This article focuses on one of the most striking ideas to come out of the radical Islamist movements of recent decades: the doctrine of jāhiliyya presented by the Egyptian activist Sayyid Qutb (1906–66) in his latest writings.

For years, religious violence and terrorism in Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt have splashed across the headlines and surged across the screen, announcing yet another round of senseless death and destruction. While Arabists and Islamicists attempt to pick their way carefully through the ideological and intellectual minefields to make sense of what is happening, the wider public generally disregards their insights and instead sticks to what it knows best: deeply ingrained prejudices and biases. Egyptian, Arab, Muslim—all are painted in a very unfavorable light. Even in Egypt, many bystanders show the same sorry prejudices. In the end, people simply blame the brutality on inexplicable backward religious ideas and then move on.

The collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago engendered both hope and fear about the future of Islam in Uzbekistan (and Central Asia in general). Many Muslims from other countries hoped that, freed from the constraints of the Soviet regime, Uzbeks and other Central Asians would rediscover their religious traditions and rejoin the broader Muslim world.1 Other observers feared that Islam would emerge as a political force and threaten the security of the region.2 As the decade progressed and militant Islamist organizations appeared, fear tended to overshadow hope. The events of autumn 2001 in Afghanistan, when fighters belonging to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) played a prominent role alongside the Taliban, seemed to vindicate the darkest fears,3 and to justify the unremitting campaign that the regime of President Islom Karimov has waged against “religious extremism” since 1998.

In contrast to what might be expected after the triumph of a colossal revolutionary process and the establishment of a state deriving its power mainly from a strong ideological drive, in Iran the development of socio-political thought did not end with the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Indeed, the post-revolutionary period has witnessed a proliferation of socio-political discourses articulated by groups and individuals inside and outside the country, notwithstanding censorship and attempts to control the flow of information by the government.1

While contemporary Muslim countries are not exactly textbook democracies, the desire for (more) popular participation in the political decision-making process exists. With the current polarization of anything Western as bad and anything Islamic as good (one notices the opposite use of these adjectives by some Westerners), the odds are low that Western political systems will provide the vocabulary to articulate demands for popular participation. Many Muslims look to the concept of shūrā, which broadly means consultation, to address the problem. Shūrā is considered a truly Islamic principle because it is mentioned in the Qurءan, practiced by the Prophet Muhammad, and makes up part of classical Islamic thought. The Qurءanic and sunnaic references, however, are very general, and early Islamic history imbued the actual practice of consultation with the negative connotation of fitna, or civil unrest. Nevertheless, in the modern period, Muslim authors took renewed interest in the concept of shūrā to structure their political landscape.

Asma Barlas's objective in this book is to uncover the essentially egalitarian message of the Qurءan by defining the best methodology for reading the Qurءan and by applying this methodology to better understand its message concerning the ontological and social status of women. In Part I, she draws on the work of previous scholars to fashion a critique of interpretations that conflate the Qurءan with secondary texts such as a hadith and tafsīr, texts she views as instrumental in the incorporation of misogynist beliefs and customs into Islam. She calls for a reaffirmation of the primacy of the Qurءanic text but read in a new way—holistically and as a historically situated text. A Muslim who does not question the divine origin of the Qurءan, Barlas insists on the individual responsibility of its readers correctly to uncover its meanings through the use of their intellects, using the tool of ijtihād rather than the blind acceptance of traditional interpretations.

Of all of the “Oriental churches,” it is the Coptic church that has garnered the greatest scholarly attention. Nevertheless, the state of Coptic studies leaves much to be desired. Certain aspects have been studied in some depth at the expense of others that are equally important. Thus, while the Gnostic texts, the Christological controversies, the position of the Alexandrine church, and—to a lesser extent—the modern Coptic renaissance have received a good deal of attention, social history in the pre-modern period is sorely lacking, as is any serious attempt to understand the Coptic community in its Islamic context after the 7th century. Several previous synthetic works on the Coptic church, moreover, now appear problematic for their apologetic or polemical approaches to the subject. The present book, while not filling the lacunae, does provides a welcome, balanced synthetic history of the Coptic church.

In this book, M. R. Ghanoonparvar describes his experience of translating Shahrokh Meskoob's Guftugū dar bāgh (Dialogue in the Garden), a fictionalized dialogue between a writer and his painter uncle during the course of which many aspects of Iranian culture are discussed through the prism of gardens, long held to be significant to the Persians. The author clearly states the thesis of his book on the very first page: “[this book] is about the act of translating, the actual process of translating.” In what follows, the reader accompanies the author–translator along the path that leads from the latter's interest in Dialogue in the Garden to his numerous struggles and decisions regarding individual words, passages, and concepts, and then ultimately to the completed translation of the work, which is presented at the end of the book (pp. 125–68).

This book, adopting the method of Rubin's earlier work on the image of the Prophet Muhammad, The Eye of the Beholder: The Life of Muhammad as Viewed by the Early Muslims (1995), examines hadith reports of the first three Islamic centuries that draw on Qurءanic/biblical material. He analyzes these reports as attempts on the part of Muslims to define themselves vis-à-vis the People of the Book—primarily Jews, and to a lesser extent Christians. Each of the work's three parts reflects a particular historical attitude toward the Jews and definition of the relationship between Jews and Muslims.

The title and publication series of Prefacing the Image initially suggest that it treats a topic of interest only to specialists in art history—a dozen or so rhetorically ornate prefaces composed for bound albums of calligraphies, drawings, and paintings (muraqqaע) during the 16th century. However, it quickly becomes apparent that the scope of this study extends far beyond such disciplinary boundaries. “The primary objective of this book is to study the preface through a variety of approaches—historical, cultural, social, and intellectual” (p. 17). By integrating the album preface into a broad network of social practices and literary discourses, Roxburgh's well-researched and probing study should be of interest not only to art historians but also to any reader with an interest in the cultural and intellectual life of the later Persianate world.

Anthony Shay's Choreographic Politics fills an important gap in the research of the history of folk dancing, a gap opened by the controversial status of “state folk dance ensembles,” whose performances have often been neglected or despised by folklorists and dance scholars. Staged folk dances have always charmed audiences with the energy they embed in their performances but they have also puzzled them, because it is clear that they are more of a “representation” than a true reflection of a locality's reality. The analysis of “state folk dance ensembles,” then, moves on the edges of folklore and “fake lore,” the art of dance and the ethnography of dance. Choreographic Politics touches on this very sense of illusion and disillusion, focusing on the politics of state folk dance ensembles, a cultural product of the post-war era.

In 1669, after twenty-four years of devastating war, Venice surrendered the island of Crete to the Ottoman Turks. As a Venetian commander described it, Crete was “the most beautiful crown to adorn the head of the Most Serene Republic” (p. 4). It was a grievous loss for Venice, which did not resign itself to the loss of its beautiful crown for another fifty years, until the end of the last Ottoman–Venetian war in 1718. The period of early Ottoman rule between 1669 and 1718 is the subject of Molly Greene's excellent study. Her emphasis throughout is on multiple identities, mixed narratives, hybrid solutions, cross-cutting allegiances, and historical continuity. Along with historians such as Leslie Pierce and Jane Hathaway, she rejects the model of Ottoman decline, styling it a “meat-grinder” (p. 20) of a thesis that focuses on a weak sultanate and ignores both the complexity and vitality of Ottoman imperial governance. She also rejects the notion that the transition from Venetian to Ottoman control in Crete marked a sharp dividing line, an event that helped wring the ambiguity out of the Mediterranean world (p. 5).

In any monarchy, court gossip is the coin of the realm. Every observer of Saudi Arabia has his or her own theories of who is up and who is down, who is joining with whom and who has betrayed former allies, and who is with America and who is against America among the princes of the al-Saעud. Like most gossip, most court gossip is wrong. The safe rule regarding the family politics of the al-Saעud is that “those who know do not talk, and those who talk do not know.” Joseph Kechichian has therefore tackled the hardest question there is in the analysis of Saudi Arabian politics, and does as good a job as any outsider can hope to do. While those who talk usually do not know, Kechichian has talked to some who do know, including many members of the ruling family. His conclusions about future successions in Saudi Arabia, of necessity are speculative, but they are well informed.

This fine book provides the first comprehensive account of the Indian merchant communities that arose in Central Asia in the 16th century and continued to occupy an important niche in the local economy until the turn of the 20th century. The subject of India's relations with Central Asia and Russia has often been addressed, but it has usually fallen afoul of methodological and linguistic boundaries that divide the historiographies of the two regions. This is the first work that is equally at home in both Indian and Central Asian history. Levi's greatest contribution is to bring Central Asian sources to bear fully on his argument. He uses Persian-language narrative and documentary sources from Central Asia (housed in the manuscript collections of the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent) and the state archives of Uzbekistan to glean useful new information about life in the diaspora and the activities of its members. He backs these up with accounts of European travelers, which he has mined with great thoroughness for all references to Indian merchants.

Monty Noam Penkower has written a detailed and documented account of the diplomatic relations of American, British, and Palestine-based Zionists with the American and British governments from 1939 to 1945. His theme is that these governments showed a callous disregard for the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust because they refused free immigration into Palestine. The author's scholarship is sound in terms of the people and diplomacy with which he deals. The probable audience for the book is scholars and researchers who are interested in the history of the Holocaust and the response to it by both the Allied powers and Zionist leaders, as well as those interested in the origins of the Israeli state. However, the events covered in this work are explicitly tied to Palestine and its fate, and in that regard the author has produced only a “half history.” Penkower's treatment of Palestine is incomplete because the subject of the Palestinian Arabs, who bear the consequences of the negotiations, planning, and conspiring that the work details are mentioned only in passing and then almost always in negative terms. It is as if one were to write the history of Nazi planning for the Holocaust and only rarely and disapprovingly mention Jews.