The 11th-century Andalusian author Ibn Hazm, in his treatise on love entitled Tawq al-Hamama (Ring of the Dove), strikes on a vivid analogy for illustrating the nature of the self and its propensity for wrongdoing: “[t]he righteous man and woman are like a fire concealed within ashes that doesn't burn anyone nearby unless stirred, but the unrighteous are like a blazing fire that burns up everything.” This fire that must be kept tightly enclosed is the lower self, the inner repository of insatiable desire. To release the fire is to allow an immediate and untrammeled gratification of desire that would quickly consume the self and its surroundings. Ibn Hazm's analogy derives from the normative discourse pioneered more than two centuries earlier by Ibn al-Muqaffa (d. 757) and al-Jahiz (d. 868), who, drawing on a variety of sources, developed an account of moral self-integration consonant with the courtly culture of their time. Their account complements the contemporary courtly panegyric poetry, which depicted the caliph and other figures of authority as embodiments of the normative ideal, enjoying and conferring a utopian state of bliss. In the same period, the poet Abu Nuwas (d. c. 814) developed a body of wine poetry that parodies the ideal of self-integration in a way that reveals the symbolic operations at work within it. Abu Nuwas's wine poems take advantage of the apparent contradiction at the heart of normative discourse: the blissful condition of power and pleasure sought by the desiring self can be realized only through moral self-integration, which is the suppression of the desiring self. In other words, one must master one's insatiable desire by adhering to moral norms because this is precisely the way, ultimately, to gratify desire eternally and absolutely. The goal of self-integration, whether conceived of as an ideal psychic state, a utopian community, or a condition in the afterlife, is thus the same boundless conflagration of the sinner pictured by Ibn Hazm, except that it perfects the self instead of destroying it.

For the past seven years, Iran has been in the grip of a literary event. A novel, Bamdad-i khumar (The Morning After), written by a hitherto unknown woman, Fattanah Hajj Sayyidjavadi, (b. 1945), became an overnight best-seller and has so remained. From the start, the book has generated heated debates over its literary and socio-cultural merits. Most critics and readers have very strong opinions about the novel. One reader, another first-time writer, was so deeply angered by what she considered to be the novel's exaggerated female-centeredness and its unfairness to men that she decided to rewrite the novel through the voice of its male anti-hero.

Whereas it is required by equity and justice that, in accordance with the principles of hygiene, the gaols in the governorate and the district capitals be clean and have access to so much fresh air that a person's health is not impaired, and whereas it has been noticed that some of these prisons do not satisfy these conditions, therefore the governors are instructed to conduct personally an examination and inspection of the prisons in their governorate, together with the chief engineer and the regional health officer.

—Order of the Majlis al-Aḥkām, issued in 1849Majlis al-Aḥkām, Mahfaza 1, doc. 1/89, 16 Shaban 1265/13 June 1849, no. 451.

On 19 March 1907, a doctor of the French government, Emile Mauchamp, was beaten to death by a Moroccan mob outside his clinic in the city of Marrakech. The French colonial lobby used this brutal murder to justify invading the Moroccan city of Oujda in 1907 and, eventually, to add Morocco to the colonial empire as a French protectorate in 1912. At Mauchamp's funeral, the minister of foreign affairs eulogized the doctor as a martyr to the barbarous Muslim hatred of civilization. In his (posthumous) study of Moroccan medical practice, La Sorcellerie au Maroc, Mauchamp wrote of Moroccan medicine as “sorcery” and the antithesis of rational science. However, Mauchamp's demise was neither an Islamic rejection of Western science nor an incidental death. Mauchamp's murder was a political event, an act of popular Moroccan defiance against Sultan Abd al-Aziz and anger at his impotence before the European powers. In the Moroccan political imagination, Mauchamp came to embody internal and external threats to the body politic and was made to suffer “many deaths”—for a crumbling Moroccan state, for foreign influence, and for social and economic crisis in Morocco.

In January 1952, the Egyptian monarchy, for the second time, banned a history book by Abd al-Rahman al-Rafii (1889–1966). Several months later, in the wake of the July Revolution, al-Rafii's status had changed dramatically. From his former position as an officially marginalized historian and politician he had become the editor of a daily newspaper, a member of the new constitutional committee, and the head of Egypt's bar association. He subsequently won several state prizes for his scholarly achievements. His books were reprinted and distributed widely. The president quoted him in his speeches. By the early 1960s, al-Rafii had become Egypt's most awarded and celebrated historian of the 20th century and was selected as Egypt's candidate for the Nobel Prize.

Despite the considerable expansion of research in Ottoman economic and social history in recent decades, our knowledge of the long-term trends in prices in the Ottoman Empire, and more generally in the Balkans and the Middle East, is very limited. Economic and social historians of these regions in the late medieval and early modern eras are still unable to make sense of the most basic of monetary magnitudes involving prices, wages, and wealth, even though inter-temporal comparisons of these magnitudes are the most basic prerequisites for studying the long durée.

Dionisius Agius, a reader in Arabic and the Medieval Mediterranean at the University of Leeds, has directed his expertise in linguistics and the writings of medieval geographers writing in Arabic to a study of seafaring in the Arabian/Persian Gulf and Oman. Drawing on a wide range of literary sources and more than ten years of fieldwork in the region, Agius has sought in this book “to establish an historical and linguistic link between the present traditional seagoing vessels and coastal boats of the Gulf and Oman, and those of the medieval Islamic period” (p. xv).

This is a frustrating book. It is frustrating because the author, R. J. Barendse, has clearly undertaken an enormous amount of archival research, including extensive work in the Dutch archives, which, for linguistic reasons, have not been sufficiently exploited. His sources provide a wealth of colorful vignettes from the world of trade in the 17th century. The trip from Mosul to Basra, for example, “led through barren deserts, where the single sound was the distant wail of hyenas. No other human beings were seen for days; sometimes on the far horizon appeared campfires” (p. 44). Or the trials and tribulations of a Turkish merchant named Nasr Ali Cagasi who went to Samarkand to buy rhubarb for a Dutch merchant. When he went bankrupt, the Dutch East India Company threw him in jail to force him to pay his debts. Finally, they released him since no one came forward to provide bail; he had to labor as a domestic servant instead (p. 157). Yet the wealth of detail in the book is not presented within a coherent framework. Indeed, organization of the material is so lacking that it is exhausting to read.

In From the “Terror of the World” to the “Sick Man of Europe”: European Images of Ottoman Empire and Society from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth Aslı Çırakman argues that European attitudes towards the Ottoman Empire were extremely variable in the 16th and 17th centuries, hardening into a simpler picture as Europeans became more self-confident and more self-critical: “one can observe that in the eighteenth-century images of Ottomans there is more agreement than controversy as to the nature of this peculiar form of government and people” (p. 108). The author seeks to challenge Edward Said's arguments in Orientalism, stating flatly that Said oversimplified early modern attitudes to smooth the way for a teleological argument that European attitudes started out reflexively hostile and only became more so with the rise of imperialist and colonialist agendas in the region. Specifically, she argues that earlier travelers and essayists displayed a more wide-ranging curiosity and therefore produced more diverse perspectives on the Ottoman Empire than did their counterparts in the 18th century.

In A. D. 945, eleven days after receiving his title from the ruling Abbasid Caliph al-Mustakfi, the Buwayhid amir Muizz al-Dawla deposed him. Like the green dome of the palace of Abu Jafar Mansur that had crumbled during the spring rains of 939, the Abbasid caliphate was collapsing inward. Not until the turn of the next century, with the loosening of the hold of the Buwayhid amirs on Baghdad, did a caliph make guarded efforts to assert his divinely sanctioned authority outside his sacred precinct. By that time, beyond the walls of the caliphal palace, monumental changes in the structure of power had long since occurred.

This is a fine, if somewhat simple, undergraduate introduction to the thought of Alfarabi—if you happen to be a student transported back to the late 1960s. There are a few entries in the bibliography dated after that, but these citations are mostly reprints of Alfarabi's published texts. Certainly, Fakhry's observations on Alfarabi's thought do not appear to have developed much beyond the scholarship of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the reader justifiably might think that this is a publication of a rather old manuscript, dusted off and given a pleasant cover. Fakhry's efforts here remind one of the recent publication of Muhsin Mahdi's Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy (Chicago, 2001) in that both are rather quaint products of an earlier time in the study of philosophy and science in Islam. It is difficult to say what has prompted this resurrection of mostly outdated scholarship, It may be a response on the part of publishers eager to get anything in print since the recent renewal of interest in things Islamic, though for all the wrong reasons.

Historians of the Ottoman Empire have until recently characterized the 17th and 18th centuries as a period of decline, wedged in between the glorious age of Süleiman and that of the Ottoman recovery in the Tanzimat era. As such, the Ottoman conquest of the island of Crete that began in 1644 and ended with the fall of Candia (Iráklion) in 1669 has often been reduced to a footnote, at best, or confined to discussions of Ottoman military tactics and siege warfare. Greek nationalist historiography sees the conquest of the island as a tragic historic rupture, with the island's people slipping from the mini-renaissance they had enjoyed during the last decades of Venetian control to the despotism of the Tourkokratía. Despite the very important re-imagining of the Ottoman past that has occurred over the past decade as scholars have examined a wider range of archival sources throughout the Mediterranean basin, this thesis has gone largely unchallenged. Molly Greene's monograph on Crete before and after the conquest shatters that simplistic characterization with a well-written, and much needed, bit of historical revisionism.

Classical Arab authors' use of anthologies for self-expression and their tendency to recycle familiar material from earlier authors make their works a gold mine for studying the relationships that link a person to a text. It is this tangle that Abdelfattah Kilito unravels and illuminates, deftly and unobtrusively, in The Author and His Doubles, a set of essays on plagiarism and forgery in classical Arabic literature. The fourth chapter, “The Paths of the Prophetic Hadith,” for example, points out both that few other texts have inspired as much discussion of the relationship of a man to a text as hadith collections and that scholars' emphasis on its isnād did not mean that they neglected “the contents of the Hadith” (p. 42).

This learned work is the accumulated harvest of more than twenty years of profound research, as shown by the inclusion in the book's bibliography of numerous publications on the subject by the author, Rafael Talmon. The subject at hand is the reconstruction of the Arabic grammatical tradition in its earliest phase up to the time of the most famous grammarian of Arabic, Sibawayh (d. ca. A.D. 796), author of al-Kitab, “the Book,” and his teacher al-Khalil ibn Ahmad (d. between 777 and 791), author of the lexicographical Kitab al-Ayn. The discussion was triggered by Michael G. Carter in a few thought-provoking publications dating from the 1970s in which he identified Sibawayh and his immediate teachers (besides al-Khalil, Yunus ibn Habib [d. 798]) as the first real systematic grammarians of Arabic. In Carter's view, Sibawayh had a group of enthusiastic but still amateurish grammarians in mind when reference was made, twenty-two times, to naḥwiyyūn in his Kitab. Talmon could not and would not accept the idea of a sudden creation of Arabic grammar in free space and became engrossed in approaching this subject matter from various angles, analyzing both grammatical and historiographical aspects of the early history of the Arabic grammatical tradition. In his previous monograph, the voluminous Arabic Grammar in its Formative Age (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), originally intended to be a mere chapter of the book under review here, Talmon deals exclusively with al-Khalil's role in the genesis and early development of the Arabic linguistic tradition. This was basically done to determine which parts of Kitab al-Ayn can be positively attributed to al-Khalil in order to compare al-Khalil's views with Sibawayh's and with those of other early grammarians from both the Basran and the Kufan schools to support the “Old Iraqi School” hypothesis, which is central in the present work.

Maan Abu Nowar, a member of a well-known family from Salt, joined the Arab Legion in 1943. In 1948, as a young lieutenant, he participated in the Palestine war. In 1957, as a colonel and commander of a brigade group, he was tried for involvement in a conspiracy against King Hussein (instigated by his cousin, Ali, the chief of the General Staff) but was acquitted. He retired from the army in 1972 as a major-general and commenced a second career as a diplomat and politician. Simultaneously, he pursued a third career—that of a prolific historian. In 1988, he gained a D.Phil. at Oxford for the study that constituted the basis of his book History of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan: The Creation and Development of Transjordan 1920–1929 (1989). His two recent books are a chronological and conceptual continuation of his first work.

This volume hit the bookstore shelves when the film Salkım Hanım's Necklace sparked a great deal of controversy in the Turkish press and drew criticism from ultra-nationalist circles. The film was about the tragedy of the Capital Levy, the most drastic Turkification policy implemented during World War II. It was thanks to the film that younger generations of Turks learned about these events. The debate was further inflamed when the film was shown on state television.

Maziar Behrooz has stated that the goal of his study is twofold: first, to document the history of communism in Iran during the thirty years between the 1953 coup and 1983, “when the last legal communist organizations were banned”; and second, “to provide an analysis of how and why the movement disintegrated in the 1980s.” (p. xv)

The last chapter in Lawrence Davidson's book is titled “Colonizing the American Mind,” with a purpose to reverse the interpretation of Peter Grose's famous book Israel in the American Mind (1983). Actually, the whole of Davidson's book aims to revise the traditional historiographical approach, which has highlighted the strong bond between American values and those of the Jewish state. Davidson has been criticizing this approach since the beginning, focusing his argument on the concept of imperialism, which has produced, according to him, a serious alteration in the West's attitude toward the East. However, as will be shown, the concept of imperialism—based on the traditional separation between a civilized, advanced, and efficient West and an East in need of protection and leadership, which Davidson uses as a basic negative criterion for all his interpretation—is weak, outdated, and, above all, too ideological.

Bankers-turned-historians are not a common sight in our field, and EzzelArab brings his expertise to where it is needed most. His book rightly argues for the significance of financial constraints and economic competition in the development of early nationalism as a reaction to foreign interference in Egyptian affairs before the Urabi revolt. The author predates the notion of economic nationalism, defined as the struggle over the domination of state finances and the economy, to this period rather than to its common association with the establishment of Bank Misr in the early 1920s. Although the term “traditional elites” is somewhat misleading (see later), the book demonstrates that economic nationalism was developed as a response of local power groups to external threats to their interests.

In Green Crescent over Nazareth, Professor Israeli provides a very provocative and meticulous account of Nazareth in modern times—as part of the British Mandatory Palestine and as part of the State of Israel since 1948—and the changing demography of the city, which he characterizes as the hostile and deliberate displacement of Christians by Muslims. The story of Nazareth, and the political and cultural struggle between the Christian and Muslim communities that clearly characterize it, is explained in great detail and is the focus of the book.