By the late seventeenth century, Algeria and Tunisia had established regimes that were largely independent of Ottoman sovereignty in almost every regard, although the Porte continued, in strictly legal terms, to exert minimal rights of sovereignty.

        Michel Le Gall1

But, let there be no mistake: the more a regency of Barbary has become fearsome to the Christian princes, the more the Sultan is its absolute master. He had only to utter a word to end an unjust war and fix even the terms for peace.

        Jean-Michel Venture de Paradis2

Separated by two centuries, these two quotations describe the role of the Ottoman Empire in North Africa in very different—indeed, contradictory—terms. On the one hand, Ottoman North Africa is depicted as a region where independent political entities emerged out of a century of Ottoman rule, ready as it were for the eventual emergence of nation-states in the 20th century. Venture de Paradis's earlier description, however, is devoid of the hindsight gained by our knowledge of the “end of the story.” It tells us that by the end of the 18th century, contrary to the contemporary accepted view of the remoteness of the Maghribi “regencies” from the imperial center in Istanbul, the three Ottoman provinces of North Africa were indeed an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, and the rulers of these provinces were obedient subjects of the Sublime Porte.

Safavid Iran's foreign trade is usually described as the highly profitable export of silk to Europe. That is at best an incomplete description. One problem is that it focuses on only one side of the trade (exports) rather than looking at both sides. Taken to its extreme, the usual story could make Iranians look like mad mercantilists determined to export without thinking much about what they got in return, while Europeans could look like crazed consumers so eager for Iranian silk that they would buy without thinking about the bill. At the very least, an account of trade should examine what is going in each direction, not just at what one side exports and the other side imports. That is one major lacuna of the usual story. Another is that it concentrates on Iranian–European trade without as much attention to Iranian trade with other areas. Safavid Iran's trade with Europe can be understood only in the context of its overall trade, for only in that context can we know whether Europe was an important market or an incidental one.

Recent scholarship has taken great strides toward integrating the history of the late Ottoman Empire into world history. By moving beyond the view that the West was the prime agent for change in the East, historians have shed new light on indigenous efforts aimed at repositioning the state, reconceptualizing knowledge, and restructuring “society.”1 A comparative perspective has helped students of the period recognize that the late Ottoman Empire shared and took action against many of the same problems confronting its contemporaries, East and West. The assertion of Ottoman agency has been critical to finishing off the stereotype of the “sick man of Europe,” but the persistent legacies of modernization theory and nationalist historiography continue to obscure our view of the period.

In the 19th century, Europe had a tangible impact on the Arab East. During this period, Arabic-speaking regions were brought into intimate contact with the West, both through military intrusion (e.g., the French in 1798–1801 and the British in Egypt in 1882), and institutional penetration (e.g., the founding of Western-style schools and higher-education institutions in the Levant in the 1800s by Christian missionaries such as the Syrian Protestant College in 1866, now the American University of Beirut, and [the Jesuit] St. Joseph University, also in Beirut, in 1874). This overpowering European encroachment on the Arab East in the 19th century resulted in cultural and linguistic identity crises. Muhammad ⊂Ali, who ruled Egypt from 1805 until 1848, dispatched groups of students to Western countries such as Italy, Austria, and France to study at their universities and technical institutions. At home, he established schools with Western-language instruction, and sponsored translations of scientific works initially into Turkish, and later into Arabic, from Italian and French, thus making available new disciplines such as various branches of engineering, military science, and agriculture. In 1822, he established a printing press in the Bulaq section of Cairo.1 From then on, Arabicized versions of European terms such as “theater” (tiy―atru), “journal” (jurn―al), “the post” (al-busta), and “politics” (al-bulit―iq―a) signaled the arrival of Western institutions and technology in Arabic-speaking regions, and such terms were adopted by writers in their writings. The cultural, political, military, and technological challenges that resulted from the European contact with the Arab East, and the institutional changes that accompanied them, proved to be a crucial turning point in the development of the Arabic language, particularly its lexicon. However, interest in language matters was central to the Arab renaissance (Nahda) of the 19th century. Arab writers; intellectuals; and translators such Rifa⊂a Rafi⊂ al-Tahtawi (1801/2–73), (Ahmad) Faris al-Shidyaq (1801/04?–87), Nasif al-Yaziji (1800–71), and Butrus al-Bustani (1819–83), among others, debated Arabic linguistic issues in terms of their own literary and linguistic heritage. These and other authors discussed the “internal” needs of Arabic, not only issues of translating the culture of the Western societies. They wrote grammars and compiled other literary textbooks to facilitate the teaching of Arabic and to overcome difficulties of learning the language associated with older, traditional ways of language teaching and to raise awareness of the literary tradition of Arabs. These intellectuals also engaged in the preparation of glossaries and dictionaries appropriate to the needs of their societies.2

This book addresses an increasingly salient but still under-studied subject: the relationship between Arab states seeking to maintain and expand political hegemony over their populations and minority communities struggling to maintain their identities in the face of this centralizing and homogenizing thrust. Coming as it does at a time when the shifting balance between states and civil societies continues to dominate both the politics of the Arab world and the intellectual agenda of its students, this volume is a welcome addition to the literature on the region.

The story of the Zanj revolt in Basra and Khuzistan against the Abbasid caliphate between the years 869 and 883 has received little extensive study by historians. This is not unusual given that, as with other important political events of this period, the information we have in the medieval sources is scarce. Alexandre Popovic makes a significant attempt to provide a comprehensive outline of the Zanj revolt and stress its social and political dimensions. This book, originally a French doctoral thesis submitted in the early 1960s, was first published in 1976. Now, with a grant from the French Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, the book has been translated into English.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 has unleashed a flood of books on the causes and consequences of the rise of political Islam and the failure of Western-supported modernizing states. Ervand Abrahamian's new book is important because it is the first detailed academic work that deals with the conditions of the prisons and the horrors of the criminal system—the torture, the forced confessions, and the executions—in the newly established theocratic state. This book is a testimony to the horrors of self-righteous ideological regimes whose ruling elite claims a monopoly on truth and the knowledge of what is best for its citizens. This is a chilling book that should be read by all scholars and non-scholars who care about human rights.

If you have ever wondered why the U.S. government has a hands-off approach in its foreign policy toward the African country of Sudan, C. Norman Anderson's Sudan in Crisis will explain this phenomenon. Admittedly, the United States suddenly and unexpectedly torpedoed a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, only last year. This event, however, has been the most notable in a decade of increasing disengagement from this country, which today boasts Africa's longest civil war.

In Legislative Politics in the Arab World, Abdo Baaklini, Guilain Denoeux, and Robert Springborg provide a long-overdue and important step toward understanding legislative institutions in the Arab world. In the first part of this work, they redirect scholars' attention to Arab legislatures, which they argue both reflect and affect the “dynamics of democratic transition and consolidation in the Arab world” (p. 6). In the second part of the book, they provide detailed case studies of legislative institutions in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, and Yemen. Throughout the book, they leave us with the simple but important message: “Arab legislatures matter.”

Hanna Batatu's long-awaited study of Syria's peasantry is an extraordinary accomplishment. An exhaustive historical survey of Syria's rural society and the social formation of its current leadership, the book is encyclopedic in its scope and mastery of detail. It is also strikingly ambitious in its effort to link contemporary Syrian politics and the leadership of President Hafiz al-Asad to the transformations that reshaped rural Syria in the 19th and 20th centuries. Syria's Peasantry brings to an English-speaking audience a depth of knowledge that was previously available mostly through the Arabic-language publications of Syrian scholars such as ⊂Abdallah Hana. However, although Batatu's achievement is considerable, Syria's Peasantry is nevertheless flawed, and its ambition is not always realized. It is driven by a vision of peasant society, of Asad, and of Syrian politics that many readers will find unsatisfying, if not problematic.

In this book, Marion Boulby traces the rise and evolution of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Jordan. In chapter 1, she gives a brief historical survey of Jordan's state-building and the economic and social developments in the country between 1921 and 1989. In chapter 2, she describes the formative phase of the Brotherhood and the conditions surrounding its establishment between 1945 and 1957. Here, Boulby contends that the concern over the future of Palestine rather than competition with leftist groups was the primary motive behind the formation of the Brotherhood. She also highlights the conservative nature of the founders of the movement and their adoption of a reformist ideology and pragmatic political stands. In her opinion, the norms of political conservatism, reform, and pragmatism, which have characterized the movement throughout its history, were behind the forging of a close alliance between the Brothers and the monarchy.

With this book, Michael Herb makes a significant contribution to the debate on monarchism and its resiliency in the Middle East and North Africa. Relying on archival materials, a small number of interviews, and secondary literature, Herb compares the fortunes of twelve monarchies in the Middle East and North Africa and one monarchy in Afghanistan. By comparing the fate of eight successful monarchies with that of five failed monarchies, Herb seeks to understand which variable best accounts for the success of monarchical rule. A secondary task of the work is to evaluate the future of monarchical institutions in the Middle East and North Africa. Herb asks, “Is revolution—the destruction of these institutions—a necessary step toward political development in the region? Is it possible that political development can occur in the Middle East as it did in some places in Europe, through the adaptation and evolution of traditional institutions, rather than through their destruction?” (p. 256).

The globe is estimated to have 6 billion people today. The rapid increase of the human population has for decades been a common Western bogeyman. Now, at the turn of the millennium, the threat is brought out again. Today “the human time bomb” connotes uncontrolled fecundity in the Other, the non-Western or non-European. Demographic research shows that many countries in the Middle East and North Africa have among the highest rates of population growth in the contemporary world. Unlike Europe, where the nightmare of demographers and politicians is the aging and decreasing population, the Middle East still has a rapidly increasing and young population. Quite clearly, many politicians in the European Union are worried about the “uncontrollable overflow” of populations over its borders from the southern and eastern Mediterranean shores.

An argument that the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians can be resolved no longer seems utopian, and some might even assert that it no longer needs to be made. It is in this sense that this book of essays by the Israeli journalist and essayist Amos Elon is important, for it describes how deeply the conflict has structured regional political developments and how much is involved in breaking the cycles of violence and hostility. Elon's perspective on the prolonged confrontation between Israel and the Arab world conveys a strong sense of contingency: the confrontation that is taken for granted as a fixture of Middle Eastern politics is interpreted by Elon as the result of bad choices made by politicians whose attachment to the past turned into an unbearable burden for the future. With his powerful prose, Elon raises fundamental questions about the authoritarian polities characteristic of the Arab states, as well as about the nature of Israeli democracy and its concentration of political power. These essays, mostly drawn from previously published articles in The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books from 1967 through 1995, provoke a serious critique of Israel's dominant culture even as they are very much a product of it.

This well-researched book is a welcome contribution to the study of the Druzes, one of the most under-studied religious groups in the Middle East. The main objective of this book is to trace the historical development of the Druzes in Israel since the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 to the present, and to show that Druze ethnicity was and still is an instrument in the hands of the Israeli government officials and the Druze elite. This book also attempts to show how the Zionists used Druze ethnicity and ethnic issues to pursue their policy aims of alienating the Druzes from other Arabs. In this work, the author, a professor at the University of Haifa, revisits an area he knows well and has already presented in a previous book, A History of the Druzes.

Nissim Rejwan is an Israeli scholar who was born and raised in Baghdad. He does not fit the more common mold of Israeli post-nationalists, or post-Zionists, the majority of whom are of Ashkenazi background. He also has a much higher regard for Jewish tradition, including religion, than is typical of most post-Zionists. Indeed, it is that very regard for Jewish tradition and culture that underlies his post-Zionism.

This book addresses a topic that has aroused much interest since June 1982: the relations between Israel and the Maronite community in Lebanon and the historical and ideological origins of these relations. Brought to the fore by Israel's invasion of Lebanon, this relationship so far has been the subject of three major—and one should add, conflicting—contributions, by Benny Morris,1 Avi Shlaim,2 and Eyal Zisser.3 Morris's and Shlaim's works are quoted extensively in Kirsten Schulze's book; Zisser's is not even mentioned (though the author is quoted as a source). This, I believe, has much bearing on the validity of Schulze's arguments, because these studies represent two differing views with regard to the matter at stake: how should one interpret archival material and memoirs, place them in their rightful context, and form a firmly grounded opinion as to past events.

Arnon Soffer has written a comprehensive study covering the geo-politics of water conflict in the Middle East. Soffer's major contention is that the region is rapidly heading in the direction of environmental disaster because it is running out of water. Although he believes that regional cooperation, combined with the development of new water resources through nonconventional means—particularly desalination—is a possible solution to the problem, he is pessimistic about the likelihood of cooperation because of historical distrust among the nations involved in each basin conflict.