This is the first issue of the journal that I edited and sent off to the press, but I did so as part of a team rather than as an individual. I must offer warm thanks to my predecessor as editor, R. Stephen Humphreys, for having done much of the pre-production editing, with his usual attention to detail and search for excellence, and for consulting so closely with me on acceptances. And, of course, I am deeply in his debt for having done such a fine job with the journal for the past five years, leaving to my charge a flourishing enterprise. Thanks, too, are owed to Liz Montana and the others at the Santa Barbara office who shepherded these pieces through the editorial process, as well as to our book-review editors.

Al-Azhar, traditionally Egypt's most respected and influential center for Islamic study, adopted an increasingly bold platform opposing Egyptian government policy throughout the mid-1990s. Al-Azhar defied government policy on a variety of sensitive issues, including population control, the practice of clitoridectomy, and censorship rights. Moreover, al-Azhar directly challenged the government in high-profile forums such as the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in September of 1994. This open opposition was remarkable in light of the tremendous capacity that the Egyptian government has shown in the past to manipulate and control al-Azhar. Over the past century, and particularly since the 1952 Free Officers' coup, the Egyptian government virtually incorporated al-Azhar as an arm of the state through purges and control over Azhar finances, and by gaining the power to appoint al-Azhar's key leadership. Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Husni Mubarak all benefited from this dominance over al-Azhar by securing fatwas legitimating their policies. Given this overwhelming leverage, what can explain al-Azhar's increased opposition to the government throughout the mid-1990s?

In June 1959, Emperor Haile Sellassie of Ethiopia paid a visit to President Gamel Abdel Nasser of the United Arab Republic, during which the two leaders aired matters of acute strategic importance. Several issues, some touching the very heart of ancient Ethiopian–Egyptian relations, were in the stages of culmination. These included a bitter dispute over the Nile waters (some four-fifths of the water reaching Egypt originates in Ethiopia1), the emergence of an Arab-inspired Eritrean movement, Egyptian support of Somali irredentism, the Ethiopian alliance with Israel, the future of Pan-African diplomacy, and Soviet and American influences.2 Both leaders did their best to publicly ignore their conflicts. They were able to use a rich, though polarized, reservoir of mutual images in their speeches to emphasize the dimensions of old neighborliness and affinity.3 In a joint announcement issued during the farewell party of 28 June, they even underlined a common policy of non-alignment. Though they hinted at the issues mentioned earlier in all their public speeches, they refrained from referring to one culminating historical drama.4 On that very same day, in the main Coptic church of Cairo, the Egyptian Coptic Patriarch Kyrillos VI had ceremonially appointed the head of the Ethiopian church, Abuna Baselyos, as a patriarch in the presence of Haile Sellassie and Egyptian officials. In so doing, he declared the Orthodox Ethiopian church autocephalous, and for the first time since the early 4th century, the Ethiopian church had become independent of the Egyptian church.

The creation of Pakistan was a crushing blow to those hoping to establish autonomous, ethnically defined states in the western borderlands of the Indian empire. The best known of these movements, the Red Shirts (Khudai Khidmatgar), was active in the North-West Frontier Province since the 1920s and moved from affiliation with the Indian National Congress to advocating sovereignty and ultimately an independent Pushtun state when faced with the inevitability of Partition.1 Similar Pushtun and Balochi movements arose in the last decades of the Raj in the areas that now constitute the Pakistani province of Balochistan. In the pivotal years of 1947 and 1948, the Muslim League was able to outmaneuver and suppress these ambitious young movements, but they did not die. In subsequent decades, Balochi and Pushtun nationalism became key elements in the political discourse and the equation of power in Balochistan, and they remain so today.

This paper proposes that domestic political conflict presents opportunities for positive change with long-term effects despite the “inherent plausibility” of its harmfulness. This position is tested using examples of Arab bread riots in the context of the wave of Arab democratizations over the past twenty years. Although generally guided and controlled, Arab political liberalizations (especially those of Sudan, Algeria, and Jordan) have their roots in pressure from below. Elsewhere (as in Tunisia and Egypt), similar pressure has helped consolidate—or, at least, place—political reform on the agenda of de-legitimized ruling elites. Democracy and democratization in the Arab Middle East have almost invariably meant a trend toward “parliamentarization” and “electoralization,” without yet presaging polyarchal rule. Between 1985 and 1996, the Arab world has experienced more than twenty pluralist or multiparty parliamentary elections, twice the number that took place in the entire preceding period since the early 1960s, when many Arab countries won independence from colonial rule. A focus on the khubz-iste (the quietist bread seeker who abandons quietism as soon as his livelihood is threatened by the state) and the hitiste (the quietist unemployed who becomes active in bread protests) provides a new perspective on democratization processes in Arab societies.

In February 1963, the government in Iran formed the Ministry of Economy—a pilot bureaucratic agency that was to oversee industrial transformation and generate growth. In 1969, after six years of unprecedented growth and significant industrialization,1 the political leadership withdrew its support for the ministry and broke down its autonomy. The fate of the ministry had little to do with its performance or promise in the economic arena. It was, rather, the political implications of the rise of an autonomous and competent bureaucratic agency, and the rationalization of industrial policy-making, that led the political leadership—and Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in particular—to end its support for this experiment.

During the Cold War years following World War II, the U.S. government and international agencies such as the World Bank and FAO strongly advocated and pushed for land reform (distribution) in countries under U.S. influence. Examples of American-sponsored land reforms included the land-distribution programs in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, South Vietnam, Iran, the Philippines, and El Salvador. Land reform in practice consisted of giving the ownership of land to the cultivating tenants and sharecroppers. By giving land to the tenants, it was believed that a communist revolution or takeover could be avoided. The modern theoretical basis for land reform can be found in the writings of such Marxist scholars as Alain de Janvry, the non-Marxist writers Albert Berry and William Cline, and the World Bank economists Hans Binswanger and Miranda Elgins.1 Marxist writers had stressed the political aspects of “anti-feudal” reforms. Such reforms were said to promote political stability as well as strengthen capitalism. How the abrogation of private-property rights was supposed to “strengthen” capitalism was not really explained. Non-Marxist writers concentrated on increased efficiency and increased output that was expected from land redistribution. Berry and Cline showed that in labor-surplus underdeveloped dual economies with a bi-modal farm structure (where large commercial and small subsistence farms existed side by side), a land reform that redistributed land from large farms to small farms increased agricultural production and rural welfare, and brought about economic growth and development. In addition, land reform was seen to result in greater social equity (taking land from wealthy landowners and giving it to poor farmers). It was an article of faith among the proponents of land reform that “the hated class of absentee landlords” did not fulfill any useful socio-economic function, at least none that could not be performed equally well by some government agency. They also believed that sharecropping and tenancy did not fulfill any useful social and economic functions. It was implicitly assumed in the theoretical writings that the rights of a small number of individuals were to be sacrificed for the benefit of the many. In none of the theoretical literature was the possibility of expropriating a large number of individuals advocated or even considered.

This book has, at the very least, four purposes: (1) to introduce general readers to the early history of Islam; (2) to sketch some of the salient features of the relationships among Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the Arabian Peninsula in the time leading up to and including the 7th century; (3) to summarize, compare, and contrast some of the key stories about figures in the Qur⊃an and Bible; and (4) to point to several of the key events, publications, and Muslim and Christian intellectuals involved in Muslim–Christian dialogue during modern times. The volume is divided into six chapters. In the Introduction, Busse introduces some of the key concepts within Islam and several significant 19th- and 20th-century scholarly works on Islam by Western writers. In the second chapter, he examines the political and religious background of the rise of Islam (giving particular attention to the pre-Islamic religious practices endemic to 7th-century Arabia as well as the historic presence of Jews and Christians in that region), the role of Mecca as a trading center, the complexities of the relationship of the Hanifs to the early Muslim community, and the various textual and oral sources which Muhammad may have used in the formulation of the Qur⊃an.

Rather than expound a thesis, this study establishes the fundamental facts of Armenian history from the 4th century to the 12th century on the basis of multiple difficult and sometimes hitherto unexploited sources. If there is an overall thesis, it is that Armenian sectarianism was so prevalent that it accounts for the fragmentary picture of Armenian history given by any single source. Orthodox Armenian sources ignore or dismiss sectarians. Sectarians wrote no history. And Arab historians make only annalistic references to Armenians, unaware of their sectarian divisions.

In the past two decades, several important studies have dealt with the impact of the Arab Muslim conquest on the Near East, but they have mostly dealt with the lands that were conquered from the Mediterranean region to Iraq. Although the book under review is not a detailed history of Arab Muslims' conquest of Iran, it attempts to fill the gap in our knowledge of the eastern area that came under their control. The work is primarily concerned with the interaction between the Zoroastrian and the Muslim community in Iran and Central Asia from the 7th to the 13th century. The book attempts to study the processes in which the Zoroastrian community, which was the dominant religious community during the Sasanian empire (224–641), gradually lost its status and hold on power, while the new Muslim community became dominant as a social and political group.

“Define your terms” was the dictum stressed in school, and that is precisely what Ronnie Ellenblum does to fine effect. He challenges both the image of a Crusader population living in isolation behind city walls and the alternative picture of a Franco-Syrian society in which Crusaders were totally assimilated. Both interpretations rest on a series of assumptions, which are methodically examined and act as guideposts to a new and convincing conclusion.

Balanced, well-written surveys of the pre-modern history of the Middle East are still, unfortunately, quite rare, and works that illuminate specific areas of that past with aplomb are rarer still. Such, however, is no longer the state of our field with regard to Islamic Spain, which can now be studied and taught from the excellent survey provided by Hugh Kennedy. The book is a fine political history deftly attuned to the elucidation of critical historiographical issues. The importance of contemporary Arabic sources, or lack thereof, is central to the organization of this text, a point that the author utilizes throughout to prompt a sense of critical inquiry from the reader.

Chinese Muslims, known today as the Hui and during the 19th century as Dungans, present a particular problem for a historian. Why should Chinese-speaking believers in Islam constitute a separate ethnic group when believers in other religions of foreign origin (Buddhism and Christianity, for example) do not? Did Chinese Muslims have a common history across China, or has one been created for them because they are now labeled an ethnic minority group (minzou) in the People's Republic of China? Jonathan Lipman begins his history by challenging the whole notion of the “Hui” as an ethnic group, which he argues in his Introduction has been taken as an unproblematic category by both Chinese and Western scholars. Lipman prefers the term “Sino-Muslim” to “Hui” to emphasize the reality that these Muslims are and have been Chinese in culture for centuries and to distinguish them from non–Chinese-speaking Muslim groups in China.

Endowments (sing. waqf) are one of the more pervasive and diverse institutions found in Muslim societies through time and space. Praised for their contributions to religious practice, culture, and welfare, endowments have also been criticized and condemned in historical and contemporary writings for their detrimental effects on individuals, society, property, and the greater economy, as agents of sloth, corruption, and underdevelopment. This negative image stems from repeated, though not well-substantiated, accusations, as well as a paucity of research on the actual functioning of individual endowments. Generally, endowments have been written about from the perspective of their founding documents, or of snapshot images taken at later and seemingly diminished or deteriorated stages of their existence. Until now, only Robert McChesney (Waqf in Central Asia, Four Hundred Years in the History of a Muslim Shrine, 1480–1889 [Princeton, 1991]) has undertaken a monograph study of one endowment in order to demonstrate how a particular foundation survived and evolved over several hundred years.

At its heart, Aykut Kansu's The Revolution of 1908 in Turkey is a thoughtful attempt to revise the way Turkish and Western historians have portrayed the events that ushered in the Ottoman Second Constitutional Period. Consisting of both a provocative historiographical essay and a detailed political narrative of the years 1906–8, the book reads the dominant accounts of the last years of the empire against the grain and makes a fresh contribution to the often staid discussions of this fundamentally important moment in the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. Although his arguments are compelling, evidentiary and rhetorical problems inherent in the work undermine its overall value; less persuasive, though still worthwhile, is his attempt to mitigate the historical significance of the statist reforms of the Kemalist period. In Kansu's revision, the events of 1908 constituted the last great bourgeois revolution of the “long nineteenth century.” It succeeded in wresting power from the grip of Turkey's ancien régime—bureaucrats of the Sublime Porte and the sultan—and placed it, temporarily, in the hands of the “citizens.”

An Ayyubid Notable and His World delivers on its title. David Morray's careful study of Ibn al-⊂Adim's (d. 1262) Bughyat al-talab fi ta⊃rikh Halab (Everything Desirable about the History of Aleppo) exemplifies how this important local history can be used to shed light on the social history of medieval northern Syria, especially under the Ayyubids.1

Most of us associate the 19th-century commerce in opium with the Opium Wars that propelled China into humiliating economic subjugation to Western powers. Opium was probably second only to slavery as a shameful economic underpinning to European domination of much of Africa and Asia. Consequently, it is important that we understand not only where the poppy was grown, who purchased it, and where and why it was marketed, but also the values and ideologies that led to its suppression by the very polities that earlier had encouraged its cultivation and habitual use.

Compared with the cottage industry that has grown up around the study of slavery in Africa and the Americas, slavery in the Ottoman East barely registers as a target of inquiry. Ottomanists and Islamicists have tended to avoid it altogether, and global comparativists have given little play to slave systems that, like the Ottoman, did not center on plantation labor. Military slaves and other varieties of “elite slaves” in the Ottoman Empire have been exceptions to the general indifference, although considering the long and complex history of elite slave (kul) manpower in the 600 years of Ottoman statehood, the pickings are slim there, as well.

From its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been characterized by a paradox. Some of its most frequently employed slogans: wahdat-i isl―am (Islamic unity) and sud―ur-i inqil―ab (export of the revolution) reflect the apparent eagerness of its leadership to reach out beyond Iran and to make the rest of the Islamic community share in the fruits of the country's revolutionary experience. Yet the minority status of Shi⊂ism within the umma, coupled with the close and growing identification of the revolution with (Twelver) Shi⊂ism, has largely restricted the outside appeal of Iran's new order to the Shi⊂i world.

Shireen T. Hunter and Bassam Tibi have both written thoughtful and useful books about the current Islamic political phenomenon, which complement and do not duplicate each other. Hunter presents a realistic, readable, and analytical argument showing, among other things, that the foreign policies of Islamic states are only to a small degree influenced by Islam and are much more determined by considerations of foreign and domestic interest, however Islamic the government may claim to be. She also demonstrates that there has been little unity in the foreign policies of Muslim countries. For both of these reasons, she states that Samuel Huntington's idea of a coming clash of civilizations, centering on the West versus Islam, is not based on reality and is extremely unlikely to come to pass. (Tibi's book is also concerned with disproving Huntington's argument with effective counter-arguments.)