Psychologists attribute great significance to slips of the tongue. In such moments, the train of normal speech is interrupted by a word that seems to be out of context. Yet analysts say that this interruption actually betrays an inner truth hidden, consciously or not, behind the screen of “normal” speech. I suggest here that the 1931 Arab–Jewish transportation strike against the Mandatory government in Palestine can be seen as a historical slip of the tongue in the history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

In late November 1957, the Hebrew and state-sponsored Arabic press in Israel printed a series of articles describing an extravagant “ceremony of reconciliation” held in the small and impoverished Palestinian border village of Kafr Qasim. The event was attended by more than 400 distinguished guests, including cabinet ministers, Knesset members from the ruling MAPAI party, military-government representatives, national trade-union officials, and “notables” from neighboring Arab villages. The idea behind the “sulḥa,” as its government-appointed organizers termed it (borrowing from the Arabic), was to heal the remaining wounds from the 29 October 1956 Israeli border-patrol massacre of forty-eight Palestinian Arab citizens, all but four of whom were residents of Kafr Qasim.1 The day of the ceremony, 20 November, marked exactly one year and three weeks since the first day of the Sinai war and the fateful evening when village day laborers returning home were lined up and summarily shot for unknowingly “violating” a curfew that had been announced only thirty minutes earlier.

This article examines the historical development of Arab–Palestinian soccer under the British Mandate, and then afterward under the State of Israel. It strives to explain why the Arab sporting grandstands—particularly those of soccer—did not become a site for the construction and expression of Palestinian national pride in Israel.

And, if we wonder why the mythmaker resorts to myths when he has more sophisticated tools at hand, the answer is that, although he doubts whether his mythical argument can stand alone, he regards it as being more lucid and compelling than an argument from abstract principles.1

This article reports an empirical investigation of the study of war and the military in Israel and offers some reflective thoughts on our findings. We explore the social and political conditions under which academic knowledge about “things military” in Israel has been, and is being, produced. By academic knowledge we mean the publicly available theories, methods, and findings produced in universities and research institutes. Concretely, we refer to the plethora of articles, books, and edited collections published over the past thirty years in the social sciences. We do not, however, deal with research in clinical psychology or psychiatry, or with strategic studies, international relations, and conventional military history, although these fields have been sources of a good deal of research in Israel. By “things military” we mean social and cultural concerns related to (and derived from) the armed forces, war, and provisions for “national security.” Thus, we are concerned with studies related to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as an institution that is characterized by certain professional and organizational features and that must constantly manage its relationship to a variety of social groups and representatives of the state. In a complementary manner, we refer to studies that explore the ways in which the state and society manage their relations with Israel's armed forces.

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in British rule in Palestine. Although invariably selective, recent scholarship has nevertheless attempted to deal with the administration of the Palestinian Mandate over its entire time span. These studies provide an opportunity to reconsider more generally some of the methodological problems posed by the writing of Mandatory history. There already exists for Palestine a large body of literature, one that has prompted several historiographic reviews identifying particular assumptions, preoccupations, and conceptual frameworks.1 They include the extent to which histories of Mandatory Palestine invariably reflect current thinking and are thus not solely concerned with the past; the reliance on official archives, particularly British and Israeli; and the tendency to concentrate on Zionism as the moving force behind developments during the Mandate period (thus committing a conspicuous act of retroactive determinism).

Now we're getting somewhere. This collection of fifteen studies on the general topic indicated in the carefully worded title is one of the more enjoyable reading experiences in Qurءanic studies of recent memory. A wide variety of problems and subjects are treated in the key of deep and engaged appreciation for the powerful artistry of the Qurءan. The articles are divided into three major groups. The first comprises studies of specific or peculiar modes of “religious meaning.” Sells discusses here again the relationship uniting spirit, gender, and aurality as a vehicle of meaning; Zahniser addresses the problem of the unity of the sura by examining what he takes to be transitional passages in two longer chapters; McAuliffe revisits Q.3:7 but this time tries to connect implications of the earliest tafsīr of this verse with some recent developments in literary criticism; Welch explicates commonalities among various punishment narratives; Rippin succinctly meditates on the implications of wajh Allāh, for individual responsibility (it may be helpful here to read for the prepositional, rather than nominal, content of “face of God”—namely, “direction of God”); and Shahid attempts, in novel terms, to unravel the secret of the mysterious disconnected letters.

This monograph is a revised version of a doctoral dissertation completed at the Centre for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto in 1996. At the beginning, the author enunciates clearly his purpose, method, and organization, and he adheres closely to the agenda he has set. His purpose is to provide a sophisticated comparison of early Syriac Christianity with the Bahaءi faith as enunciated by its founder Bahaullah. His method rests primarily on adaptations of concepts developed for cultural anthropology by Sherry Ortner and for comparative religion by Ninian Smart. Briefly characterized, his approach is a comparison of central symbols drawn from the two religious traditions as represented by a normative set of texts. While eschewing a strictly historical method, Buck strives to avoid the pitfalls of older comparative studies by attending to the distinctive historical contexts of the 4th-century Syriac Christian authors Ephrem and Aphrahat and the 19th-century articulation of the faith of Bahaullah.

Albrecht Fuess has written a detailed history of the Syro-Palestinian frontier during the Mamluk era in order to discover why this Turko-Muslim state, which occupied such an important geographical position astride Asian-to-Mediterranean trade routes, did not develop a naval force. Because this issue arises during a period that oceanic voyages of Europeans and the Indian Ocean expeditions of the Chinese marked the beginning of a new era in maritime history, his research will have wide appeal among historians.

Research on the Safavid period has come a long way in the past ten years with the publication of several studies, conference proceedings, and printed editions of primary sources, including historical texts. Willem Floor has been at the forefront of this activity, with a number of monographs most notably on economic history. His new work, Safavid Government Institutions, is a detailed examination of the principal offices of the Safavid state, including the organization of central and provincial government and of the army. The book evolved out of a commentary on the administrative manual, Mirza Rafiעi's Dastur al-muluk, begun toward the end of the reign of Shah Sultan Husain (1694–1722). It is unfortunate that Floor has been unable to take advantage of the new and more complete text recently published by Iraj Afshar (Daftar-i Tarikh, vol. 1 [Tehran, 2001], 475–651). The newly discovered portion, for instance, contains details of the (minor) offices of daftardār and עazab-bāshī (pp. 618–19), discussed briefly by Floor (p. 59). Other elements of Safavid state organization, such as the judiciary and the religious establishment, are excluded but already largely dealt with in other studies by the same author (ZDMG 150 [2000]: 461–500; Studia Iranica 29 [2000]: 9–60). The material in the Dastur al-muluk (and, for that matter, in the comparable Tazkirat al-muluk) is entirely rearranged in a way that helpfully regroups most of the relevant offices according to their primary function in the administration or the army. The author pays fitting tribute to the pioneering work of earlier scholars, such as Röhrborn, Savory, and Aubin (whose work is oddly described as “less accessible”; p. x) but justly remarks that a great deal of new source material has become available since then.

The historiography of Muslim communities under Russian domination, whether czarist Russian or Soviet Russian, has until now been presented with a strongly modernist and nationalist focus. The social context created by Islamic belief and the institutions to which it gave rise have rarely been studied except as a foil for the promotion of nationalist, Russocentric, or “modernist” ideologies. The present work is therefore an important corrective. It is a richly detailed analysis of several distinct yet connected communities located just to the east of the Volga River. The book focuses on an agricultural region marked by two north–south river basins, about twenty to thirty miles apart, and roughly parallel to the Volga, about 100 miles to the west. In particular, the work focuses on a group of villages along a major tributary (the Altata River) of one of the rivers, the Bol'shoi Uzen. In this area, Muslims were a distinct minority in the period covered by the study. The principal source for the study is a local history of these communities, the Tawārīkh-i Ālṭī Ātā, written in 1909 and 1910. Its authors were father and son, Muhammad Fatih and Muhammad al-Ilmini. Ilmin was a village in the township of Osinov Gai (also known as Iske Uzen) where the Altata River emptied into the Bol'shoi Uzen. Although the focus of the Tawārīkh-i Ālṭī Ātā is the township and four other villages in it, the al-Ilminis range over the whole watershed of the twin Bol'shoi and Malyi Uzen Rivers, thus including communities in three large administrative districts (uezdy)—Novouzensk, the Ural Cossack Horde, and the Kazakh Inner Horde—in all, an area of about 28,000 square miles located today in far western Kazakhstan.

In one of the great understatements about the literature of Arabian travel and exploration, T. E. Lawrence said that it is not easy to write about Charles M. Doughty. Every one of the famous travelers in Arabia—whether Burton, Palgrave, Doughty, or the Blunts in the 19th century or Bell, Lawrence, Philby, or Thesiger in the 20th—presents some complex problems, but Doughty seems to combine them all. His background, his psyche, his conduct during his voyage, his later life, and above all his masterpiece, Travels in Arabia Deserta, are filled with enigmas and ambiguities.

The topic of master–servant and patron–client relationships is not new to the multi-disciplinary literature on Morocco. What distinguishes this work from the others are the context and approach as well as the societal positions of the two parties to this relationship. In this case, the focus is on two social categories: the marginal and subordinate haratin (sing. hartani) and the shurfa (sing. sharīf), or religious elite, in an oasis in the Dra Valley in the south.

A Trade Like Any Other explores the status of freelance women singers and dancers in Egypt. In her Introduction, Nieuwkerk states the twofold goal of her book: to de-exoticize the entertainment trade and to generate more sympathy for male and female entertainers among Egyptians and Westerners alike.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union has had far-reaching consequences for the character of the international political system, the full impact of which has not yet become totally clear. The systemic changes triggered by the Soviet Union's collapse have been felt globally, but the region that once formed part of the union and its immediate and near neighbors have felt their effect most strongly.

This book is well researched in both content and form. The author's methodological approach to the subject at hand is both robust and lucid. The major drawback of the book, however, is that it is old. The book is based on the author's doctoral dissertation completed some thirty years ago and, alas, does not address any of the issues that have emerged since 1972. The focal point of this book is to maintain that the politics of oil should not be looked on in isolation from policies pursued by Western governments—in particular, the United States.

Popular perceptions frequently characterize militant Islamic groups such as Hamas as uncompromising, ideological movements trapped by rigid adherence to dogma. Such understandings view radical groups as irrationally beholden to strict religious doctrine, engendering fatalistic assessments of the possibility for peaceful political change. Against this general perspective, Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela offer a more nuanced view of Hamas (and implicitly of Islamist movements in general) as a strategic actor constrained by the realities of political context rather than doctrine. In a manner akin to rational-choice theory (though not explicitly recognized as such), they detail the strategic decisions of Hamas as it balances ideological and pragmatic imperatives to ensure the survival of the movement in a dynamic environment.

Simon Murden has written a timely book mainly to describe and highlight the position of Islam and the Middle East in the overall global environment, characterized by Western—and particularly, American—hegemony. The book is valuable to undergraduate students, but it can also be a quick refresher on the topic for some graduate students. The book does not attempt to provide new theories in explaining the inferior position of the Middle East in the global system; nor does it claim to be an in-depth analysis of the reasons behind a global system dominated by the West. Murden focuses on the challenge posed to Islam by Westernization and how Islam and the Middle East have responded and adapted to this challenge: it describes the advent and evolution of modern globalized politics and economics and how Muslim societies in the Middle East are responding and adapting to it. The book is divided into an Introduction and two main parts, with a total of seven chapters. Part 1 deals with Islam and global hegemony, and Part 2 discusses Muslim resistance and adaptation in the liberal international order.

By now it is a platitude to claim that social scientists have long underlined the important role of the state in Turkish political life. The “strong Turkish state,” the “centralizing Turkish state,” the “transcendental Turkish state,” the “bourgeois Turkish state” have all been problematized, elaborated, and questioned by students of social studies. However, Yael Navaro-Yashin's work is the much needed and most welcome anthropological study of the state in Turkey. Faces of the State, unlike any other book on the subject, shows us what the state means in people's lives and how people endorse and cultivate statism in their public life. The author focuses on the issue of secularism that has long defined the state in Turkey, and she interrogates in all its complexity how secularism is lived in private and championed in public in a context of increasing religious observance.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Caucasus and Central Asian regions have emerged as two of the most complex regions in international politics. The emergence of the new republics and their detachment from the communist state and its economic system have brought about a sudden decline in economic conditions and an increase in social problems in most of these countries in addition to the outbreak of ethnic and national conflicts.