One of the most complex questions in the study of the history of Arab nationalism is that of the relationship between Islam and nationalism in collective political identity. This complexity shows itself clearly in the specific case of the Palestinian national movement during the early Mandatory period, when the Islamic political sensibilities that historically had been central to the Ottoman Empire were thoroughly intertwined with Palestinian territorial nationalism and Pan-Arabism.1 It is not difficult to identify individual Palestinian activists who expressed their political identities at various times through any or all of these categories.2 Clearly, religious and nationalist bases of social and political identity are neither mutually exclusive nor unchanging over time. Concepts of identity, whether expressed through kinship relations, citizenship, or religious and national identity, are generated, chosen, and manipulated in specific historical circumstances. As Dale Eickelman explains, “These forms do not exist as objects that can be torn from social and cultural contexts by anthropologists for recording and classification into typologies.”3 One can therefore ask, Under what circumstances did Palestinian activists choose to express their political identity in terms of nationalism?

Although social-contract theorists differ on a number of points, they concur that human beings choose to form associations to promote their interests. An important corollary is that tension exists between the individual's inherent independence and freedom and the authority to which she or he must submit to achieve compliance with the goals of the contract. Occasionally, a theorist discusses God in the overall scheme of things, but the conception is deistic, so that the God who created the world does not intervene in its operation. For the rest, contractarian theories privilege natural law and natural rights, according to which the individual is treated as a social being who is fully rational, free, and independent. Fundamentally, three steps are taken in the process of making the social contract: (1) creating society; (2) creating the sovereign state; (3) discharging obligations and enjoying benefits.

Around the mid-19th century, the cigarette, the latest fashion in tobacco consumption, gained popularity in Egypt, as it did globally and throughout the Ottoman Empire. Some fifty years later, the cigarette had become the predominant smoking preference in Egypt, and luxury Egyptian cigarettes were being exported around the world. Indeed, Egyptian and Turkish brands played a significant role in introducing cigarettes to different parts of the globe and thus in shaping world cigarette production. This article sets out to tell the fascinating story of the luxury Egyptian cigarette and uses this case to reflect on the development of modern markets in Egypt.

This article addresses the impact of novel consumption practices on the shaping and negotiation of modern social identities in the late Ottoman Empire. These issues are placed within the context of the rapid social, economic, and cultural changes that occurred during the 19th century and the powerful, though ambivalent, influence of the West. A number of studies have examined the diverse and complex relations between the Ottoman Empire and European societies during this period, stressing the fundamental role of Western influence on the shaping of the late Ottoman society.1 Although most of these studies touch on issues of cultural change, it is my contention that this important field still needs to be studied in its own right.

This essay analyzes the organizational culture(s) of Egyptian public-sector firms. I accomplish this through an ethnography of two state-owned textile companies in Alexandria. I describe the cultures of these organizations in terms of hierarchy, accountability, trust, and authority relations and assess the effects of these features on the quality of working life and overall efficiency.1 What is it like to work in these companies? How is authority exercised, and what is the nature of relations between superiors and subordinates? What impact, if any, do the cultures of these firms have on performance, efficiency, and productivity?

The books under review here variously demonstrate the progress made in the recent historical writing of the late Ottoman period (c. 1750–1922). They also reflect the problems that persist in this important sub-discipline of the historian's craft. In the West, the writing of Ottoman history began as an offshoot of European history, often the purview of historians interested in the “Eastern Question.” A notable example is William Langer's Diplomacy of Imperialism, a series of essays on various aspects of European diplomacy that gave prominent place to the Ottoman Empire.1 These European specialists, well grounded in their discipline, correctly treated the Ottoman past as part of European history. For all their disciplinary skill, however, they studied the Ottoman experience from the outside, using a rich array of European-language material but not indigenous sources generated from within the Ottoman world. This scholarly pattern began to shift with the appearance of a number of seminal works that opened new paths for research into Ottoman history.2 These studies are still noteworthy for their often extensive use of Ottoman primary sources, especially the writings of the Ottoman chroniclers and contemporary observers. The work of Bernard Lewis was particularly influential, expressing a paradigm that focused on Westernization during the Ottoman 19th century that inexorably—indeed, inevitably—led to the Turkish republican 20th century. Thus, these 1960s works also misdirected the field in a serious manner, creating a set of false assumptions that we live with now, in the present day—namely, all of them worked from the presupposition that “Ottoman Empire” and “Turkey” were synonymous terms. While speaking of the Ottoman past, their real agenda was to discuss the origins of the Turkish nation-state. In so doing, they dumped into the trash bin of history those Ottoman experiences that were not directly related to the formation of the Turkish republic. And so, the histories of the Balkan and Arab provinces of the empire became largely irrelevant and off the Ottoman historians' agenda.

A significant overlap of subject matter explains the decision to review these two books together. Paul Cobb's study concerns itself with the political history of Syria in the late Umayyad and early Abbasid periods. Jacob Lassner's book is more far-reaching, but nearly all of the eleven essays in his book deal with the history and historiography of the early Islamic period. The longest chapter considers the ninth Abbasid caliphate during the Samarran interlude, and in this case he and Cobb are on shared ground.

In the Leaven of the Ancients, John Walbridge studies the appropriation of non–Peripatetic philosophical ideas by an anti–Aristotelian Islamic philosopher, Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi (d. 1191). He proposes a comprehensive explanation of the origin of Suhrawardi's philosophical system, a revival of the “wisdom of the Ancients” and its philosophical affiliations “grounded” in Greek philosophy (p. xiii). Walbridge attempts to uncover the reasons for Suhrawardi's rejection of the prevailing neo–Aristotelian synthesis in Islamic philosophy, Suhrawardi's knowledge and understanding of non–Aristotelian Greek philosophy, the ancient philosophers Suhrawardi was attempting to follow, the relationship between Suhrawardi's specific philosophical teachings (logic, ontology, physics, and metaphysics), and his understanding of non–Aristotelian ancient philosophy and the relationship between Suhrawardi's system and the major Greek philosophers, schools, and traditions—in particular the Presocratics, Plato, and the Stoics (p. 8).

This volume does not “distill more than four decades of research,” as its jacket blurb asserts, but brings together eleven articles on Farabi's “political philosophy” by Muhsin Mahdi published between 1963 and 1999. They are arranged in the book in three parts. The first, introductory part contains two general essays titled “The Political Orientation of Islamic Philosophy” and “Philosophy and Political Thought,” and a historical study on “The Foundation of Islamic Philosophy.” The second and third parts contain seven articles, which present detailed readings of eight selections from Mahdi's canon of Farabi's “political” writings: Enumeration of the Sciences (chap. 5), Book of Religion, Virtuous City (second half), Political Regime (second half), Attainment of Happiness, Philosophy of Plato, Philosophy of Aristotle, and the second part of the Book of Letters (some of Mahdi's renditions of the titles are misleading; see later). Another general essay on “Religion and the Cyclical View of History,” roaming from Plato to Nietzsche, concludes the collection.

Of the four or five names one associates with the founding of the modern study of Islamic mysticism, Fritz Meier's is perhaps the least appreciated in North America because most of his seminal contributions to the subject have remained in their original German, and since the end of World War I North Americans have been not inclined to give Islamicist scholarship in this language its due. Such foundational works as Nöldeke and Schwally and Goldziher in Qurءanic studies, Ritter on עAttar, and the present author on Kubra and Baha al-Walad, remain untranslated and insufficiently studied or even referred to by recent generations of scholars and specialists.

Klaus Schippmann, who teaches archaeology at the University of Göttingen, has participated in several archaeological excavations in southern Arabia. As he states in the Introduction to the book, “very little is known on the subject” of the history of ancient southern Arabia, and he outlines the reasons for this. His aim is to present to a broad audience, including Orientalists, historians of ancient history not concerned primarily with this region, archaeology students, and the general reader, “a consolidated overview of the current state of knowledge” on topics related to the history and culture of South Arabia. The book was originally published in German in 1998; corrections and updating were introduced in the English edition.

Devin Stewart has written a thoroughly researched and closely argued analysis of how Twelver Shiעi legal theory developed in response to the institutionalization of Sunni law. He contends that the origins and history of Twelver Shiעi law, sparked by the vacuum in authority brought about by the Occultation of the twelfth imam, was motivated by the need to communicate and debate with Sunni jurists.

Iran's monarchs have had a special place in the historiography of that country. Before the 1977–79 Iranian Revolution, Iranian and non–Iranian historians devoted hundreds of pages to the lives, habits, courtly life, wars, and customs of Iran's kings, from the ancient Archaemenians to the recent Pahlavis. Following the recent revolution, a spate of works on the late Muhammad Reza Shah filled the bookshelves. Moreover, during the past decade, researchers revived earlier passions for the Safavid family, their financial, commercial, and agricultural practices, foreign policies, and historiography in both article and book form.

In Preparation for a Revolution, M. Şükrü Hanioğlu has brought together extensive research into the working of the Young Turk political-opposition movements against the rule of Sultan Abdulhamid II to create a work that is likely to become a benchmark for historians of late Ottoman history. Moreover, the author has meticulously mapped out the path by which modern intellectual idealism was transformed into actual political transition—a progression largely under-studied for the Ottoman state.

This is a welcome addition to the literature on American foreign policy, the Cyprus crisis of 1974, and the implications the crisis had for American politics and the triangle of American–Greek–Turkish relations. It provides an in-depth analysis of the events that led to the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in July 1974 and examines how the Watergate scandal prevented the United States from playing a constructive role in the eastern Mediterranean. The author argues that, while the White House was virtually paralyzed and President Richard Nixon was preoccupied with his struggle to stay in power, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger mishandled the Cyprus crisis. Ioannides's thesis is that the absence of presidential leadership and authority affected the conduct of foreign policy, with grave consequences for U.S. interests in the region.

Uri Kupferschmidt's study of Henri Naus is a welcome addition to the material for the study of Egyptian inter-war politics and economics and to the very sparse biographical material on members of the Egyptian elite during the 20th century more generally. Naus, a native of Belgium who was intimately connected with the Egyptian sugar industry in the first three decades of the 20th century, was one of a rather large community of expatriate businessmen in Egypt at the time. Theirs is a story that, as Kupferschmidt's copious and intelligent comments on the existing literature make clear, has been told from a variety of viewpoints other than their own. Robert Tignor's State, Private Enterprise and Economic Change is a large overview of Egyptian business. Robert Vitalis's study When Capitalists Collide focuses on the business community through its Egyptian-born rather than foreign members.

This is a brisk, refreshing book that helps all of us look at the Middle East in a different way. There are many points at which, it can be claimed, the modern Middle East was formed. One obvious candidate is 1967, the date of the third Arab–Israeli war, and of the effective demise of the conflict between Arab radical nationalist and conservative forces. Another turning point would be 1991, the year of the last Gulf War and of the collapse of the USSR. An earlier conventional starting point for the history of the modern Middle East is 1918, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of the states system that has, more or less, endured to this day. David Lesch, a historian working at Trinity University in San Antonio, takes 1979. In his view, there are three major, somewhat inter-related, events that together marked this as being the decisive moment for the ensuing decades: the Iranian Revolution in February, the Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty in March, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.

This work is part of Arnold's Historical Endings series and is presumably intended for university students. However, the book has some inherent limitations that may restrict its usefulness in the classroom, especially for courses on the Middle East.

Theoharis Stavrides has produced an exhaustive study of one of the founding fathers of the Ottoman grand vizierate, the “second-in-command” and deputy to the sultan, an office that acquired most of the duties and obligations that characterized its imperial version with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The work is divided into three parts, consisting of ten chapters, as well as an Introduction, a brief Conclusion, extensive footnotes, three appendixes, a bibliography (pp. 418–32), and an index.

Offering a useful survey of historical developments in Algeria since 1830, Algeria, 1830–2000 focuses on persistent problems of historical memory, struggles over identity, and the (until now) failed effort to create a state based on law and secular-republican principles. The book consists primarily of English-language translations from three books written by Benjamin Stora, a noted French historian of Algeria, in the early 1990s.