The first periodical in Egypt to focus on women as both subject and audience, Al-Fatat (The Young Woman, 1892), heralded the founding by women of many periodicals for women in Egypt. The women's press emerged in a time of intense public debate concerning putative intersections of systemic gender relations and gender ideology with anti-imperialist nationalism: what would constitute “national” strength sufficient to assert, or force, an independent existence based on claims to autonomous nation-state status?1Women writing in the women's press, as well as in the mainstream—or “malestream”—press, shaped the debate over how gender did and should inflect social organization and institutional change.2 Equally, male intellectuals and politicians participated in a rhetoric of persuasion, edification, and ambition. When women and men wrote treatises on what was called the “woman question” (qadi¯yat al-mar[ham]a), articles in the women's press challenged, debated, and refined the points of these treatises. Writers approached that fraught “question” from another direction, too, establishing a thriving industry of conduct literature that fed on translations of European works as well as original works by Egyptian and other Arab writers. Books on how to behave as a proper father, a good mother, a fine son or daughter, or a responsible schoolgoer went through numerous printings for a reading public prepared by various rhetorics of nationalism, theology, and reform to bring this debate into everyday life by following the guides for behavior that such literature—including essays in the women's press—supplied.3

Kuwait, a small city-state on the Persian–Arabian Gulf, has undergone massive political, economic, and social development throughout the 20th century. In spite of this, Kuwaiti rulers continue to cherish what is perhaps an impossible dream: that Kuwait can be simultaneously a “developed” country and a “traditional” tribally organized social formation run by an autocratic ruler. This dream is echoed in equally ambivalent pronouncements and policies regarding women, not only by representatives of the state but also by Kuwaiti citizens. Should Kuwaiti women stand side by side with men in public life as half of a modern society, or should they be secluded, subjected by, and submissive to the men in their lives as local “tradition” demands? In this essay I argue that these two ambivalences are linked. Democratization of Kuwaiti political life has proceeded in fits and starts that parallel the uneven progress of democratization of gender relations in Kuwait. Perhaps in consequence, the politics of both kinds of democratization have become more closely linked.

October and November 1960 were two of the coldest months of the Cold War. Continuing tensions over Berlin and the nuclear balance were exacerbated by crises in Laos, Congo, and—for the first time—France's rebellious départements in Algeria. During Nikita Khrushchev's table-pounding visit to the United Nations, he embraced Belkacem Krim, the foreign minister of the Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne (GPRA). After mugging for the cameras at the Soviet estate in Glen Cove, New York, Khrushchev confirmed that this constituted de facto recognition of the provisional government and pledged all possible aid. Meanwhile, in Beijing, President Ferhat Abbas delivered the GPRA's first formal request for Chinese “volunteers.” U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked his National Security Council “whether such intervention would not mean war.” The council agreed that if communist regulars infiltrated Algeria, the United States would be bound by the North Atlantic Treaty to come to the aid of French President Charles de Gaulle and his beleaguered government. After six years of insurgency, Algeria appeared to be on the brink of becoming a Cold War battleground.1

The literature on Jordan is awash in studies of the history, politics, and possible futures of the Hashemite family. In a polity so closely identified with its ruling dynasty, one would be surprised if this fixation did not prevail. More curious to the anthropologist is the extent to which the scholarly attention lavished on the Hashemites has centered on the rather obvious fact that they rule, but has given less concern to the fact that they rule as a family—that they express their dominance in a patriarchal rhetoric brimming with kinship metaphors, and that they preside over a body politic in which households and their influential heads are of far greater significance than electoral constituencies, public opinion, or (least of all) individual citizens and their rights. When King Hussein described his realm as “the big Jordanian family” (al-usra al-urduniyya al-kubra¯), he invoked an image of community (and authorized a style of political exchange) that made immediate sense to his subjects. In his final years of rule, Hussein artfully consolidated his role as national father figure. His heir, King Abdullah II, who was 37 years old when he inherited the throne in 1999, affects the “older brother” persona appropriate to his age. In announcing Hussein's death, Abdullah II relied heavily on the vocabulary of political kinship his father had standardized: “Hussein was a father, a brother, to each of you, the same as he was my father. . . . Today you are my brothers and sisters, and with you I find sympathy and condolences under God”1

This paper explores the utility of 19th- and 20th-century taxation and court records as tools for mapping the changing social topography of rural Morocco. Little serious work has been done with such records to date, and it is hoped that this paper will encourage more researchers to use this material.1 As a subset of the Moroccan official record, legal and tax records obviously have an epistemological character differing from that of private correspondence and even other administrative records. Yet in the post-modern era, it is obvious that this cannot be simply reduced to the official record providing us with truth while private correspondence is a mixture of fiction and possible truth. All sources need to be scrutinized both in the traditional ways of the historian and, more generally, as reflecting social forces conceived broadly.

It has long been recognized that Iranian silk constituted the principal source of foreign exchange of the Safavid state in the reign of Shah [ayn]Abbas I (1589–1629), and widely appreciated that Armenian merchants of New Julfa, Isfahan, played a critical role in marketing Iranian silk both within the country and abroad. It is all the more remarkable therefore to consider that Ina Baghdiantz McCabe has produced the first major study of the Iranian Armenian community's business organization, their relationship with the Safavid state, and the nature of their involvement in the production and marketing of Iranian silk. Based on Armenian, English, French, and Persian sources, this well-illustrated publication in the University of Pennsylvania's Armenian Texts and Studies series represents an ambitious work of political economy. In it, Baghdiantz McCabe argues forcefully that the Armenians' position reflected the implementation of systematic economic goals by Iranian monarchs; that Armenians during the reign of Shah [ayn]Abbas I became part of the political elite; that Armenian trade, far from being the work of itinerant peddlers, was directed by a highly organized, extremely wealthy commercial elite; and that Armenian merchants operating within the Safavid system were successful in excluding European companies from gaining significant influence in the Iranian silk trade.

The social and economic history of the Qajar period has not received much attention from Iranian or Western scholars. The present book has partly filled this gap by focusing on the biography of a leading Iranian merchant and entrepreneur, Haj Muhammad Hasan Amin al-Zarb. It complements the few existing studies by Issawi (1971), Ashraf (1980), and Natiq (1992) on the economic history of 19th-century Iran. The author shows that the expansion of foreign trade in Iran benefited many native merchants, who successfully used their entrepreneurial skills, experience of the internal market conditions, and family networks to gain an important social and economic place during the 19th century. The Qajar ruler Nasir al-Din Shah encouraged and supported native merchants and provided them with important privileges and concessions. Many leading Iranian merchants, such as Amin al-Zarb, engaged in regional and international trade, set up family firms, and performed important banking functions for the state. Further, they used their capital to invest in manufacturing, mining, communication networks, and education. In the absence of an economic and political infrastructure and state support, their achievements were of limited success. Nevertheless, they left an important legacy of social and political engagement that continued to shape the course of Iranian history in the 20th century.

This book is a translation and edition of the work written by Spandounes in 1538 and published and edited by C. N. Sathas in Documents inédits relatifs à l'histoire de la Grèce au moyen âge, vol. IX (Paris, 1890). Theodore Spandounes, or Spandugnino, was probably born in Venice and died after 1538. He was sent when young to his great-aunt Mara, widow of Murad II, who was then living in eastern Macedonia, and seems to have visited Istanbul in 1503. At the end of 1508, he was exiled from Venice as a suspected Francophile and was in France from 1509. By 1516, he had returned to Venice.

Daniel Panzac's newest book is both refreshing and sad. It is refreshing because, so often, books on Mediterranean commerce tend to paint a picture of the eternal sea, where ships ply their trade in 1700 much as they had in 900. Panzac's book is a story instead of abrupt shifts and the ability of individuals—in this case, Muslim North Africans—to respond to new commercial opportunities by venturing into previously untested waters. It is a sad book because it documents, in great detail, the ultimate exclusion of this same group of people from the ports of southern Europe, particularly Marseilles. This exclusion was one of the reasons that the North Africans returned to piracy. The French, of course, used the extirpation of piracy as one of the main justifications for their invasion and subsequent occupation of Algeria in 1830.

This is an exhaustive study of French economic interests in Egypt, the development of a particular type of capitalism in Egypt, and Franco-British relations in Egypt between the British Occupation in 1882 and World War I. It is based on an extraordinarily wide range of sources from Belgium, Britain, Egypt, and France, including British, Egyptian, and French diplomatic documents and material from a variety of banks and business enterprises, such as the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, Crédit Lyonnais, La Compagnie du Canal de Suez, and La Société Générale. The book was published in 1997, but—and this is the only negative remark I shall make—it is a matter of some regret that (apart from some of the author's own more recent papers) its very wide-ranging bibliography stops somewhere around the end of the 1980s, possibly because the doctorat d'État, of which this book is “une version réduite” (p. xi) was defended in 1991. There is a warmly appreciative preface by Saul's maître, Jacques Thobie, author of Intérêts et impérialisme français dans l'Empire ottoman (1895–1914), and Saul expresses his own debt to Thobie and other French historians of overseas investments in Morocco, Russia, and Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Allain, Girault, Guillen, Poidevin).

Kate Fleet is curator of the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Newnham College, Cambridge. Her book is a study of trade between Genoa and Asia Minor from about 1300 to shortly after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, a time period corresponding to commercial strength of Genoa and the development of the Ottoman state toward empire. Citing the scarcity of Turkish sources, other than chronological lists, Fleet depends heavily on Western materials, particularly notary deeds in the Genoese archives and published primary sources such as Balducci Pegolotti's La practica della mercatura. She also includes, however, some Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources.

In Women and Men in Late Eighteenth-Century Egypt, the historian Afaf Marsot has set for herself the task of shattering myths about Egyptian history and the manner in which it is written.

Elisabeth Özdalga's book is an important introduction to one of the issues that has been front-page news in Turkey since the 1980s. The most visible and controversial sign of the increasing participation in public discourse of Islamic revivalists has been the marked increase in numbers of women in urban spaces and institutions who wear the particular form of dress called tessetür, a public symbol of a personal commitment to a certain form of Islamic values. Özdalga's focus is timely and of interest to both a Turkish audience and a Western one, although it speaks mainly to the latter. The banning of the Islamist Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) from Turkish politics since the publication of the book, as well as the internationally noted furor surrounding the election to, and subsequent dismissal of, a headscarf-wearing woman in Parliament, show that what the author calls Turkey's “large-scale attempt to integrate Islam within the institutions of a modern, liberal democratic polity” (p. viii) continues to be a vitally important and controversial subject. Her book attends both to the symbolic power and legal status of women's clothing in public debate and to women's actual participation in the re-formations of public and private definitions of citizenship.

Scholars often acknowledge reproductive behavior as a core issue in Israeli politics but they seldom examine how public policies affect family size. Israel has designed no official government fertility program, but the country's leaders are nevertheless obsessed with Jewish natality. Israeli women are bombarded with regulations affecting access to contraceptives and abortion procedures and with all sorts of unsubtle massages about the importance of mothering as a factor in the state's continuing vitality and fulfilling its national purpose. Jacqueline Portugese explains Israel's ongoing efforts to encourage a high Jewish birthrate by focusing a feminist lens on public discourse, popular culture, and particular policies, all of which, she argues, have a highly pernicious impact on women. Despite the differences in feminist perspectives on the issue of fertility, they share a critical stance toward state regulation of the family, and all aid Portugese's narrative in uncovering and explaining the large repertoire of relatively intrusive regulatory mechanisms at the disposal of the government. The special insight of Fertility in Israel lies in its clarifications of the connections between seemingly benign welfare benefits and tax incentives and denying women autonomy with regard to the decision to bear children.

Vincent Cornell's Realm of the Saint is a masterly work, indisputably authoritative, the result of more than twenty years of research on Sufism in Morocco and Al-Andalus. Drawing on a critical reading of a vast array of textual sources, including hagiographies, histories, didactic treatises, devotional works, and poetry, this book brings to light material that has been virtually untouched in academic studies on Moroccan Sufism. As Cornell points out, Morocco has become a paradigm for the anthropological analysis of Sufism, but the vast archival resources of Morocco had been hitherto largely untouched by academicians. Through detailed analysis of the lives of many Sufi saints as presented in hagiographical literature, exploring both the ideological and sociological dimensions of sainthood in the Moroccan context, he convincingly argues that the “doctor” versus “saint” topos that prevails in the anthropological literature does not do justice to the reality of pre-modern Moroccan Sufism. He also deconstructs the centrality of “maraboutism” and rurality in Moroccan Sufism. Cornell compares his findings with studies of saints in Europe by scholars such as Peter Brown and Thomas Heffernan, as well as with the Weberian theories of charismatic leadership that have prevailed among social scientists, displaying an extraordinary range of competence in the literature of several academic disciplines. It is a rarity to find a scholar of Cornell's deep understanding of Arabic and Islamic tradition who also places his research within the broader context of the study of religion. Nevertheless, scholars outside Islamic studies are unlikely to read this book because of its length, excessive detail, and frequent use of Arabic terms, despite the presence of a glossary of technical terms at the end of the book.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.