The 18th-century European Enlightenment championed rational philosophy and scientific methodology, rather than any form of traditional theology, as the way to understand the objective truth.1 In their quest for the fundamental truth, France's philosophes, the rational and anticlerical intellectuals of the Age of Reason, were forced to brave official censorship, persecution, and imprisonment as they disentangled themselves from their Christian heritage. Thus, the French Enlightenment was informed by a dualistic view of history—an ongoing contest between reason and faith. Although faith had gained ascendancy with Christianity's triumph over classical antiquity in the late 3rd and 4th centuries, according to the philosophes, many of whom served as key contributors to the Encyclopédie, religion and science had once again joined battle in the 18th century, this time with science and reason poised to overcome religious irrationality.2 In this context, the renowned philosophe Voltaire, in his highly controversial Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), attacks Christian dogma, refutes the tenet of Christ's divine nature, and rejects the possibility of miracles as running contrary to all scientific evidence.3 Similarly, in Système de la Nature (1770), another philosophe, d'Holbach, deplores man's pursuit of the chimeras of religious revelation and refusal to engage in rational methods of inquiry.4 The arguments of Voltaire and d'Holbach are just two examples of the French Enlightenment tenet that knowledge can be based only on science and reason.

Since the 1970s, the Salafi movement in Jordan has grown substantially. Today, Salafis are ubiquitous in every major city in the kingdom, and Salafi bookshops, lessons, and activities are common. The purpose of the movement is to institute religious behavior and practices that capture the purity of Islam, as understood by the salaf (early Companions of the Prophet). Salafis believe that because the salaf learned about Islam directly from the Prophet or those who knew him, they commanded a pure understanding of the religion. All decisions in life must therefore be based upon evidence from the Qur⊃an and sunna, as recorded in authentic sayings (had―iths) by the salaf. In instances where particular actions or behaviors were not sanctioned by the original sources of Islam, they are rejected as “not Muslim.” Those who strictly adhere to this religious understanding are considered Salafis.1

Middle Eastern women have often been portrayed by Westerners as silent shadows or as helpless victims of suppressive customs and traditions who are unable to organize or form groups on their own and for themselves and are prevented from entering fully into the public sector of life. The past decade, however, has seen an explosion in research and publication that fully acknowledges women as people in their own right. Women in the Middle East have come to be seen as political and economic actors who fend for themselves and struggle and reflect on their lives and the future of their societies. Through their actions, the boundary that defines what is traditional cultural behavior and what is contemporary, foreign, or unacceptable is often blurred.1 The patriarchal state, however, fails to recognize the transformative power of women's contemporary behavior, which pushes the definition of “accepted” or “traditional” behavior beyond that found in official documents and local and regional legislation, with their largely male audience.

In the broadest sense, the process of development involves improving the quality of human life. Although most people support the idea of improving human lives, the concept of development is notoriously difficult to define. In the poorer countries of the world, development generally requires increasing incomes. But it also involves other things, such as raising standards of health and nutrition, improving access to education, reducing poverty, and increasing the equality of resources. How is it possible to incorporate these, and other notions, into a workable definition of development that can be used to evaluate the recent record of development in Egypt?

The earliest period of Islamic thought has emerged as a major focus of contemporary scholarship during the past few decades, with a variety of techniques—ranging from historical documentation and historiographical analysis to narrative reconstruction and source criticism—being applied to comprehend more accurately the ideas and events that fueled the rise of Muslim societies in the Middle East. Suliman Bashear has made a fascinating addition to the writing that has emerged from this scholarly quest to configure the Middle Eastern Muslim past. The book under review probes available early Arabic literature, largely on its own terms and occasionally in relation to later Arabic writings, to determine the great complexity of Arab, Muslim, and Arab–Muslim views about themselves and about members of other communities during and shortly after the 7th century. Bashear's work also endeavors to trace how such views changed over the next few centuries. At the same time, however, the book is difficult to appreciate fully. Each chapter involves mainly the analysis of a series of hadith (and, to a lesser extent, tafsir and akhbar) linked together by general themes, with little contextual framework or broader discussion of the issues' significance. As a result, the considerable erudition and informative detail that permeates this book provide disparate nuggets of knowledge that, when taken together, fall short of providing the reader with a clear overall notion of how and why the earliest Muslims perceived themselves and others in particular ways.

This is a confused and confusing book. The subtitle clearly suggests that the monograph is a study of Nisab al-Ihtisab, a treatise on hisba written by the subcontinental Hanafite jurist Sunami. It turns out, however, that the monograph is for the most part a disappointing translation, with an even more disappointing short Introduction, which hardly constitutes a study. The first and longest section (eight pages of the Introduction) raises a number of questions about authorship, all of which are answered in a cursory and far less than satisfactory manner. The sections that follow, all of which are very short, deal with Sunami's education, social milieu, and presentation of the text. Thereafter, in the space of no more than two pages, the “value of the work” is considered, and this is followed by a chronological list of “known hisba treatises.” The issue of theory and practice, implicitly raised in the title, is addressed in fewer than two pages, and poorly at that, considering how fundamental an issue this is. In sum, little in this Introduction constitutes, properly speaking, a study of the text. At best, it provides background information about the treatise and its author, although it does so in a not altogether organized, thorough, or systematic fashion.

In recent years, the field of Mamluk studies has seen what may well be an amount of published scholarship unparalleled in any field of Middle East studies. Less than a decade ago, the study of the Mamluk rulers of Egypt and Syria could hardly have been called a distinct field, and it was only about four decades ago that the period was given any systematic attention at all through the pioneering efforts of David Ayalon. However, Mamluk specialists now have their own journal, the Mamluk Studies Review, with three annual volumes in print and more on the way, as well as an extensive and ever-growing Web-based bibliography, both of which are published by the University of Chicago's Middle East Documentation Center. Mamluk specialists around the world have been engaged in this work, but it was initiated by Thomas Philipp and the late Ulrich Haarmann. In December 1994, these two scholars organized a conference on Mamluk studies in Bad Homburg, Germany, and eighteen of the papers presented at that symposium have been published as The Mamluks in Egyptian Politics and Society. The papers in this volume cover the period of the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt and Syria from 1250 to 1517, as well as the subsequent Ottoman period up to the rule of Muhammad Ali in the early 19th century. The richness of the sources for this period is evident in the diverse topics represented; papers dealing with political and social history are supplemented by studies in astronomy, religion, traditional culture, historiography, and urban geography. Indeed, the volume stands as a benchmark from which to view this rapidly growing field.

It was only after Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan regained the Umayyad caliphate that concerted efforts were made to extend Umayyad sway into the Maghrib. These efforts turned into a wave of expansion that extended all the way into the 2nd century A.H./8th century A.D. and reached far into the Iberian Peninsula and across the Pyrenees. These efforts also constitute the history of the Maghrib, a history aptly described by the title of the book under review: A Gateway to Hell, a Gateway to Paradise. This title reflects the conflicted attitudes held by early Muslims regarding the region and its history. In the beginning, Umayyad policies were indeed contradictory. For example, Tariq ibn Ziyad, a Berber, could lead Muslims into the Iberian Peninsula, while up to a time Damascus considered Berbers legal booty.

Michal Biran fills an important gap in research on the 13th-century Mongol empire with her recent study of Qaidu (1236–1301), a great-grandson of Chinggis Khan and champion of the house of Ögödei. Characterizing Qaidu as a pragmatist, not an “ideological warrior” (p. 107), she challenges the conventional view that he was one of the quintessential defenders of nomadic values against the sedentarizing ethos of other Mongol rulers, and that he claimed the office of qa⊂an (supreme Mongol overlord). The work argues that his long struggle with Qubilai and his ruling career in Central Asia had two main goals: to restore to the Ögödeid ulus its rightful territory according to the original division of the empire by Chinggis and to secure the political and economic viability of that territory. It concludes that Qaidu did not aspire to become the qa⊂an but played a crucial role in the emergence of an independent Chaghadaid khanate in the early 14th century.

The author claims that this work is a “preliminary argument for a new approach” (p. xxi) to the history of the Muslim East, one that runs counter to older Indo-centric views of the Mughals and the contrived “national” histories produced by British and Russian imperial historians (p. 154). Two central themes run through this study. The first is that “tripartite Muslim Asia” (Iran–Turan–Hindustan) of the 16th and 17th centuries was, in terms of the dominant elite culture, one world and not several. The Muslims of Central Asia and northern India in the 16th and 17th centuries “appear not to have thought of each other mainly as foreigners or as subjects of another king. Rather, they considered each other foremost as Muslims and secondarily in terms of family connections or other loyalties” (p. 31). This in part contributed to and permitted the large-scale movement of talent from Iran and Central Asia to the Mughal domain, “where opportunities were perceived as being better” (p. xix). This notion and the elements of “shared economy” and “mental geography of Asian Muslims” are briefly explored in the first chapter and returned to repeatedly throughout the book. The second chapter, “Timurid Legacy and Turko-Mongol Identity,” focuses on one very particular aspect of this special relationship. The Mughal dynasty was founded by Babur, a descendant of Tamerlane and heir to the extraordinary Turko-Iranian culture that flourished under Timurid rule in Central Asia. Having been evicted from his patrimony in Central Asia by the Uzbeks and having failed to regain his ancestral lands, Babur (who viewed India as “inhospitable, uncivilized and heathen” [p. 127]) and his descendants had to make do with Muslim South Asia. This was their “consolation prize.” That is not bad as “consolation prizes” go, especially because the new territory, which Babur's descendants, after a shaky start, soon expanded to include much of the Indian Subcontinent, quickly outpaced their Central Asian patrimony in power and wealth. Uzbek Central Asia, decreasing in importance militarily, strategically, and economically, never constituted a threat to the Mughal regime and was no longer a core zone of world trade. “In strictly material terms the Mughals had little to gain by reconquering the land of their forebears,” Foltz writes, “yet it remained an obsession. Simple nostalgia appears to have been a major factor in determining the Mughal's foreign policy, and may well provide historians with an example of psychology overriding economics” (p. 6). This is the second major theme of this work. Babur, understandably, always dreamed of returning to his Central Asian homeland. Foltz, however, contends that his “obsession was to be the inheritance he bequeathed to his own descendants, which would haunt them mercilessly despite their successes and glories in India for two centuries to come” (p. 14). Another psychological factor, the author suggests, was the need of the Mughals to prove to the Uzbeks and the rest of the world that they had “made good in exile” (p. 68). By the late 16th century, the Mughals controlled a state with some 60 million to 90 million subjects, while Uzbek Turan could only muster some 5 million—and not always under stable rule. In addition to the psychological factors, which, with the exception of Babur's memoirs (a unique source) are difficult to document, there were also very good political reasons for the Mughals to maintain this Central Asian link. They were Timurids, after all, and Timurid descent was an important component of their ideology, especially when facing the Shibanid Uzbeks. Although they considered the Shibanid Uzbeks barbarians, the Shibanids' Chinggisid descent gave them even higher standing. Foltz correctly notes that “in a world where lineage was nearly everything, the Mughal descendants of Timur could not, ideologically speaking, abandon their paramount claim to Central Asia no matter how firmly established in India they became” (p. 22). Viewing themselves as the lawful rulers of Central Asia, the Mughals “were content to let the Uzbeks ‘house sit’ for them” (p. 33), sometimes referring to Uzbek rulers as “governors” or the Wali-yi Turan (p. 127). Although many Uzbeks eventually came to seek their fortunes in Mughal service, they were stereotyped as simpleminded and pious but obstinate ruffians and bigots, given to revolt. Foltz attributes their rebellious inclinations to the egalitarian traditions that they brought with them from the Turkic lands (p. 59).

P. M. Holt's The Sudan of the Three Niles is an annotated translation of the Funj Chronicle, a history of the Funj sultanate (1504–1821) based at Sennar, along the Blue Nile, and of the Turco-Egyptian regime that succeeded it at Khartoum. Along with the Tabaqat of Wad Dayf Allah (a biographical dictionary of Sudanese Muslim holy men compiled in the late 18th century), the Funj Chronicle is the most important Arabic source on the northern riverain Sudan in the Funj era, a period in which Islam was spreading widely and the region was developing its pronounced Arab–Islamic identity.

The history of Sudan still reflects the country's struggle to find its identity between Middle Eastern and African studies. Even within Sudan, there are spheres of interest ranging from the expanding ancient studies of Nubia to the protracted conflict between so-called Afro-Arab northerners and Nilotic southerners. Lost in these expanding domains are the histories of eastern Sudan and Kordofan to the west. Even the historiography of Sennar and Darfur is far better established than that of Kordofan. Thus, the very title of the book being reviewed suggests that Kordofan is an “invaded” and “peripheral” area on the edge of the Islamic and African worlds. Thus, this work is a welcome starting point in filling in this considerable gap in Sudan studies. Stiansen and Kevane have done noble service in this respect.

Although the vicissitudes of the Ottoman Empire during World War I are well known, the fate of Iran during the same period remains relatively unappreciated. Officially neutral in the conflict, Iran in fact found itself overrun and occupied by various foreign powers. Following a 1907 accord with Britain that divided the country into two spheres of influence, Iran by 1911 found much of its northern half practically occupied by Russia. Intent on safeguarding its Indian possessions, Britain, meanwhile, controlled most of the south. With the outbreak of the Great War, these traditional rivals were joined by the Ottomans, who, supported by local tribes and Iranian nationalists loath to see half of the country controlled by Russians, invaded Azerbaijan in early 1915. Finally, there were the Germans, who, supported by an alliance with the Ottomans, infiltrated Iran later in 1915 as part of a grand strategy designed to destabilize the country by inciting its population against the British and eventually to forge a German–Iranian alliance.

Seeing a country through the eyes of diplomats is to see it both intimately and from a distance. Diplomatic messages are full of gossip: who is close to who, what various characters are like, how they look, what they wear—in this book, even how they eat. At the same time, diplomats are odd people, plucked from their home cultures, yet representing them in alien and perhaps alienating climes. A conviction that home is best might not be realized consciously, but it is there, permeating judgments about characters and incidents and shaping advice given to foreign offices at home and decisions about how to handle things on the spot. Coupled with the generally narrow view represented in routine reports—how much can one person see, after all, and how well can most of those who come for only a few years interpret the range of meanings of what they see?—an account that rests heavily on a limited range of diplomatic sources may itself be two-dimensional, more anecdotal than reflective about what these various accounts might have to say to us today.

The mystery of the Ottoman Empire is not that it ended but that it lasted as long as it did. The End of the Ottoman Empire is the first book in a new Longman series under the editorial direction of Keith Robbins to examine key “turning points” in the history of the emergence of the modern world. Positioning the Ottomans' final moments within the context of a world-history approach is a worthy goal. Moreover, scholars in the discipline have recently been discussing the need to develop texts to expose the Ottoman experience to a broader audience. Macfie attempts to make this connection by relating the end of the Ottomans to the contemporary world. He argues that the destruction of the Ottoman state marked “a tectonic shift in the political and social structure of the area” (p. 234), leading to the emergence of the successor states and the modern organization of the Middle East and southeastern Europe. It is also, according to him, “the end of the Eastern Question” (p. 234) and the beginning of new relations among the modern European states.

This lengthy two-volume work is part of a long-term Greek project to make foreign archives concerning modern Greek history more accessible to researchers in Greece. Professor Eleutherios Prevelakis, who passed away one year before the publication of these volumes, became the director of the Research Centre for the Study of Modern Greek History of the Academy of Athens in 1963. This position allowed him to conceive and carry through his program of collecting in microfilm form British archival material of relevance to modern Greece. The two volumes under review grew out of the work that he and Professor Merticopoulou conducted over many years in the archives of the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office, which are stored in the Public Record Office.

Israel's May 1999 elections featured three newly retired generals, including Ehud Barak, a former chief of staff who was elected prime minister. There was consensus among most political analysts that Barak was elected primarily because of his military background. Moreover, a wellorchestrated public-relations campaign presented Barak as the most likely candidate to revive the peace process that his military commander, Yitzhak Rabin, had started. Few questioned, however, that military credentials have become almost a prerequisite to holding political office in Israel or that someone who devoted most of his life to war-making is indeed the best person to lead a peacemaking process. It would be quite difficult to understand the centrality of the military in Israeli politics, as in almost any other sphere of life, without paying close attention to the processes and practices that have shaped Israeli militarism over time. By providing readers with both the historical context and the socio-political background, Uri Ben-Eliezer's The Making of Israeli Militarism enables us to come to terms with how the “military way,” as he refers to it, came to dominate Israeli politics in general and its relationships with its neighbors in particular.

Conventional scholarship views Baha⊃ism and its precursor, Babism, as intrinsically rooted in traditional Shi⊂ism—in both Shi⊂ism's central doctrines of messianism, millennarianism, and imamism, and its less important features of Neoplatonism, numerology, esoteric knowledge, ecstatic worship, and obedience to religious hierarchy. In short, Babism and Baha⊃ism have been treated as historic relics from a traditional worldview rather than birth pangs of the modern age.

Studies of contemporary visual art in the Middle East are scarce compared with the vast literature on historical Islamic arts. In the past ten years, however, several notable books and articles have featured this important but under-recognized realm of visual culture in the region. These recent works often examine the ways in which art reflects social trends such as nationalism and struggles for religious identity. Karnouk's book is a worthy introduction to the world of contemporary art in Egypt, and is the first major English-language book of its kind on the subject (see also Wijdan Ali, Modern Islamic Art: Development and Continuity [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997]). Contemporary Egyptian Art is a sequel to Karnouk's earlier Modern Egyptian Art: The Emergence of a National Style (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1988), in which she outlined the prominent artists and styles of the first half-century of the modern art movement within the context of Egyptian nationalism. This recent book picks up from the 1952 revolution and presents the major trends in art since that time while offering possible socio-political explanations for these trends.

Rashid Khalidi sets out to study the emergence of Palestinian nationalism at the dawn of the 20th century. He explores the early cultural beginnings of Palestinian identity, which precede the encounter with Zionism, and studies the different developments of Palestinian identity in light of that encounter. Whereas a large number of accounts stress that Palestinian identity developed exclusively as a result of the encounter with colonial Zionism, Khalidi sets the record straight. In line with predominant theories of nationalism, Khalidi demonstrates that national identities are defined in relation to an other. Palestine identity, which as early as 1701 manifested itself against a hostile European Christianity, remained Jerusalem-centered until the beginning of the 20th century. That is when a modern Palestinian nationalism was emerging, before the encounter with British colonialism and Zionist settler colonialism changed the configuration of both the Palestinian self and its other. Khalidi charts the changes in the forms of knowledge that the Palestinian intelligentsia was acquiring in the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, noting the shift from Islamic studies to modern social science and the humanities. Through an inventory of Palestinian libraries, Khalidi carefully chronicles these changes in forms of knowledge, correlating them with the new and emerging political ideas in the country.