The sensational nature of the Iranian press in the 1940s has been largely understood in political terms. In September 1941, occupying Allied armies forced Reza Shah Pahlavi (1879–1944, r. 1925–41) into exile, ending his tyrannical “twenty years” and unleashing a variety of political forces which vied with each other for public support in the press.3 The presence of Allied censors notwithstanding, so the argument goes, the Iranian press was momentarily free from effective government censorship—though not from the recurring cycle of censorship that has dominated scholarly interest in the Iranian press.4 But a closer look at the often violent and sexual political discourse in the Iranian press raises questions less about Iran's political history than about its cultural and economic history. Why was the content of the press so graphic in the 1940s? What economic and cultural trends sustained such content once it had been provoked by political events? How much did the overt sexuality of political discourse confirm or modify notions of gender in Iranian culture?

The 19 August 1953 toppling of Muhammad Musaddiq's government in Iran was an important historical event from various perspectives, many of which are being discussed by Middle East observers to this date. First, it was the first covert post-World War II operation by the U.S. government, in cooperation with Britain, to topple the constitutional government of a sovereign nation. Operation AJAX, as the coup d'état came to be called by the CIA, was implemented at the height of the Cold War, and as such was accompanied by many familiar justifications. The most important of these were the improbability of any resolution to the oil-nationalization crisis between Iran and Britain as long as Musaddiq remained in power and the communist threat posed by the Tudeh Party of Iran and its Soviet sponsor.1 The long-term consequence of this intervention can partially explain the 1979 revolution in Iran and the ongoing crisis in Iran–U.S. relations.

The era culminating in World War I saw a transition from multinational empires to nation-states. Large empires such as the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman searched for ways to cope with the decline of their political control, while peoples in these empires shifted their political loyalties to nation-states. The Ottoman Empire offers a favorable canvas for studying new nationalisms that resulted in many successful and unsuccessful attempts to form nation-states. As an example of successful attempts, Arab nationalism has received the attention that it deserves in the field of Middle Eastern studies.1 Students have engaged in many complex debates on different aspects of Arab nationalism, enjoying a wealth of hard data. Studies on Kurdish nationalism, however, are still in their infancy. Only a very few scholars have addressed the issue in a scholarly manner.2 We still have an inadequate understanding of the nature of early Kurdish nationalism and its consequences for the Middle East in general and Turkish studies in particular. Partly because of the subject's political sensitivity, many scholars shy away from it. However, a consideration of Kurdish nationalism as an example of unsuccessful attempts to form a nation-state can contribute greatly to the study of nationalism in the Middle East.

A columnist in a Turkish newspaper recently asked, “Will nothing really be the same again?”3 referring to the impact of the massive earthquake of 17 August 1999 on the Turkish psyche. The writer Murathan Mungan used a similar metaphor earlier in what seems today like a prophetic statement: “I think Turkey has really come to lean against the wall. There is nowhere to go; either the wall will crumble or it will be dismantled. If it crumbles, we will be crushed below, if it is dismantled maybe we will move to another space—or at least try to.”4

Political Islam has gained heightened visibility in recent decades in Turkey. Large numbers of female students have begun to demonstrate their commitment by wearing the banned Islamic headdress on university campuses, and influential pro-Islamist TV channels have proliferated. This paper focuses on the Welfare (Refah) Party as the foremost institutional representative of political Islam in Turkey.

Islamic Politics in Palestine charts the evolution of political Islam's responses to the changing political environment in Palestine from the 1920s through the mid 1990s. Through extensive fieldwork based on oral evidence, ethnographic interviews, and an impressive compilation of primary source material, Milton-Edwards provides her readers with perhaps the most detailed, comprehensive, and informative account of Palestinian Islamic politics in recent years.

In The Fortress of Faith: The Attitudes Towards Muslims in Fifteenth Century Spain, Ana Echevarría presents a study of four mid-15th-century texts and argues that their polemical tone toward the Muslim world was inspired by contemporary historical events and revealed a Christian Spain preparing itself to end Muslim rule on the Iberian Peninsula. She argues that the events of 1450–70 are key to understanding Fernando and Isabel's renewed march against Granada in 1474 and that ecclesiastical literature of this time—as a manifestation of a “frontier church”—can provide a glimpse of the ideas common at court and among the clergy. At the center of her book are the works of three theologians (Juan de Segovia, Alonso de Espina, and Juan de Torquemada) and one layman (the Aragonese Pedro de Cavallería)—all written between 1450 and 1461—and Echevarría juxtaposes these texts with a wide selection of similar treatises written in Spain and elsewhere since the Muslim invasion of Iberia in 711. For each of her four primary texts, she provides the historical context of the author's life as well as an analysis of each work's style, sources, symbolism, and mode of argumentation against Islam (which, in general, involved allegations about the illegitimacy of the Muslim Prophet, holy text, or tenets). She then compares the views of these authors with the legal norms governing interactions among Muslims, Christians, and Jews in 15th-century Spain and concludes that both reveal an “evolution towards intolerance and violence which was common to the society and its rulers” and that impelled the eventually successful conquest of Granada.

Over the past several decades, many scholars have attempted to develop a general theory explaining the causes and consequences of revolution. Some of the most notable of these scholars are Crane Brinton, Barrington Moore, Theda Skocpol, and Jack Goldstone. Their theories—as well as those of others—continue to be actively debated even though they were published many years, or even decades, ago.

This edited volume, the outcome of a conference held in 1996 in Istanbul, consists of seventeen articles, sixteen of which concern [ayn]Ali-oriented communities in the Middle East. Ten of the articles are focused on Alevis in Turkey, and the others discuss Ahl-i Haqq studies, the Druze, and the Alawites of Syria. The reader is immediately drawn to the gorgeous, vividly colorful artwork on both covers and the high-quality glossy paper used in this volume, both of which are rare in academic books published in the West. This book will be of interest mainly to Islamicists who are interested in [ayn]Ali-oriented religions, even though Tord Olsson's brief Epilogue is methodologically encompassing for a wider history of religions audience. Libraries should have it in their collections.

“Modernization,” or processes of modern socio-political development, and identity formation have been among the most recurrent and pertinent themes of scholarly studies undertaken on 19th- and 20th-century Egypt. Works on intellectual thought; economic, political, and social history; folk culture; and gender implicitly and explicitly grapple with the issue of the country's transition to, maintenance of, struggle with, or rejection of modernity. Modernization has often been understood through a hegemonic nationalist discourse—that is, through governmental rhetoric, the writings of establishment intellectuals, and uncritical examinations of state institutions. Alternative and counter-hegemonic manifestations and representations of modernity have been largely overlooked, which makes Walter Armbrust's anthropological inquiry into Egyptian mass culture an absolutely vital contribution to the study of modern Egypt.

For more than a decade, scholars and writers of various stripes have been revisiting the events surrounding the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948, whose outcome heavily shaped subsequent Middle East politics. Basing their work primarily on newly available Israeli, British, and American archival materials, they have shed considerable light and generated much heat regarding the origins, consequences, and degrees of responsibility for the events surrounding the birth of the State of Israel, the uprooting of two-thirds of the Palestinian Arab community, and the defeat of neighboring Arab armies.

Uri Davis has written a valuable book in which he advances a very progressive project indeed. Davis is first and foremost committed to human rights. Whereas he acknowledges that liberalism, the ideological narrative of Western universalism, informs this discourse, Davis dismisses the critique of human rights as mere cultural imperialism from the West. Human rights, according to Davis, are spared what may otherwise be a justifiable critique of liberalism by virtue of their incorporation into the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In other words, this declaration is universal law, and state membership in the United Nations necessarily implies respect for it.

Ever since Max Weber posited the ideal-typical distinction between Oriental and Occidental cities in his essays on the economic history of Europe, many historians of the Middle East have grappled with his model. The debate about the existence of the “Oriental” or, more specifically, the “Islamic” city and the validity of Weber's construct have led to the growth of a sizable body of literature on the topic. In this collection of their essays, Masters, Goffman, and Eldem approach this question from a different angle. They ask not so much whether the “Islamic City” exists, but whether there was such a thing as an Ottoman city. Based on their work on Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul in the 17th and 18th centuries, they come up with an answer that can be described as a qualified no.

The Other Kurds: Yazidis in Colonial Iraq offers an ambitious effort to reinterpret communal identities in Iraq during the British Mandate. Although this work focuses explicitly on Yazidis, Fuccaro engages the ongoing debate about the process of group identity formation in non-national states. In this monograph, Fuccaro argues that changing Yazidi communal identities are constructed within a broader context of government centralization, national identity formation, and British Mandatory rule. She shows that this context is crucial in understanding the reconstruction of Yazidi collective self-definitions.

Like a mega-earthquake, the end of the Cold War sent lasting shockwaves throughout the international system. Outside the former communist bloc, the epicenter of this earthquake, nowhere else were those tremors more dramatic in their impact than in the Middle East—a region of long-standing geo-strategic standing and a legacy of incessant foreign conquest and intervention. The end of the Cold War exposed clearly the structural weaknesses of the region and drastically reduced its system immunities. As at previous turning points, the Middle East faced formidable constraints as well as luring opportunities. Middle East at the Crossroads is a collection of articles addressing the contours of this new environment and its challenges for both Middle Eastern states and the major powers. It is a welcome addition and an important contribution to Middle Eastern studies.

The Kurdish question has remained one of the most destabilizing issues for modern Turkey. Despite decades of military campaigns in the southeast and the existence of a continuing state of emergency in that region of Turkey for more than a decade, various Turkish governments have yet to resolve their Kurdish dilemma in a satisfactory way. According to the Turkish Association for Human Rights, some 3 million Kurds have been driven from their villages by the Turkish army, and some 3,000 Kurdish villages have been evacuated (ethnically cleansed) over the past fourteen years. In addition to military campaigns in Turkey's southeast, disappearances, summary trials, and other forms of political repression have turned the region into a permanent war zone.

The objective of Scott Pegg's book is to examine the role of the de facto state in the international system. The book begins with a description of quasi-states, entities defined as ineffective states that possess internationally recognized sovereignty as indicated by membership in the United Nations. The de facto state, by contrast, is a political movement that possesses substantial control over a specified territory and population but lacks recognition of its sovereignty by the international community. As expressed by Pegg, “The quasi-state is legitimate no matter how ineffective it is. . . . The de facto state, on the other hand, is a functioning reality that is denied legitimacy by the rest of international society” (p. 5).

First published in 1976 under the same title by Bibliotheca Islamica (Minneapolis and Chicago) but with the additional subtitle, “A Study in 15th/9th Century Turko–Iranian Politics,” this book is a revised and expanded version of the author's revised doctoral dissertation (Princeton University, 1974).

The importance of Qutb al-Din Musa al-Yunini's (d. 726/1326) Dhayl Mir[ham]at al-Zaman has long been recognized by historians of the medieval Islamic world. In this book, Li Guo places this author and his work in the context of early 14th-century Mamluk Syrian intellectual developments and provides both a translation (vol. 1) and an edition of the Arabic text (vol. 2) for the five-year period 1297–1302. The result is a valuable work of historiography and philology.

This much-needed historical survey of the Sufi tradition brings together a great deal of specialized literature, especially the European scholarship that is often ignored in North America. The first eight chapters of the book discuss the beginnings of the tradition, early figures, gradual institutionalization, poetical and metaphysical expressions, and the foundations of the great tariqahs. Chapter 9 provides an overview of the later history of the tariqahs on a regional basis, in most cases coming into the 20th century. Chapter 10 discusses major concepts and practices. Given Knysh's keen awareness that the Sufi tradition cannot be isolated from the Islamic tradition as a whole, surprisingly little attention is paid to the roots of Sufism in the Qur[ham]an and the hadith. Then again, the survey is necessarily selective and aims only to highlight major figures and movements. Any serious attempt to be comprehensive would have given us a multi-volume study. Every specialist will be disappointed at the failure to discuss or at least mention certain figures, movements, themes, or topics.