Susan Slyomovics's Object of Memory explores the ways in which Arabs and Jews (primarily Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews) narrate the Palestinian village, focusing on the pre-1948 Palestinian village of Ein Houd, located in the Carmel Mountains south of the city of Haifa. The Palestinian inhabitants of Ein Houd were displaced during the 1948 war and prevented by the Israeli government from returning to their homes there. Most of them became internal refugees, designated “present absentees” under Israeli law. Others became refugees in surrounding Arab states and in the part of Palestine that became known as the West Bank. Their properties were confiscated by Israel under the Absentee Property Law.

In this original and intriguing study, Jonathan Katz explores and analyzes the dream diary of a little-known 15th-century North African Sufi saint (wali¯), Muhammad al-Zawawi of Bijaya (modern Bougie, Algeria). Over a ten-year period (1447–57), al-Zawawi kept a nearly complete diary of his dream encounters with the Prophet Muhammad. Consisting of 109 entries, al-Zawawi's Tu[h dot under]fat al-na¯[z dot under]ir wa-nuzhat al-mana¯zir traces his visionary career across North Africa from Bijaya to Cairo and back.

The Kurdish question has remained one of the most destabilizing issues for modern Turkey. Despite decades of military campaigns in the southeast and the existence of a continuing state of emergency in that region of Turkey for more than a decade, various Turkish governments have yet to resolve their Kurdish dilemma in a satisfactory way. According to the Turkish Association for Human Rights, some 3 million Kurds have been driven from their villages by the Turkish army, and some 3,000 Kurdish villages have been evacuated (ethnically cleansed) over the past fourteen years. In addition to military campaigns in Turkey's southeast, disappearances, summary trials, and other forms of political repression have turned the region into a permanent war zone.

The Israel connection whose impact on American Jews David Mittelberg examines is that engendered by a visit to Israel by an American Jew, not that of any special relationship between the nation-state of Israel and of the United States. The book's conclusions, then, are not offered with an eye toward Israeli or American foreign policy. Instead, they are offered as a possible contribution to those “formulating strategies and allocating resources which will have an impact on Jewish education and community survival” (p. 2) in the United States. Mittelberg advises those engaged in such activities that the survival of an American Jewish identity requires not only a religious component, but also an ethnic one based in a Jewish community. Moreover, that community “must choose to exist not mainly for the sake of philanthropic, social welfare, and political activities, but as an end unto itself [whose] boundaries include all of Jewish history and Jewish peoplehood” (p. 133).

The principal focus of Zeev Sternhell's screed is Labor Zionism, although like other Israeli so-called new historians, he touches on relations with the country's Arabs, tensions between the Ashkenazi elite and Sephardi under-class, the Yishuv and the Holocaust, and attitudes toward and perceptions of Diaspora Jewry. The author, whose professional field has been European history, mainly France and Italy, was motivated to undertake this study by “serious doubts” (p. ix) about the generally accepted ideas sanctioned by Israeli historiography and social science. Using his skills as a professional historian, he probed Zionist and Israeli government archives and reread original texts to compare what he perceived as social and political realities with the ideology guiding policies. Sternhell is critical of traditional Israeli historiography because of the damage it has caused by separating Jewish history from general history. The consequences, he asserts, are “truly appalling” (p. x), resulting in paralysis of any real critical sense and perpetuation of “myths flattering to Israel's collective identity” (p. x). This has led many historians of Zionism “to lock themselves up in an intellectual ghetto” (p. x), leading to ignorance and emotional blindness.

The objective of Scott Pegg's book is to examine the role of the de facto state in the international system. The book begins with a description of quasi-states, entities defined as ineffective states that possess internationally recognized sovereignty as indicated by membership in the United Nations. The de facto state, by contrast, is a political movement that possesses substantial control over a specified territory and population but lacks recognition of its sovereignty by the international community. As expressed by Pegg, “The quasi-state is legitimate no matter how ineffective it is. . . . The de facto state, on the other hand, is a functioning reality that is denied legitimacy by the rest of international society” (p. 5).

This book focuses on the cultural dimensions of the Central Asian form of an Islamic modernist movement, Jadidism, which arose among several groups of Muslims of the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Politics was not an option for the Jadidists until the final years of the czarist monarchy and the early revolutionary period, so the author relegates that aspect of the movement to the later chapters. To the extent that involvement in politics in Russia became possible, Central Asian Jadidists sought to participate, not to pursue either isolationism or separatism. According to the author, Russian officials were the ones who mistakenly assumed that Jadidism posed a separatist threat; subsequent generations of scholars misperceived the movement through the lens of those fears. The author argues that culture is a significant dimension of the movement in its own right. It mattered in Central Asia both in the rivalry between the Jadidists and traditionalists for leadership of the region's Muslims and as a way for educated Muslims to preserve their distinctiveness within the Russian Empire.

Martin Sicker's book is an account of the emergence of Jewish nationalism centered on Palestine during the century prior to the establishment of the British Mandate. It is a tertiary source, written mostly on the basis of published secondary sources. Hence, it offers no new material or interpretations for specialists to consider. The text is clean, unencumbered by a surfeit of notes, and it is easy to grasp. The major audience, in addition to students, would appear to be policy-makers and public-affairs professionals who need a concisely presented and easily digestible historical background study.

This work seeks to portray the reality of the “Maghribi woman” (the Maghrib of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) using a gender-studies approach. It therefore has both the advantages and disadvantages of such an approach: its multidisciplinarity allows each contribution to enrich the others by analyzing women in turn through their legal status and economic and political role. At the same time, however, this exclusive focus on women at times overlooks important aspects of women's social relations with their broader environment.

In a modest but original contribution to the literature on the Islamist movement in the West Bank and Gaza, Andrea Nüsse explores the ideology of the key player in this movement: Hamas. Nüsse analyzes Hamas's system of thought, particularly how it frames its struggle against Israel; the arguments it employs to oppose the peace process; and its use of Qur[ham]anic exegeses to underpin its militant, or jihadist, stance. The author avoids such issues as the structure of the organization and the social base of its constituency, which have been explored elsewhere. Instead, she relies on primary material to address the goals, strategy, ideological foundations, self-image, and perceived enemies of the movement. In addition to these themes, the author presents Hamas's perspective on contemporary historical events and developments, including the Gulf War of 1990–91, the mass deportation of Islamists to South Lebanon in 1992, and the Hebron massacre of 1994. The aim throughout the book is to shed light on an under-studied aspect of the movement, leaving it up to the reader to seek out other writings that give a more comprehensive analysis.

First published in 1976 under the same title by Bibliotheca Islamica (Minneapolis and Chicago) but with the additional subtitle, “A Study in 15th/9th Century Turko–Iranian Politics,” this book is a revised and expanded version of the author's revised doctoral dissertation (Princeton University, 1974).

This work is a careful examination of the punishment narratives in the Qur[ham]an, focusing on the “triangular drama” among God, Muhammad (along with the believers), and the unbelievers. Expanding the work of Horovitz, Bell, and others, Marshall's analysis builds on the observation that Qur[ham]anic narratives concerning earlier prophetic figures often reflect and comment on, more or less directly, the contemporary situation of the Prophet Muhammad. Many passages portray Noah, Hud, Salih, and others addressing their peoples in their capacity as messengers of God. They are rebuked and meet with little success in their efforts to convince the unbelievers of their misguidance and to convert them to worship of the one true God. They then warn the unbelievers of the dire punishment that awaits them should they insist on refusing to believe, but to no avail. God inflicts the threatened punishment upon the unrepentant peoples, annihilating them in a cataclysmic event: the flood in the case of Noah's people; a raging wind in the case of [ayn]Ad, the people of Hud; a shower of stones in the case of Lot's people; and so on. These narratives portray the relationship between the messengers and their recalcitrant audiences in some detail and can therefore serve as the basis for a fruitful analysis of the relationship between Muhammad and the unbelievers among his people, the Quraysh.

The importance of Qutb al-Din Musa al-Yunini's (d. 726/1326) Dhayl Mir[ham]at al-Zaman has long been recognized by historians of the medieval Islamic world. In this book, Li Guo places this author and his work in the context of early 14th-century Mamluk Syrian intellectual developments and provides both a translation (vol. 1) and an edition of the Arabic text (vol. 2) for the five-year period 1297–1302. The result is a valuable work of historiography and philology.

This is the slyest, and therefore smartest, assessment of Islamic fundamentalism currently available. The author, a prolific Lebanese political theorist, has offered in this, his fourth monograph on the subject, a well-argued, highly original thesis. Moussalli asks one basic question: does Islamic fundamentalism have a philosophical basis? “Yes, it does,” he replies, “but it is not the same basis for all Islamic fundamentalists.” He then proceeds to demonstrate how particular Islamic fundamentalist theorists have addressed issues such as ideology and knowledge, society and politics, from their own philosophical perspective. The argument is markedly tilted toward politics, as each of the six chapters examines either a facet of political philosophy or the discourse of a particular theorist on the Islamic state. The first three chapters are framed as general overviews, first of the fundamentalism–modernism dyad, then of the epistemological divide between divine revelation and human reason, and finally of the discursive dichotomy between the Islamic state and democratic pluralism. The next three chapters shift to dominant theorists, the three “heroes” of Islamist ideology. Chapter 4 examines Hasan al-Banna on the Islamic state; Chapter 5, Sayyid Qutb. Chapter 6 takes up the most prominent current Islamist: Hasan al-Turabi. Not since Hamid Enayat's Modern Islamic Political Thought (Texas, 1982) has any scholar made such a comprehensive effort to trace the patterns of similarity—and the evidence of conflict and disagreement—among the major ideologues of Islamic fundamentalism.

It is testimony to the sad state of the study of economics in the Middle East that a work such as The Political Economy of Middle East Peace: The Impact of Competing Trade Agendas, edited by J. W. Wright, Jr., could be produced. This collection of essays attempts to shed light on the relationship between international economic relations and the peace process. The sloppy scholarship included in this volume would be inexcusable when looking at any other region, but it appears to be acceptable when analyzing Middle Eastern economies. Although this description is not characteristic of all of the essays in the volume, it diminishes the overall quality of this work to such a degree that it detracts from the some of the more enlightening and important papers that are included. For example, Laura Drake's careful examination of “A New Middle East Order” in the first chapter lays out the potential stumbling blocks and hurdles as the process of normalization between Arab states and Israel continues. Unfortunately, the next chapter, by Wright, primarily examines the same topic but almost completely ignores relevant data and scholarship critical to his thesis. While some chapters examine key issues and analyze nuances in the political economy of the Middle East peace process, this uneven and incongruous group of essays is of little value to policy-makers, academics, or students of Middle Eastern political economy.

In the Preface, Fadwa El Guindi states that her book is a study “born out of fieldwork on the contemporary Islamic movement” and represents “an original synthesis of ethnography, history, Qur[ham]anic text, Hadith, and Tafsir.” But the book is also exhortatory. In a preliminary sentence that takes the place of a dedication, El Guindi expresses the hope her book will reach those who have made the decision to veil, those who have refused, those who have always veiled, and those who have never veiled. It is clear that El Guindi's main audience is Muslim women and men, whom she invites to understand the religious, political, and sociological origins of their current stances for or against veiling. Yet the non-Muslim reader, who feels graciously invited into the audience to observe and learn, easily understands her arguments.

The Muslim woman—secluded, oppressed, and either longing for liberation or ignorant in her false consciousness—has been an enduring topos in the Western imagination since the spread of Islam. Right? Wrong. Mohja Kahf explains that in fact “the question of the liberty, or lack thereof, of the Muslim woman” does not appear until around the 17th century, and the image of the subjugated Muslim woman, with its trappings of harems and veils, does not reach full fruition until the 18th and 19th centuries. If we go back to the 8th century, even after the Muslims had conquered Spain and part of France, there was a lack of European curiosity about Muslims and a tendency to see them as just another enemy who was not particularly different from the pagans of Europe. Orientalism and its gendered images came much later and were based on and helped to justify Western domination over the East, especially during the rise and heyday of colonialism. What, then, was the European image of the Orient—in particular, of Muslim women—during the many centuries before Orientalism, when the Muslim world was as powerful as, or even more powerful than, Europe? Kahf answers this question by introducing us to a series of fictional Muslim women from European literature of the Middle Ages through the late Romantic period.

This much-needed historical survey of the Sufi tradition brings together a great deal of specialized literature, especially the European scholarship that is often ignored in North America. The first eight chapters of the book discuss the beginnings of the tradition, early figures, gradual institutionalization, poetical and metaphysical expressions, and the foundations of the great tariqahs. Chapter 9 provides an overview of the later history of the tariqahs on a regional basis, in most cases coming into the 20th century. Chapter 10 discusses major concepts and practices. Given Knysh's keen awareness that the Sufi tradition cannot be isolated from the Islamic tradition as a whole, surprisingly little attention is paid to the roots of Sufism in the Qur[ham]an and the hadith. Then again, the survey is necessarily selective and aims only to highlight major figures and movements. Any serious attempt to be comprehensive would have given us a multi-volume study. Every specialist will be disappointed at the failure to discuss or at least mention certain figures, movements, themes, or topics.

In this book Geert Jan van Gelder, Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford, studies how Arab–Islamic culinary culture was represented in Arabic literature. He thus contributes to our knowledge of both Arabic literature and, indirectly, Arab–Islamic gastronomy and cookery. Although representations of food as such are not the finest aspects of Arabic literature, and the preparation and consumption of food are not the finest aspects of Arab–Islamic civilization, his perspective throws light on little-studied facets of Arab–Islamic culture that are worth noting.

The fifteen-year civil war in Lebanon and its destructive social effects have called for soul-searching by many Lebanese. Hassan Diab explores the regional and international economic developments that caused political instability and led to episodes of civil strife and social upheaval in Lebanon from the late Ottoman period until recent times. Further, Diab promises to assess the revival of Beirut's past through the governmental project of Rafiq Hariri known as Horizon 2000, and the ramifications of reconstructing downtown Beirut in the aftermath of the civil war. Diab raises a number of legitimate concerns about the validity and necessity of these projects and the extent to which they can prevent the eruption of a civil war in the future.