interested in the origins of the Israeli state. However, the events covered in this work are explicitly tied to Palestine and its fate, and in that regard the author has produced only a “half history.” Penkower's treatment of Palestine is incomplete because the subject of the Palestinian Arabs, who bear the consequences of the negotiations, planning, and conspiring that the work details are mentioned only in passing and then almost always in negative terms. It is as if one were to write the history of Nazi planning for the Holocaust and only rarely and disapprovingly mention Jews.