Crowds have always puzzled historians. As essentially anonymous and spontaneous movements, they often seem to possess a mysterious, irrational, and even primal quality. They can form suddenly and unpredictably, unite strangers behind an apparently common cause, move through the streets as if acting with a single will, and then unexpectedly melt away into the surrounding neighborhoods and markets from which they came. Explanations are not easy to find. Once the sound and fury have subsided and participants have left the streets, it is nearly impossible to trace identities or determine individual motives for joining demonstrations. This obscurity only deepens when one moves to the more distant past, as the number of records and firsthand accounts rapidly dwindles.

War in the Balkans over the past decade and a half has inspired a plethora of scholarly, journalistic, and diplomatic publications, all of which have sought to capture the region's “chaotic” history. Unfortunately, much of this work assumes that conflict in the Balkans can be understood only along ethno-religious lines.1 This reductive line of argument has been particularly evident in the treatment of the Ottoman period in the Balkans' past, a period that extends back some 600 years.2 Consequentially, such work has distorted our understanding of Balkan societies both during and after the Ottoman Empire.

From Paris in June 1928, Edmond Rabbath (1901–91) sent to Saעdallah al-Jabiri (1893–1947) his recently published L'évolution politique de la Syrie sous mandat. While the book is an early exploration of the legal underpinnings of the French Mandate, it is also the first nationalist history of Syria. Adopting a now familiar historiographical trope that the Ottoman past was a period of decadence and unjust alien rule, Rabbath organized recent episodes from the turbulent history of the Eastern Mediterranean since World War I, including Faysal's Arab kingdom, the Syrian Arab Congress, the rebellions of Salih al-עAlawi and Ibrahim Hananu, and the Great Syrian Revolt, into a linear narrative of an unfolding modern national consciousness.1 With a Preface by a prominent figure from pre-war Ottoman politics in the Levant, Shakib al-Arslan, the book outlined the logic in which much of inter-war Syrian opposition to French colonialism would be phrased:2 France must adhere to the letter and spirit of the League of Nations' mandate and emancipate the Syrians upon their achievement of national maturity. With some reservations, Rabbath argued that this maturity had already been attained.3

In the summer of 1555, by writ of Papal Bull, the ghetto of Rome came into being. Within less than half a decade, across the Mediterranean at the foot of the High Atlas Mountains, the Jews of Marrakesh met a fate not unlike that of their Italian co-religionists when they, too, were transferred to their own “city within a city.” Located where the Moroccan sultan's stables had previously stood, the new walled Jewish quarter of Marrakesh was in fact the second of its kind in Morocco, and like its predecessor in Fez it was called a mellah,2 a name that originally referred to the salty marsh area to which the Jews of the northern Moroccan capital had been transferred. The Roman ghetto had similarly appropriated its name from its predecessor, the Venetian foundry (getto or ghetto) where a policy of Jewish confinement was first put into official practice in Italy. The terms continued to follow parallel trajectories, moreover, with ghetto and mellah each coming to describe the generic Jewish quarter within its respective environment.

The concept of the “status quo”1 was introduced in 1852, when the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Mejid, in a futile attempt to avoid a war, issued a decree freezing the rights of worship and possession of the religious communities in the Holy Places of Christendom. The decree terminated the bloody rivalry between the Greek Orthodox patriarchate and the Roman Catholic church for predominance in the Christian sanctuaries and recognized the paramount rights of the Greek Orthodox church in the Holy Places affirmed since 1757.2 In 1853, the sultan issued another decree, which transferred the power of jurisdiction over the sanctuaries from the local officials in Palestine to the Sublime Porte. Subsequently, Article 62 of the Treaty of Berlin (1878) proclaimed the inviolability of the decree of 1852 and declared it the “Status Quo of the Holy Places.” The successive governments of Palestine, the British Mandate, and the State of Israel further maintained the regulations as set forth by the status quo of 1852.3

Michael W. Dols's posthumously published Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society (Oxford, 1992) is a magnum opus, a voluminous enterprise, and a piece of meticulous research that equals—if not surpasses—Dols's earlier work on plagues in medieval Islam. Dianne E. Immisch, Dols's long-time research assistant who took up the job of seeing the manuscript to the press, briefly points out in her Foreward the richness of topics dealt with in the book. Indeed, writing about madness in a particular society involves the history of medicine, law, and other subfields, but it is above all a study in the history of culture, certainly from the perspective of the present, when there is increased interest in the formation of categories of deviancy. The attitude of a society toward madness and its mad people is a crucial cultural topic—a “big issue,” as one reviewer has put it.2

In the field of Islamic history, the publication of a Variorum volume of a scholar's reprinted articles signifies that that scholar has attained an unassailably authoritative status. No Ottomanist would deny that Colin Heywood has achieved this status. Although retired (prematurely) from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, he is still a very active scholar of the Ottoman Empire.

In certain fields of study one sometimes finds a long-awaited book—a book by one of the field's most venerable senior scholars; a book that is expected to be the crowning glory of the sage's career. The Politicization of Islam by Kemal Karpat is just such a book. It is precisely for this very reason that it is so disappointing. The book comprises seventeen chapters spanning a very broad range of topics, from “Islamic Revivalism” through the “Turkishness of the Community” and “Reconstruction of the State and Ethnic–National Identity.” One of the central problems is that Karpat tries to do too much at once. “Identity,” “State,” “Faith,” and “Pan-Islam” are colossal topics, each of which merits a book on its own.

Sachiko Murata has given the growing field of Chinese Islamic studies a great gift and has made a major contribution to its future development. For the most part, scholars of Chinese Islam are trained in East Asian studies or Chinese history and at best have only secondary knowledge of Islam or of Islamic languages such as Arabic and Persian. Similarly, scholars of Islam generally have little interest in or knowledge of China. This is despite the fact that from as early as the late 7th century the two civilizations, the Chinese and the Islamic, have maintained vibrant economic, political, scientific, and cultural ties. Muslim settlements in China can be traced back to the 8th century, and the Muslim Chinese—the Hui—are today one of the largest “national” minorities in China.

Abdelmajid Hannoum's Colonial Histories, Post-Colonial Memories is a fascinating study of the many inventions of the historical-mythical figure of al-Kahina, the Berber leader who is said to have stopped, for a brief moment, the advance of Muslim armies in the Maghrib during the 1st century A.H. Hannoum's account reviews a long series of debates about the figure of the Kahina, debates that have taken place in Arabic, French, Hebrew, and now English. As Hannoum notes, the Kahina to date has appeared as man, woman, eunuch, sorceress of the Jahiliyya, queen, Christian, Jew, anti–Semite, Joan of Arc, feminist, fortress, and so on. Hannoum's list is exhaustive, although undoubtedly, as he says, there are other inventions of the figure hiding elsewhere, especially in those oral traditions now lost to us.

This book deals with the relationship between the Islamic clergy, or ulema, and the Durrani monarch Amanullah who ruled in Afghanistan from 1919 to 1929. The author characterizes Amanullah as a devout Muslim who repelled British influence in Afghanistan and espoused a far-reaching modernization agenda for the country. The narrative is designed to explain why Amanullah lost the support of the ulema who initially backed his reforms but then led a rebellion that ended his reign. He argues that high-ranking clergy in Kabul supported Amanullah and his policies, but lower-ranking clergy active in the tribal hinterland did not. Nawid brings new data to bear on a long-standing and prominent debate about Amanullah's ill-fated reform program.

This is a successor volume to the author's Egypt during the Nasser Years. Like its predecessor, it is based heavily on interviews with participants in the tumultuous events of those years. Quotations from those interviews are sprinkled throughout the text, giving it a firsthand quality that is rare in academic works. Indeed, the author has succeeded brilliantly in his stated goal to write an “accessible” book, with “theorizing and the use of political science concepts (kept) to a minimum” (p. ix). Although passing mention is made of Gramsci's notion of hegemony, readers are referred to Beattie's volume on Nasser if they are interested in its elaboration. The text is organized chronologically, and although it may illustrate the absence of Gramscian hegemony—hence, the political failure of the Free Officers—the reader is left to decide that for himself or herself and whether and in what ways the absence of “hegemony” might be important. It is, in sum, a highly informed, well-written political history and biography of the Sadat era.

Alon Liel, Israel's former representative in Ankara and a former director-general of Israel's Foreign Ministry, provides an evaluation of Turkey's relations with the Arab world, Iran, and Israel from an Israeli perspective. Thus, the book is primarily intended for an Israeli audience. The book is divided into three sections, which are further subdivided into ten chapters. There is also an introductory chapter, but there is no concluding chapter.

The transition from a state-controlled economy to a market-ruled one always introduces a variety of challenges. These include ideological, political, and social resistance to change, a shortage of resources, structural inflexibility of the production system, and a weak or non-existent private sector. Algeria's attempt at change, which began in the early 1980s, faced all of these challenges—and more. Since the 1980s, the country has been suffering from a serious and multi-faceted crisis, and the political violence that erupted in the early 1990s forestalled economic recovery and contributed to the repeated postponement of substantive reforms. Meanwhile, all of the country's non-hydrocarbon sectors experienced negative growth, and a deep social crisis wiped out most of the progress made in human development since the 1970s.

Almost immediately, any visitor to Cairo becomes aware of the city's pollution—the bits of organic and inorganic garbage in the gutters, the noxious exhaust of aging mopeds and buses, the discolored canal water, and the unnatural haze that hangs over rooftops. Surely, Egyptians share this awareness. For the authors of People and Pollution: Cultural Constructions and Social Action in Egypt, however, “the issue is not whether there is an environmental awareness in Egypt, but what the nature of that awareness is, how it varies from one setting to another, and above all where it leads” (p. 1).

In his Aesthetic Occupation: The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestine Conflict, Daniel Bertrand Monk opens with a critical analysis of the rhetoric employed to explain the violence surrounding the 1996 Jerusalem tunnel crisis. By tracing the discursive relationship between architecture and politics in Palestine/Israel during the Mandate period, Monk offers readers an innovative, theoretical approach to the uses of architecture in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. Through a concise, historical examination of how British, Israeli, and Palestinian political players assumed an equation between Jerusalem's architectural sites and political realities, Monk proposes that it is exactly this conceptual paradigm that allows for the normalization of the continuing violence within the representation of the conflict itself.

This volume, a collection of essays by a group of mostly European-based, young scholars, should open the public sphere in Muslim societies to the same level of attention civil society enjoyed in the two-volume Civil Society in the Middle East, edited by A. R. Norton almost a decade ago.

Anthony Shadid is a talented correspondent for Boston's Globe who is now based in Washington, D.C. and who has covered the Middle East with distinction in recent years. As I discovered during the past year while I lived in Boston, his articles routinely provide important insights into the politics and people of the Arab world, routinely capturing the human complexities of issues that other correspondents often miss.

Dal Seung Yu's The Role of Political Culture in Iranian Political Development represents an attempt to demonstrate the vitality of political culture in the process of political (under)-development in 20th-century Iran.

Stéphane Valter's book raises a legitimate question: how did the Baעthist regime of Syria (since 1963), and especially Hafiz al-Asad (from 1970 to 2000) succeed in remaining so long in power? Crude brutality, as documented by Middle East Watch (Syria Unmasked: The Suppression of Human Rights by the Asad Regime [1991]), was not enough. Neither were the threats and expectations of external wars, as Fred Lawson argues in Why Syria Goes to War (1996). Coercion had to be blended with some sort of legitimacy to explain the durability of a regime that could not be labeled totalitarian.