This article is about social activism and its relationship to social development in the Middle East. It examines the myriad strategies that the region's urban grass-roots pursue to defend their rights and improve their lives in this neo-liberal age. Prior to the advent of the political–economic restructuring of the 1980s, most Middle Eastern countries were largely dominated by either nationalist-populist regimes (such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Turkey) or pro-Western rentier states (Iran, Arab Gulf states). Financed by oil or remittances, these largely authoritarian states pursued state-led development strategies, attaining remarkable (21% average annual) growth rates.1 Income from oil offered the rentier states the possibility of providing social services to many of their citizens, and the ideologically driven populist states dispensed significant benefits in education, health, employment, housing, and the like.2 For these post-colonial regimes, such provision of social welfare was necessary to build popularity among the peasants, workers, and middle strata at a time that these states were struggling against both the colonial powers and old internal ruling classes. The state acted as the moving force of economic and social development on behalf of the populace.

Over the course of more than three decades, efforts to integrate theories of political economy with verbal culture have produced some of the most generative inquiries into the social meaning of discursive form. Beginning in the 1960s, sociolinguists developed what became known as the “ethnography of speaking,”1 with the aim of considering verbal skills and performance as aspects of a socioeconomic system whose resources are apportioned according to a hierarchical division of labor. Critical of the more formalist and universalist language paradigms of Leonard Bloomfield and Noam Chomsky, these theorists argued that speaking is a socially and culturally constructed activity that is meaningful precisely in its relationship to specific systems of material organization. By the 1970s, sociologists were extending these insights to broader political theory by proposing that linguistic competence be considered a form of “capital” that is distributed in “linguistic markets.”2 Through pioneering interdisciplinary efforts, inquiries into the competences of individual speakers gradually yielded to analyses of situated calculations that individuals make in exchange—calculations of quantities and kinds of return, of symbolic and economic capital, of alternative representations. Meaning was becoming as much a matter of value and power as it was an expression of relationships between, as Ferdinand de Saussure once proposed, a “sound pattern” and a “concept.”3 Indeed, in recent work in linguistic and cultural anthropology, studies of meaning have been linked even more intentionally to political economy by scholars who locate signs within social and material contexts. Words are things that circulate as signs through social, symbolic, and economic trajectories4 and are refracted through linguistic markets that are multiple and shifting.5 Building on earlier social anthropology, these studies suggest that, even within one tightly knit social community, exchange becomes meaningful only at the intersection of multiple systems of value.

The wartime fate of the Ottoman Empire's Armenian minority continues to be controversial. The debate in the main revolves around the causes and nature of that fate. Some historians have alleged that what is involved is centrally organized mass murder—or, to use contemporary terminology, genocide. This school of thought maintains that the Ottoman authorities were waiting for a suitable opportunity to undertake the wholesale liquidation of the empire's Armenian population, and the outbreak of World War I provided that opportunity. The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, or Unionists), who controlled the Ottoman government, they argue further, did in fact undertake this liquidation under cover of the war.1 Others, however, dispute these assertions, especially that of genocidal intent. This group maintains that Armenian acts of disloyalty, subversion, and insurrection in wartime forced the central government to order, for purposes of relocation, the deportation of large sections of the Armenian population. According to this argument, apart from those who were killed in “intercommunal” clashes—that is, a “civil war”—the bulk of the Armenian losses resulted from the severe hardships associated with poorly administered measures of deportations, including exhaustion, sickness, starvation, and epidemics. In other words, this school of thought holds that the Ottoman Empire, in the throes of an existential war, had no choice but to protect itself by resorting to drastic methods; therefore, the tragic fate of the Armenians must be understood in the context of the dire conditions of World War I.2 These views are encapsulated in the formula that the noted Middle East historian Bernard Lewis has used—namely, the desperate conditions of “an embattled empire.”3

The Turkish Republic was established in 1923 as an invention of the modernist– Westernist elites who sought a radical transformation of traditional Ottoman Islamic social, economic, and political structures after the three-year War of Independence (1919–22) against foreign occupation in Anatolia. The transformative modernist project of the Westernist elites took capitalism as the new economic basis of society; the nation-state and parliamentary democracy as its political structure; and secularization as its cultural process. Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu first used the term “Kemalism” on 28 June 1929 to refer to the new nation- and state-building ideology that defined the legitimate political vocabulary constituting the basic principles and values of the Turkish path to modernity.1 Then the term “Kemalism” was used in the mainstream histography of the Turkish Revolution to refer to a new political stand that interpreted the revolutionary practices that had taken place between 1923 and 1935 within the framework of the tradition of ideological positivism. It broadly implied a philosophical–political stand that was shaped by an adherence to the formal “six arrow” principles of the Turkish Revolution. Ali Kazancigil argued that Kemalist ideology was an amalgam of the ideas associated with laicism, nationalism, solidarist positivist political theory, and 19th-century scientism.2 The dominant trend in the histography of the Kemalist revolution saw it as a late-Enlightenment movement that had its roots in the secular-rationalist tradition of ideological positivism and characterized the politics of the era as a zero-sum game between secular-modernist Kemalists in action and religiously oriented anti-modernists in reaction. Yet both the progressive Kemalists and reactionary groups had heterogeneous structures and were composed of many groups formed around different philosophical–political understandings about the novelties brought about by the Turkish Revolution. This study, however, limits itself to the goal of illustrating the plurality of groups and approaches to the Turkish Revolution within the modernist–Kemalist ranks of which the neo-republican conservatives were an organic part. How alternative interpretations of the Turkish Revolution, including the neo-conservative one, became part of the Kemalist histography is an open-ended question that requires a comprehensive survey of the ideological and philosophical trends prevalent within the ranks of the modernist elites in the 1920s and 1930s.

Current discussions on the political developments in Turkey frequently frame the struggles between the military and religious parties as a war between secularism and Islam and draw out incommensurable differences between the two sides. Indeed, the military establishment, which casts itself as the guardian of the secular republic, succeeded in 1997 in having the Supreme Court ban the Welfare Party, the first openly religious party ever to form a government in the Turkish Republic. The generals justified this seemingly undemocratic move by claiming that that this party was trying to reinstate the sacred shari[ayin]a law.

This book is a comprehensive survey of the history of the Crusades—comprehensive, that is, from the standpoint of the sources left by the Crusaders' enemies. The author sets out to reconstruct for a Western audience what the available Muslim sources (for the most part, in Arabic) tell us about the Crusading phenomenon: how the Muslims viewed and responded to the challenge presented to them by the European Christian holy warriors who suddenly appeared on the Near Eastern scene at the end of the 11th century. In this respect it is not unlike Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, although compared to the earlier volume the present book is simultaneously less narrative and more exhaustive, even encyclopedic.

As Lawrence I. Conrad explains in the general editor's Preface, the intention of the series, The Formation of the Classical Islamic World, is to present a critical selection of previously published articles on an aspect of the formative period of Islam, defined as A.D. 600–950. Each of the volumes is edited by an expert in a field of Islamic studies and is meant to serve as an introduction to the state of knowledge of a given topic and significant debates within the scholarship, conveying a variety of approaches. The two volumes under review here have a geographical rather than a thematic focus and together present forty articles on a range of topics having to do with the first three centuries of Islam on the Iberian peninsula. The two volumes on The Formation of al-Andalus are meant to be read together. “Part 1: History and Society” and “Part 2: Language, Religion, Culture and the Sciences” share overlapping themes, and their references and bibliographies are complementary.

The title of Şevket Pamuk's book is misleading. Far from restricting himself to monetary phenomena—interest rates, coinage, inflation, and availability of specie—the author has chosen to cast his study of money during the Ottoman period (1300–1918) in the widest possible terms. Viewing some of the crucial issues of Ottoman economic and political history through a monetary lens has produced new and interesting insights—in some cases, the result is a revision of old arguments—but on other matters, Pamuk has produced provocative new hypotheses. Furthermore, the book offers a timely addition to the rapidly developing field of global history. Although most of Pamuk's comparative remarks relate to early modern Europe, his study establishes a benchmark against which the analyses of monetary and economic phenomena in the other two early modern Middle Eastern states—the Mughal and the Safavid—can be measured.

It is, to say the least, rather startling that prior to the appearance of this new book by Stefan Reif, who is professor of Medieval Hebrew Studies at Cambridge University in England, the director of the Genizah Research Unit, and head of the Oriental Division at the University Library, there simply was no detailed history of the discovery of the Cairo Genizah and its transferal abroad. Neither had there been a convenient single survey of the broad range of its contents, nor a comprehensive mise au point of the century of scholarship in so many disciplines that has resulted from this unique treasure trove. Brief introductory sketches existed in the works of Paul Kahle and S. D. Goitein, and Norman Golb surveyed the first half-century of Genizah scholarship more than forty years ago in the journal Judaism (1957). But none of these provided the wealth of detail to be found in A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo.

Perhaps the Byzantine Empire's most significant achievement during its thousand-year history was the civilizing of its northern neighbors, the Slavs, through Christianization and political tutelage. The process was not entirely altruistic; rather, it was designed to secure the empire's northern border against the Slavs and other peoples. This border shifted over time, sometimes embracing the entire Balkan peninsula as far as the Danube to modern Croatia, sometimes comprising little more than the Thracian littoral and a few isolated areas in the south of the Greek peninsula.

This collection of essays, the latest in a long list of collected works put together by Variorum's Studies in East–Central Europe, 1500–1900, is supposed to give the reader a broad range of Nikolai Todorov's lifetime work. Todorov's contribution to the field is not in doubt, although this collection hardly does justice to that contribution. The fourteen separate articles often overlap in theme, and on one occasion they almost reproduce the same article, as they span a period that reaches back to Todorov's early career in Bulgaria (1964–92). The essays somewhat misplace Todorov's importance to the field, as most of the language appropriated has become outdated with the collapse of the Bulgarian institutions that funded Todorov's research until 1989. I would like to think Todorov can survive the fall of historical materialism.

In December 1913, the English traveler and Orientalist Gertrude Bell set out from Damascus on a four-month journey that looped southeast through Arabia to the city of Hayyil, then north to Baghdad, and back across the Syrian desert to Damascus. The Syrian portion of the passage was already familiar to her, and she was not the first European to follow the caravan routes through Arabia. Charles Doughty and Wilfred and Anne Blunt, among others, had preceded her. Nor did her efforts significantly advance European knowledge of the region. But her willingness to undertake such an arduous and dangerous journey without European companions won her a gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society and a reputation as an authority on the Middle East, subsequently reinforced by her role in intelligence for the Arab Bureau during World War I and in the establishment of the British-dominated Iraqi state afterward.

Constructing Boundaries is the latest entry in a growing body of revisionist scholarship on the history and political economy of Palestine under the British, contesting the once cherished notion that the Jewish and Palestinian communities of Palestine/Israel were best investigated and understood as isolated and autonomously developing entities. By focusing on one urban setting—Haifa, which during the Mandate period become Palestine's most important port and industrial center—this work provides new insight into how the industrial economy of Palestine shaped, and in turn was shaped by, the conflictual interaction of the two communities.

The reader plunges into the whirlwind of revolution in this study of the satirical press that circulated after the Young Turks reinstated the Ottoman constitution in 1908. The brave new world depicted in the more than one hundred cartoons reprinted in this work is headed in unknown and often paradoxical directions: we see starving peasants confront fur-coated revolutionaries; dragon-headed despots leading Lady Liberty by the arm; cadaverous cholera victims patrolling the streets; and a woman steering an airplane above the revolutionary city of the future. The 1908 revolution will never look quite the same to readers familiar with the (still scant) treatment of the subject in the English language. Palmira Brummett addresses her innovative study not only to revisionist historians of the late Ottoman period, but also to a wider community of scholars interested in the history of publishing and the construction of identity in the Middle East, Europe, and elsewhere.

Intellectual history of modernism in Iran has proved to be a subject of lively academic interest. The role of Iranian exiles in late 19th and early 20th century, in particular, has drawn considerable scholarly attention. In recent years, the Iranian press in exile has also become a focus of academic scrutiny. In Germany, Anja Pistor-Hatam has studied the Iranian intellectual community in Istanbul around the newspaper Akhtar (Nachrichtenblatt, Informationsbörse und Diskussionsforum: Ahtar-e Estānbūl (1876–1896)—Anstöße zur frühen persischen Moderne [Münster, 1999]) and Keivandokht Ghahari's doctoral dissertation is concerned with ideas of nationalism and modernism among Iranian intellectuals in Berlin as reflected in the journals Kâveh, Iranshahr, and Ayandeh (Nationalismus und Modernismus in Iran in der Periode zwischen dem Zerfall der Qāğāren-Dynastie und der Machtfestigung Reżā Schah [Berlin, 2001]). In this context, the bibliography of Kâveh is thus a welcomed contribution.

Even before the publication of this book, William Hale enjoyed a reputation as a well-informed and productive scholar of Turkish politics. He has greatly enhanced his place in Turkish studies with the publication of this outstanding book on Turkish foreign policy.

Joseph Heller, associate professor of international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has previously written about the transition from the Palestine Mandate to Israel (including a study of the Stern Gang and of Zionist politics in the pre-state period), examines a period of great interest to students of contemporary Middle Eastern history and politics, as well as to those who focus on Zionism, Israel, and the Arab–Israeli conflict. He analyzes the internal decision-making of the Zionist Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine) leadership in Jerusalem from the end of World War II until the armistice agreements at the termination of the first Arab–Israeli War (the Israeli War of Independence; al-Nakba for the Arabs)—in other words, the events leading to and immediately following the creation of the State of Israel.

If the history of the Middle East in the 20th century is a history of fundamental social changes and dislocations, then surely one important part of that story is the transformation that took place in the agrarian sector of many Middle Eastern societies. The politics of landownership and the projects of land reform in the 20th century were indeed among the most ambitious of the statist projects undertaken during what we can now look back on as the “age of modernization.” Like so many large-scale projects of social engineering, land reform in the Middle East captured the optimism and idealism of modernization while producing some of its most brutal and unforeseen consequences.

In The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Ottoman Lebanon, Ussama Makdisi focuses on sectarianism as the defining experience in modern Mount Lebanon—indeed, as the core of Lebanese modernity itself. This work is a meticulous deconstruction of sectarianism as a discourse spawned by a particular historic conjecture—Ottoman reform in the age of European domination—in and around the tiny peripheral society of 19th-century Mount Lebanon. It is also an impassioned insistence not only on the historic but also the moral urgency of recognizing the contingency of, and the human agency in, the emergence of sectarianism and an invitation for hope in a Lebanese future that might yet dare to embrace an alternative modernity. Makdisi's book is not only illuminated by the scholar's insight; it is also animated by empathy for his subject matter and a talent that brings local society and its mountainous vistas vividly to the mind's eye.

Laila Parsons situates her study alongside those of the so-called new historians of the Arab– Israeli conflict who in recent years have rewritten large parts of the dominant narratives of the “traditionalist” historians. One of elements of these narratives has been the assumption that the struggle between Arabs and Jews was a starkly bipolar affair, with a relatively small number of Jews in conflict with a much larger, monolithic population of Arabs. Recent “revisionist” works, however, have shown that this interpretation is inaccurate. For example, an integral part of Zionist policy was to make contact with various Arab leaders and groups before, during, and after the emergence of the State of Israel and forge relationships that could advance the movement's geopolitical agenda. Scholars who have worked on this question include Avi Shlaim (Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine and The Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, the Zionists and Palestine, 1921–1951) and Kirsten Schulze (Israel's Covert Diplomacy in Lebanon). In The Druze Between Palestine and Israel, a compact and narrowly focused study based on the author's doctoral thesis, Parsons skillfully employs archival sources in Israel, as well as published accounts in English, Arabic, and Hebrew, to show how Zionist officials developed relationships with Druze leaders and representatives and how these links could benefit both sides.