Perhaps inadvertently, IJMES rendered a disservice to its readers by allowing Michael M. Gunter to review The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide, by Guenter Lewy, because not only the book but also the reviewer pose serious problems.

Michael Gunter should not have written a review of Guenter Lewy's The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide for IJMES or for any other scholarly journal, as he was intimately involved in the prepublication review and promotion of the book.

IJMES follows the standard academic practice of assuming that anyone who has played a substantive role in the prepublication preparation of a book manuscript—as a major adviser to the author or as a reviewer for the publisher, for example—will accordingly decline the invitation to review the book for IJMES.

An examination of the structure of the Fihrist reveals a number of principles of organization on which Ibn al-Nadim drew in compiling and arranging his work, chief among which is that of chronology. A close reading of the fifth and sixth maqamacr;las of the Fihrist, dedicated to Islamic theology and law, respectively, indicates that they present not only a taxonomy of the theological and legal schools in Ibn al-Nadimiacute;s environment in Baghdad during the Buwayhid period but also chronologically arrange histories of the foundations of those schools of thought. This original conception is one indication of the value of the Fihrist as an intellectual history of the first four Islamic centuries from the point of view of an Imami Shiءi, Muءtazili thinker.

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This article investigates the history of the Muslim Brotherhood from 1954 to 1971, when thousands of its members were imprisoned and tortured in Gamel Abdel Nasser's prisons. The period is marked by intervals of crisis, attempts at organizational reform, and ideological discourse, which was prompted by Sayyid Qutb's activist interpretation. However, the Muslim Brotherhood finally developed a moderate ideology, which countered radical Islamist leanings growing within its midst while remaining loyal to Qutb's legacy. This centrist approach to Islamist activism and opposition is epitomized by Duءat la Qudat, which was composed by a number of authors and issued in Hasan al-Hudaybi's name. Written as a joint project of leading Brothers and al-Azhar scholars, the text is evidence of the first steps toward reconciling with the state system during Nasser's presidency.

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This paper traces the significant role of Sufism in promoting Muslim—Christian dialogue at a time of growing friction and colonial encroachment. The widening gap in power and wealth between the Western and Muslim world from the 19th century onward heightened cultural animosity between the two but also evoked ecumenical efforts to diffuse this contention. One such effort was Islamic modernism, which promoted a liberal interpretation of scripture and advocated the establishment of an inclusive polity that would encompass women and religious minorities. Islamic modernism gained considerable attention in the research literature. By contrast, another important ecumenical discourse, based on Sufism, which emerged in the early 20th century and was joined by Muslims and European Christians alike, has remained largely unexplored in the literature. Cairo, Rome, and Paris constituted the geographical points of convergence of this discourse; the Sufi teachings of Ibn al-ءArabi (d. 1240) provided its ideological core. Most participants sought to position Sufi values as a cultural bridge between East and West, although political considerations were also involved. This paper shows that far from being anachronistic or detached from reality, as some of its vociferous critics charged, Sufism remained a vital tradition well into modern times. Moreover, it engendered a lively debate within Western intellectual circles over the role of spirituality in modern life.

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This article introduces the legal methodology of independent mujtahid (legal scholar) Abu Bakr ibn al-Mundhir al-Naysaburi (d. 930) in order to shed light on the nature of ijtihād (independent judgment in a legal or theological question) on the eve of crystallization of the four Sunni legal schools. Ibn al-Mundhir's presentation of laws concerning punishment for theft indicates that the Qurʿan and Prophetic hadith played a modest role in early elaboration of Islamic law. Instead, the bulk of this early mujtahid's efforts were devoted to culling and evaluating legal opinions of the companions, successors, and, in particular, a small group of postsuccessor jurists. I conclude by locating Ibn al-Mundhir within the literature of juristic disagreement (ikhtilāf) and highlighting the features that make his writings exceptional within this tradition.

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This article examines the language, content, role, and historical significance of petitions written by ordinary people to the secretary-general of the Republican People's Party in the 1920s and 1930s. Given the highly authoritarian circumstances in which other forms of expressing popular opinion were suppressed, petition writing was one of the few modes of interaction between the bureaucratic/political elites and the people. Although petitioning was an effective mechanism for the Kemalist elite to gain insight into attitudes toward the new regime, people who lacked control over bureaucratic malfeasance and injustice used petitions to involve the political elite in their everyday concerns in order to have their demands fulfilled and justice restored. Through various strategies, petitioners mediated and/or transformed the regime's nationalist and populist discourse to further their own interests. In this sense, the founding principles and the master narrative of the regime turned into a discursive field in which the meanings of “state,” “nation,” and “citizen” were being constantly redefined and contested. Petitions prove that in early republican Turkey there was a much more complicated, multilayered, multifaceted relationship between the people and state and party authorities than has previously been assumed.