In his recent article, “Secularizing Anatolia Tick by Tick: Clock Towers in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic,” Mehmet Bengü Uluengin makes a significant contribution to our understanding of late Ottoman and early republican clock towers. Uluengin shows that Ottoman clock towers carried “complex and seemingly contradictory layering of meanings” (p. 31). These buildings were at times associated with Christianity and with European power but were also seen as modern extensions of the Islamic institution of the muvakkit (timekeeper) or as symbols of the Ottoman government and its modernizing project. The cultural meanings associated with clock towers were fluid, concludes Uluengin, and it was the context that determined the way clock towers were interpreted.

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.

I thank Professor Nikki R. Keddie for her constructive critique and am using this opportunity to clarify a few points. First, let me reiterate that I do not consider statist approaches to be “wrong,” but “one-sided,” and that I am not calling for their disposal but for “trying out new sources and perspectives then fusing them with state-centered perspectives into a broader panorama of Pahlavi Iran” (pp. 38–39). I see neither “sins” nor “an ongoing struggle between ‘statists’ and ‘antistatists.’” Such language would undercut a productive debate now and disregard the fact that in the long run—as some excesses of the cultural turn in the 1980s and many historians' subsequent search for new historiographic syntheses demonstrate—the pendulum always swings back.

The price of $63.00 was erroneously assigned to this book, which is not commercially available. The Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Crete has distributed it free of charge to academic libraries and individual scholars. Please also note that the book is a paperback, not cloth.

Arabic instruction in Israel's Jewish sector fails to meet the desires and expectations of educators and other stakeholders. Too few study Arabic, and their subsequent command of the language is poor. This is notwithstanding the high national priority that is accorded to Arabic instruction. The article reviews the educational policies and practices that produce this result and the dynamics that make them intractable. Arabic instruction is approached as a social field of practice. The sectarian nature of Zionism—especially the de-Arabization of Jews and the pervasive segregation between Jews and Arabs—proves decisive, although contradictory and unpredictable, in shaping the field. This influence is mediated through the practice of such stakeholders as Military Intelligence, universities, teachers, parents, pupils, and principals. Also crucial are the different economic and cultural valuations of languages, the bureaucratic/institutional structure of the field, and the effects of the very structure of the Arabic language.

In Egypt, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, older, fragmented, and more localized forms of identity were rapidly replaced with new alternative concepts of community, which for the first time had the capacity to collectively encompass the majority of Egyptians. This article is about the growth of Egyptian national identity from 1908 until 1918. It highlights the importance of previously neglected colloquial Egyptian sources—especially recorded music and vaudeville—in examining modern Egyptian history. Through the lens of colloquial mass culture, the study traces the development of collective Egyptian identity during the first quarter of the 20th century. This article also engages with some of the theories of nationalism and tests their applicability to Egypt. Finally, it introduces the concept of “media-capitalism” in an effort to expand the historical analysis of nationalism beyond print.

Scholars have long struggled with various and even conflicting historical narratives and definitions of Salafism (al-salafiyya), but a closer look at the history of the concept itself—rather than of the ideas for which it stands—goes a long way toward explaining the perennial confusion that has typified this religious orientation. This article examines the production of knowledge about Salafism as a conceptual construct and a typological category. It argues that although Salafi epithets have existed since the medieval period, they did not start referring to a religious concept known as salafiyya until the 1920s. By the same token, the widely accepted idea that salafiyya referred to an Islamic modernist movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is a historical fiction that originates with Louis Massignon. The history of Cairo's Salafiyya Press and Bookstore, however, sheds important light on the process by which the construction of Salafism took place.