The study of Islamic movements has taken on a special relevance since the tragic events of 11 September 2001. More than ever, people inside and outside of academe are inquiring about the origins, motivations, and consequences of Islamic activism around the globe. The three books under review contribute to our understanding of Islamic activism in three countries: Algeria, Palestine/Israel, and Jordan. Camille al-Tawil's Al-Haraka addresses the rise of armed movements in Algeria since 1992 and their justification for violence, especially anti-civilian carnage, in the mid-1990s. Khaled Hroub's Hamas covers the origins, strategic orientation, and ideological evolution of one of the most controversial and militant Islamic movements in the Muslim world. Quintan Wiktorowicz's The Management of Islamic Activism sheds light on a moderate Islamic movement in the Middle East and the mechanisms of social control that foster such quiescent Islamism. These three works speak to the diverse nature of contemporary Islamic movements and the importance of political context in shaping Islamic strategic orientations. Each offers original empirical and theoretical insights that will surely enhance the discussion of Islamic activism in years to come.

Bassam Tibi has produced yet another impressive and thought-provoking book that addresses problematic dimensions in the understanding of the interaction between culture and politics in contemporary Islam and the relationship between Islam and the West inside Europe and in an increasingly “globalized” world. He revisits and expands on several of his themes in previous works on Islam while placing them within an elaborate and sophisticated cultural analysis that painstakingly attempts to define concepts, elucidate relationships, and propose solutions for the dilemmas at hand.

Allan Christelow once remarked that court documents have the potential to provide a more thorough and unbiased picture of society than most other sources. Anna Würth's study of judicial procedures at a court in a poor Sanעani neighborhood would appear to give credence to this observation. The book covers an important stage in Yemeni post-revolutionary history embracing republican state consolidation, unification of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) and the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY), and the Islamist challenge. It is based on more than one hundred fifty court cases, legal manuals, and unpublished draft statutes; “participant observation” at the court; historical chronicles; newspaper articles; and interviews with jurists and petitioners. Echoing the work of Mir-Hosseini and Messick, Würth conceives of law and legal practice as mutually constituting rather than separate domains. The book is divided into two main parts, each subdivided into two or more chapters. The first part deals with the norms governing the application of family law by the courts, describing court procedures during the period of Ottoman rule and the Hamid al-Din dynasty. Most chapters are devoted to an analysis of legal reform as part of state transformation from the 1970s to unification in 1990. Readers are offered a valuable overview of the diverse family laws of 1974, 1978, and 1992, their political objectives, and the debates surrounding them. The second part centers on the administration of justice at the court between 1983 and 1995.

Aida Adib Bamia's book is a significant study of folk poetry as a form of literary resistance and social critique in colonial Algeria just before its war of independence from France (1954–62). Bamia examines the work of Muhammad ibn al-Tayyib עAlili (c. 1894–c. 1954), an Algerian folk poet whose compositions provide a personal and historical documentation of the social concerns of rural Algerians. The poet עAlili worked as a nomadic sharecropper in northeastern Algeria during the final decades of colonization. In a small body of ten poems, he documented rural Algerian traditions and social conflicts, critiquing them from the position of the oppressed. עAlili's poetry was first recorded and collected by his friend and patron Mohammed Hadj-Sadok, a prominent educator and folklorist. The moving story of Bamia's contact with Hadj-Sadok (and thus indirectly with עAlili), as well as her own pioneering work in folklore in 1970s Algeria, informs her argument that understanding the lineage of folk poetry in terms of its inspiration and patronage is essential in determining its multiple meanings. Although the attention to provenance is not unusual in literary study, what is unique here is the perspective from which history is observed. Bamia elucidates the connection between the poet's personal experience and the larger socio-political context of colonial Algeria.

Languages are still a source of conflict in the former French colonies of the Maghrib. Despite official commitments to Arabic as a language of education and international communication, French remains an important presence, and neither written language has succeeded in displacing the regional dialectal Arabic and Tamazight (Berber) as the idioms of home and street. Only in Algeria, however, have these linguistic differences arrayed themselves along the political and economic fault lines of an increasingly disrupted society to become, in themselves, incitements to violence. These Algerian linguistic battles, which Djamila Saadi-Mokrane aptly describes as “linguicide,” are the focus of the essays in Anne-Emmanuelle Berger's intelligently compiled collection.

This is an ambitious, complex, and erudite book based on the author's 1998 dissertation at the University of Lausanne and following some of the same lines of inquiry as Johann Christoph Bürgel's provocative essays in The Feather of Simurgh (1988). La poétique de la peinture en Iran combines literary and pictorial analysis, takes on the important and little studied issue of the conceptual links between Persian literature and Persian painting, and aims at nothing less than an interpretation of the philosophical and theoretical underpinings of both verbal and visual production in Iran during the medieval through early modern periods.

The post–Hafizian ghazal, for all the magnitude of its textual corpus, has been a somewhat marginal area in Persian literature studies, while those few full-fledged works devoted to the subject were set in a preponderantly descriptive vein. Losensky's in-depth analytical study undoubtedly offers a valuable corrective to this state of research. The book explores the literary-historical development of the Safavid–Mughal ghazal through a distinctive focus on one of the key concepts of the Persian literary tradition—that of poetic imitation, as embodied in the poetic practice of Baba Fighani (d. 1519) and a number of his imitators and followers. Justly observing that “our critical understanding of the period remains hampered by an inadequate conceptual framework” (p. 3), Losensky grounds his inquiry both in a solid theoretical basis and in meticulously prepared methodology. In contrast with traditional discussions of Safavid–Mughal poetry in terms of “Indian style,” conceived largely in a synchronic perspective as a sum total of stylistic features, the theoretical tendency of the book under review clearly leans toward viewing it as an integral part of the Persian literary system—that is, of a structured whole in which literary objects (properties, phenomena, processes) must be studied in the multiplicity of their intersections, both synchronically and diachronically.

In Where Are You Going? a film about the Israeli journalist Amira Hass, Hass responds to a question about why she has chosen to live in Gaza and Ramallah in the past few years by telling a story about her mother, a Holocaust survivor. The mother described to Amira how she saw the European villagers watching the train taking her to a concentration camp with boredom and lack of interest. It was this knowing observation of the Other's tragedy that shocked Hass's mother and prompted Hass not to be an uninterested bystander, a knowing observer of the Palestinian tragedy. Hass here uses her identity as a second-generation to Holocaust survivor to demarcate herself with relation to Zionism, the Holocaust, and the Palestinian fight for independence. In effect, Hass here exemplifies an enactment of identity politics, a drawing from negotiation of personal and communal experience with hegemonic structures. This form of identity politics is used very effectively in Yosefa Loshitzky's excellent book Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen.

Using a vast array of government documents, newspapers, journals, memoirs of political prisoners, and reports issued by the Special Representative appointed by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), Reza Afshari provides a rich, sensitive, and very sympathetic presentation of the experiences and voices of victims of human-rights violations in Iran. This timely book is organized into eighteen chapters and is, to a large extent, the story of two decades of interaction between the UNCHR and Iranian officials. It discusses reports issued by the Special Representative of the UNCHR on the conditions of human rights in Iran and documents their violations in 1979–2000. In addition to gender discriminations and threats to the liberty and life of secular intellectuals, each of the following rights is discussed in a separate chapter: the right to life; freedom from torture and cruel punishment; liberty and security of person and freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention; a fair trial; freedom of conscience, thought, and religion; freedom of opinion, expression, and the press; participation in the state's political affairs; and the rights of women to equal opportunities in public life.

The Israeli–Turkish entente, which has been in place for about half a century, has generated a vast literature over the course of its life. The literature has been of varying quality. Some of the literature has extolled the virtues of the entente, while some has condemned it as contributing to the tensions in the Middle East. Yet other writings believe that it will not last.

A problem with books about the Middle East that include “today” in the title is “today” becomes “yesterday” so rapidly that attempts to produce a volume with more than ephemeral value is indeed difficult. Any textbook dealing with the Middle East should strive to be other than an account of current events. Figures dealing with current population, per capita income, and gross national product, are likely to become quickly outdated. It is better to deal with long-term trends and fundamental influences, such as the continuing role of religion, the influence of population shifts on politics, the impact of resources on economies, and past history as the fountainhead of contemporary political change.

If you have grown wary of “global/local” titles in recent years, because they usually promise more than they deliver, you have found another book to be wary about. Samir Khalaf's collection of previously published or presented articles and essays has much to commend it but little that addresses questions of the local or global—or questions of cultural resistance for that matter. The book's title finds justification only in Chapter 11, “Contesting Space and the Forging of New Cultural Identities.” The remainder of the book deals with decidedly pre-global concerns, such as issues of Lebanon's civil war and sectarian identities, the dialectics of tradition and modernity, and, most prominently, Khalaf's central paradox of a society simultaneously held together and torn apart by communal or familial loyalties. In a slightly different category are four articles about early–18th-century American Protestant missionaries, whose letters, sermons, and missionary activities show them to be pioneers of cultural imperialism in the Middle East. Khalaf's motive for writing most of his articles is a sincere concern about the post–civil-war reconstruction of his country and a steadfast belief that, as an intellectual, he has to play a role in the discourses about reconstruction. His noble intentions make his writing rather compelling, and his essays should be read as fragments of Lebanese history via the travels and travails of a scholar whose ideas were greatly shaped by that history.

You do not have to wait long to find out what this book is all about. The Preface trumpets it as a veritable consumer's report on Middle East studies, ominously warning “let the buyer beware.” Martin Kramer comes out swinging and cuts his opponents very little slack over the next 130 pages.

Saif's A Legislature in Transition, his Ph.D. thesis for the University of Exeter, is an insightful contribution to Yemeni political studies. Based on interviews and surveys of members of the Yemeni Parliament in 1998 and 1999 and an extensive analysis of Parliament's workings, the research results depict the complex relationships among the institutions of Parliament, Yemeni society, and current political outcomes.

In the past two years, the Arab Psychiatrists' Association has accomplished at least two major objectives: organizing an international conference on the mental health of Arab women, held in Tunisia in 2001, and publishing a work in Cairo on the same subject, written by Mouna Sawaf and Koutaiba Alguilbi. This illustrates the importance this scientific institution gives to such a discussion. The conference and the publication are both the work of the second generation of Arab psychiatrists—the first generation devoted itself primarily to the training of personnel, setting up institutions for mental care, regulating the profession, and so on. This new generation of psychiatrists, in which women are present in ever greater numbers, is directing its attention increasingly to societal problems, looking to answer social needs, as everyone admits that the region's development cannot take place without the active participation of women.

Melani McAlister, currently assistant professor of American studies at George Washington University, attempts a multi-faceted and multi-layered coherence between U.S. political activities and agendas figuring the Middle East, and U.S. popular-culture appropriations of specific histories, religions, and symbologies of the region over a fifty-five–year span. McAlister sets herself a daunting task to interweave popular culture, politics, history, and criticism:

When I wrote Iraq and the International Oil System—Why America Went to War in the Gulf, I anticipated that it might generate discussion. At the same time, I trusted that the debate would at least be honest. With Isamal al Khafaji's review of my book it is anything but that. Khafaji not only puts words in my mouth; he twists my meaning in several places and contrives arguments to use against me based on highly selective readings of the text. He accuses me, for example, of trying to exonerate the United States from complicity in the Mossadegh coup. Nowhere in the book do I do that. I say that, under Truman, the United States tried to work with the Iranian leader, but Eisenhower was determined to get rid of him, and once that decision was made Mossadegh's fate was sealed. Khafaji says I present no evidence to support my argument about trying to preserve Mossadegh in power. What is the long discussion of the Harriman Mission if not evidence?

Stephen Pelletiere is disappointed that the debate about his book that he had anticipated did not turn out to be an honest one because of my review. Unfortunately, he is unable to realize that the quality of what he had written could not possibly generate a debate in the scholarly sense of the term. When I was asked by the book editor of IJMES to review Pelletiere's book, I immediately found that my job instead was to navigate through a mountain of mistaken facts, historical data, and concepts, whose aim was to reconstruct a biased and apologetic narrative. Nevertheless, I did my best to present an honest and fair judgment of the book.