Fadwa Tuqan, Assia Djebar, and Latifa al-Zayyat are three Arab women who are well known for their literary and artistic creativity, as well as for their political activism. Each has written at least one autobiographical work charting her struggles in the personal, political, and literary arenas, and each has chosen to express these struggles in terms of finding a voice that resists silence but also acknowledges that silence is a form of resistance.1 In writing their autobiographical works, these women are interested in creating not simply a female autobiographical tradition but, rather, a tradition that specifically does credit to their need to authorize their voices without posing as authorities from above, to write narratives that are simultaneously antiauthoritarian and authoritative, and to do so by speaking for and on behalf of others without appropriating them or subsuming them into their own agendas. Their autobiographical works are thus marked, and ultimately enriched, by tension, hesitation, and anxiety, particularly regarding their own power and authority as authors. This hesitation enables them to express collective sorrows and dreams in this seemingly most individualistic of genres.2

This study undertakes an examination of Lebanese women's fiction over the past forty years or so. For many women, the urban environment is an escape from the restrictive traditional community that is closely aligned with a rural mentality. Many of these writers tend to see the city in stark contrast to the country, which, in their eyes represents restraining cultural values. If in some cases the city and the country are represented as real, tangible places, the majority of women tend to view them as “states of mind and feeling”1 or as representations. Some female writers see the city and the village in ontological opposition between repression and freedom, backwardness and progress, and past and present—or, as Raymond Williams refers to it, “of consciousness with ignorance; of vitality with routine; of the present and actual with the past or the lost.”2 Nevertheless, it is clear that in many cases the city incorporates and embraces both the traditional and modern patterns, because “an old order, a ‘traditional' society, keeps appearing, reappearing, at bewilderingly various dates.”3 Far from viewing themselves as alienated and degraded beings in the corrupt and hellish city4 or the modern wasteland, women see the nurturing city as a symbol of well-being, independence, and freedom from shackles. Indeed, they become so immersed in city life that, for some of them, there is “little reality in any other mode of life.”5 The city gives them the opportunity to escape the narrow confines of home, family, and stifling traditions that have relegated them to a corner and associated them with a nostalgic past. Accordingly, for many of them, the city has become, as Williams puts it, “the physical embodiment of a decisive modern consciousness,”6 a place consistently in flux and motion7 where women attempt to keep the ever-haunting past at bay and reveal a thrust for change and for experience and knowledge that they try to replenish in the city.

From 1924 to 1928, authorities of the British Mandate in Transjordan expended considerable energy trying to prove that the extensive lands on the Transjordanian side of the Ghawr (Jordan River Valley) known as Ghawr Abi עUbayda were not waqf but mīrī lands, as several parties had claimed over the years.1 British authorities established both an investigative commission and a special court to rule on the question as part of their wider attempt to regulate land matters in the new Emirate of Transjordan. These legal remedies succeeded not because the British resorted to unilateral colonial fiat but because of their strict accordance with Ottoman law, to the detriment of local custom regarding land usage. By enforcing these laws through the decisions of the commission and the court, the British hoped to forestall the disposal of land for what they considered partisan political purposes, thus averting political unrest and a loss of revenue.

Going back to the early beginnings of democracy in Jordan in the [1950s], the Jordanian people, particularly the youth and the activist forces, were very enthusiastic about political parties, despite the fact that the level of political awareness then was not as advanced as it is now. Conditions on the domestic, Pan-Arab, and international levels were encouraging. Pan-Arabism was on the rise. There were goals for the Arabs to achieve, and there was a consensus that it was feasible to achieve those goals. Political parties at that time had a vast popular base. They were large and effective due to the large-scale popular participation in these parties. The situation at present is the opposite. When political parties were born again, they looked as if they were parties in the stage of formation.

One of the most important lessons development agencies claim to have learned over the past decades is that the absence of local participation at various stages of project planning and implementation leads to what at best can be termed “inferior results.”1 The conclusion that community participation is necessary (if not sufficient) for project success has developed concomitantly with the belief in the halls of power that the state is not the ideal executor of a variety of tasks previously deemed its proper realm. Both of these changes in development thinking converged in practical terms beginning in the 1980s in the emergence of a greater stress on the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Not only were NGOs and other civil-society actors (including the private sector) seen as untainted by the rent-seeking behavior attributed to state bureaucracies; they were also seen as products of more local or community-based and -interested organizing, a critical vehicle for local participation that so many development projects had lacked. Some of this literature also regarded such institutions as the forerunners of and central to democratic transitions.2

As Islamist movements have gained strength across the Muslim world, their commitment to democratic means of achieving and exercising power has been repeatedly analyzed. The question of whether resort to violence to achieve its goals is inherent in the Islamist project (that what some Islamists understand as a divine mandate to implement shariעa ultimately sanctions the use of force against dissenters) or contingent (that the violent exclusion of Islamists from the political arena has driven them to arms, best expressed by François Burgat's contention that any Western political party could be turned into the Armed Islamic Group in weeks if it were subjected to the same repression Islamists had endured1) looms large in this debate. Where Islamist movements have not had the opportunity to participate in elections for political office, analysts willing to give these movements the benefit of the democratic doubt argue that their peaceful participation in the student body and syndicate elections that they have been allowed to contest proves their intention to respect the results of national-level elections.2 They also point to these groups' repeated public commitment to play by the rules of the electoral game.3 The fact that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan and members of the Islah Party in Yemen have successfully competed in not one but a series of parliamentary elections and evinced a tendency to wage their battles through parliament and the courts rather than by force suggests to many that the question of whether Islamists can ever be democrats has already been settled in the affirmative.

With the series of critical editions and studies of Arabic medical texts from the Middle Ages he has published in recent years, Gerrit Bos has made a significant contribution to the history of medicine in the Islamic world. He has dedicated special attention to the work of Abu Jaעfar Ahmad ibn Abi Khalid ibn al-Jazzar of Qayrawan, a 10th-century physician and prolific author of medical texts. Ibn al-Jazzar was famous and influential not only within his own Arabic– Islamic cultural domain but also—thanks to widely circulated translations of his works into Greek, Latin, and Hebrew—among Christian and Jewish physicians in the East as well as the West. (For Bos's publications on Ibn al-Jazzar's writings see p. 406).

Geographers study places, and the geographer Joseph Hobbs has studied a place that holds sanctity in the three monotheistic religions, has been caretaken by Greek orthodox monks in the Egyptian wilderness, is replete with a microscopic landscape of holiness, and is now subjected to thousands of tourists each year. Mount Sinai, the Jebel Musa of the southern massif of the peninsula, has attracted hermits, ascetics, and pilgrims since the earliest generations of Christianity. Hobbs's story is a disquisition on Mount Sinai, which is, above and beyond its dramatic physical setting and curious human characteristics, a place of no small spiritual dimensions.

One could assume from the misleading title of this work that it is a new analytical history of the fall of the Safavid empire and the nine-year Afghan usurpation of the Safavid throne. More than forty years after Laurence Lockhart published his monumental work, The Fall of the Safavi Dynasty and the Afghan Occupation of Persia, a new study based on subsequent research would be a major contribution to the field. But Willem Floor has made a different, yet extremely significant, contribution. He has performed a yeoman's service by annotating, translating, and compiling primary source materials from the archives of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), or the Dutch East Indies Company, that someday will assist such an effort.

In Waqfs and Urban Structures, Richard van Leeuwen gives a clear and coherent thesis regarding the evolution of Damascene waqfs throughout the Ottoman period. Since the takeover in 1516 of Greater Syria by the Ottomans, “waqfs were an integral part of imperial policy and were used as a mechanism to foster the cohesion between the centre of authority and the conquered provinces” (p. 148). A number of phenomena point in that direction, all of which seem to confirm the thesis of the strengthening of ties between Damascus and Istanbul. A number of sultans, beginning with Selim, who entered Damascus in 1516, erected their own waqfs within the city. Ties were strengthened with local families either through iqtāע grants or prestigious appointments to religious positions. Positions of judges, muftis, and administrators to major public waqfs, were all intermittently infused with elements from outside the city—or, at least, with elements known for their loyalty to the “center.” These elements were not exclusively from within the hierarchy of aעyān and ulama, and the local would be mixed with loyal elements from other provinces. Above all, the local governors were for the most part—with the notable exception of the עĀzms—Turkish, or at least from non-Arab provinces. Van Leeuwen argues—and that is his main thesis—that such phenomena constituted a clear indication of “centralizing tendencies” (p. 114) whose aim was for the imperial state to interfere in and control some of the major local institutions, among them, of course, the waqfs. Even though van Leeuwen makes it plain that such practices of “interference” did not imply that “waqfs were appropriated by the central government” (p. 87), there was nevertheless a deliberate urban policy of spatial control (the way waqfs were distributed). Control was imposed either through resource management (how rents and leases were granted) and appointments to major religious and judicial positions or through a reframing of the law to buttress the imperial grip over the city. Van Leeuwen's main thesis is indeed far broader than a study of urban waqfs. It uses the example of waqfs to show that, contrary to many theses of “decentralization” in which the “center” is portrayed as losing its grip over the provinces (the so-called peripheries), the state did its best not to relinquish control over major urban institutions. In short, the “centralizing efforts” (p. 115) of the imperial state is the motto of this study.

For a closer understanding of Islamic legal practice and for the application and social function of Islamic fiqh, medieval al-Andalus offers some highly fascinating source materials. Apart from a wealth of legal textbooks of the Maliki madhhab that originate from that region and a wide range of biographical and historical texts covering the different stages of the history of Islamic Spain, al-Andalus provides some of the earliest surviving collections of reported court cases (nawazil and ahkam) whose coverage of decisions in some cases reaches well back into the 9th century.

With few exceptions, Orientalist polemics and nationalist inventions of history have dominated the study of nationalism in the Arab Middle East. The lack of a critical framework and historical analysis has led many scholars to doubt the very existence of nationalism in the region. Nationalism has been treated either as a political instrument of ambitious leaders and intellectuals or an insignificant phase in Arab history, soon replaced by political Islamic movements, regionalism, and tribalism.

As Margaret Meriwether notes in her Introduction to this well-crafted study, until recently there has been little history of the Middle Eastern family. There were “histories of families,” which is not the same as a solidly researched sub-discipline within the broader field of Middle Eastern history, because these “did not deal with the family as an institution, its evolution over time, nor the relationship between family and society” (p. 2). The difficulty derives in part (as it does for other sub-fields of Middle Eastern history, particularly social history) from problems of sources that are partial, limited, or sometimes non-existent, and often where they do exist are unavailable. There are few written records on certain subjects, particularly private lives. Scholars of social history and anthropology have relied increasingly on the use of Islamic court records as sources for social history. The growing body of works produced from this scholarship has been highly sophisticated, nuanced, and exciting, opening windows into the history of private life in the Middle East. This book is a welcome contribution to this growing field of scholarship.

Eugene Rogan's book on Transjordan in the later Ottoman period offers a narrative and an analysis that will interest Middle East historians in various fields. Using central Ottoman archives, local Jordanian records and memoirs and European accounts, Rogan paints an intriguing and nuanced picture of a frontier society's experience of incorporation into the modern state. The book frames its material in a way that allows historians in other fields to compare the Transjordanian experience to their own specialized areas. The author's major thesis is that the modern state was introduced into Transjordan by the Ottomans and their associates in the 19th century, laying the groundwork for the redefinition of the country as a political entity by the British and Hashemites after World War I. In arguing his thesis, Rogan is sensitive to regional variations in local society and politics. Each of the עAjlun, Salt, and Karak districts is finely drawn, allowing the reader to understand the distinct features of each district's engagement with late-Ottoman modernity. The book explores the indigenous population's relationship with newly arrived immigrants, colonists, merchants, and missionaries. Themes of general historical interest include state formation, population movements, integration into regional markets, crystallization of modern identities, and the creation of new forms of consciousness. The icing on the cake is Rogan's fluent prose and nimble use of character sketches, which together make this one of those rare scholarly books that is also a pleasure to read.

Despite the long-standing political and practical difficulties of doing research about Iraq, the scholarly world has recently witnessed the publication of several outstanding historical works on the Ottoman period. Hala Fattah and Dina Rizk Khoury in particular have set in their books a high standard of thorough research, careful analysis, and thoughtful conclusions. Now, in this long-awaited book, Sarah Shields lives up to her predecessors' standard by making her own excellent contribution to the study of Ottoman Iraq.

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.

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.

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 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.