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.

Al-Sa⊂di's Ta⊃rikh al-sudan is an essential source for the history of West Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries and a significant volume in the library of Muslim history. Although a French translation by Octave Houdas has been available for more than a century, al-Sa⊂di's history has been used primarily by specialists and is known more generally only through references to it in textbooks and monographs. The publication of John Hunwick's translation makes this important work readily available to a broad audience in a readable and very usable form.

This is a confused and confusing book. The subtitle clearly suggests that the monograph is a study of Nisab al-Ihtisab, a treatise on hisba written by the subcontinental Hanafite jurist Sunami. It turns out, however, that the monograph is for the most part a disappointing translation, with an even more disappointing short Introduction, which hardly constitutes a study. The first and longest section (eight pages of the Introduction) raises a number of questions about authorship, all of which are answered in a cursory and far less than satisfactory manner. The sections that follow, all of which are very short, deal with Sunami's education, social milieu, and presentation of the text. Thereafter, in the space of no more than two pages, the “value of the work” is considered, and this is followed by a chronological list of “known hisba treatises.” The issue of theory and practice, implicitly raised in the title, is addressed in fewer than two pages, and poorly at that, considering how fundamental an issue this is. In sum, little in this Introduction constitutes, properly speaking, a study of the text. At best, it provides background information about the treatise and its author, although it does so in a not altogether organized, thorough, or systematic fashion.

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.

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.

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.

The First Crusaders, 1095–1131 is a mature work of a leading scholar in the field of Crusade history that displays the results of years of detailed research and thought. The greatest strength of this work is that Riley-Smith draws extensively on documentary evidence from cartularies and archives surviving in European religious communities. Such thorough and extensive use of cartulary evidence is surprisingly rare. The result is a largely fresh view of the old topic of the Crusaders' motivation and a vastly more detailed portrayal of the mechanics and logistics behind the First Crusade. The author supports his views with the cumulative weight of scores of observations regarding the identification and origins of participants in the early Crusading movement. Riley-Smith has complied (and made available in an Appendix) detailed and judicious lists of all those who certainly, probably, and possibly participated in the Crusades between 1096 and 1129. Culled from all the narrative sources and many collections of documents, the lists provide a substantial body of evidence that many scholars will find useful.

In recent years, the field of Mamluk studies has seen what may well be an amount of published scholarship unparalleled in any field of Middle East studies. Less than a decade ago, the study of the Mamluk rulers of Egypt and Syria could hardly have been called a distinct field, and it was only about four decades ago that the period was given any systematic attention at all through the pioneering efforts of David Ayalon. However, Mamluk specialists now have their own journal, the Mamluk Studies Review, with three annual volumes in print and more on the way, as well as an extensive and ever-growing Web-based bibliography, both of which are published by the University of Chicago's Middle East Documentation Center. Mamluk specialists around the world have been engaged in this work, but it was initiated by Thomas Philipp and the late Ulrich Haarmann. In December 1994, these two scholars organized a conference on Mamluk studies in Bad Homburg, Germany, and eighteen of the papers presented at that symposium have been published as The Mamluks in Egyptian Politics and Society. The papers in this volume cover the period of the Mamluk sultanate in Egypt and Syria from 1250 to 1517, as well as the subsequent Ottoman period up to the rule of Muhammad Ali in the early 19th century. The richness of the sources for this period is evident in the diverse topics represented; papers dealing with political and social history are supplemented by studies in astronomy, religion, traditional culture, historiography, and urban geography. Indeed, the volume stands as a benchmark from which to view this rapidly growing field.

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.

It was only after Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan regained the Umayyad caliphate that concerted efforts were made to extend Umayyad sway into the Maghrib. These efforts turned into a wave of expansion that extended all the way into the 2nd century A.H./8th century A.D. and reached far into the Iberian Peninsula and across the Pyrenees. These efforts also constitute the history of the Maghrib, a history aptly described by the title of the book under review: A Gateway to Hell, a Gateway to Paradise. This title reflects the conflicted attitudes held by early Muslims regarding the region and its history. In the beginning, Umayyad policies were indeed contradictory. For example, Tariq ibn Ziyad, a Berber, could lead Muslims into the Iberian Peninsula, while up to a time Damascus considered Berbers legal booty.

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.

Scholars have been reluctant to undertake a comprehensive history of science in Islamic civilization when a great deal of original material still lies unedited, unpublished, unexplored, or partially investigated in spite of prolific research. Even extensive collaborative attempts at a synthesis (see the Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, 3 vols. [1996]) reflect the level of research to date in specific areas rather than present a definitive survey within a cultural perspective. One therefore admires the courage of Howard Turner, who is not a historian of Arabic science, in taking on this ambitious publication, which extends beyond the limits suggested by its title. In fact, Medieval could be omitted from his title, as it does justice neither to the content of his book nor to the historical reality. The term refers, as we know, to some interim period of shifting chronological boundaries between the so-called Dark Ages and the Renaissance in European civilization. The comparable time period in Islamic civilization, however, encompasses the rise, a series of peaks, and the seeds of decline in the sciences. It is not a transitional phase between “dark ages” (the J―ahiliyya) and a “rebirth.” The content of Turner's book is best conveyed simply as “An Illustrated Introduction to Science in Islam or in Islamic Civilization.”

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.”

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.

Arabia is the cradle of Islam and the homeland of the Arabs, who spread that faith in a wide belt around the globe that extends from Central Asia to Western Europe. Because Islam's roots are in Arabia, that peninsula has claims on the attention of the historian of Islam both as a religion and as a world civilization—that of Medieval Islam. Although the history of Arabia before Islam is important, there is no doubt that the rise of Islam within the peninsula's confines imparted new significance to the history of the region. Because of its history in preIslamic times, the significance of the peninsula remains, relatively speaking, marginal, but has been relieved of that marginality by the fact that it became the birthplace of Islam.

Michal Biran fills an important gap in research on the 13th-century Mongol empire with her recent study of Qaidu (1236–1301), a great-grandson of Chinggis Khan and champion of the house of Ögödei. Characterizing Qaidu as a pragmatist, not an “ideological warrior” (p. 107), she challenges the conventional view that he was one of the quintessential defenders of nomadic values against the sedentarizing ethos of other Mongol rulers, and that he claimed the office of qa⊂an (supreme Mongol overlord). The work argues that his long struggle with Qubilai and his ruling career in Central Asia had two main goals: to restore to the Ögödeid ulus its rightful territory according to the original division of the empire by Chinggis and to secure the political and economic viability of that territory. It concludes that Qaidu did not aspire to become the qa⊂an but played a crucial role in the emergence of an independent Chaghadaid khanate in the early 14th century.

The author claims that this work is a “preliminary argument for a new approach” (p. xxi) to the history of the Muslim East, one that runs counter to older Indo-centric views of the Mughals and the contrived “national” histories produced by British and Russian imperial historians (p. 154). Two central themes run through this study. The first is that “tripartite Muslim Asia” (Iran–Turan–Hindustan) of the 16th and 17th centuries was, in terms of the dominant elite culture, one world and not several. The Muslims of Central Asia and northern India in the 16th and 17th centuries “appear not to have thought of each other mainly as foreigners or as subjects of another king. Rather, they considered each other foremost as Muslims and secondarily in terms of family connections or other loyalties” (p. 31). This in part contributed to and permitted the large-scale movement of talent from Iran and Central Asia to the Mughal domain, “where opportunities were perceived as being better” (p. xix). This notion and the elements of “shared economy” and “mental geography of Asian Muslims” are briefly explored in the first chapter and returned to repeatedly throughout the book. The second chapter, “Timurid Legacy and Turko-Mongol Identity,” focuses on one very particular aspect of this special relationship. The Mughal dynasty was founded by Babur, a descendant of Tamerlane and heir to the extraordinary Turko-Iranian culture that flourished under Timurid rule in Central Asia. Having been evicted from his patrimony in Central Asia by the Uzbeks and having failed to regain his ancestral lands, Babur (who viewed India as “inhospitable, uncivilized and heathen” [p. 127]) and his descendants had to make do with Muslim South Asia. This was their “consolation prize.” That is not bad as “consolation prizes” go, especially because the new territory, which Babur's descendants, after a shaky start, soon expanded to include much of the Indian Subcontinent, quickly outpaced their Central Asian patrimony in power and wealth. Uzbek Central Asia, decreasing in importance militarily, strategically, and economically, never constituted a threat to the Mughal regime and was no longer a core zone of world trade. “In strictly material terms the Mughals had little to gain by reconquering the land of their forebears,” Foltz writes, “yet it remained an obsession. Simple nostalgia appears to have been a major factor in determining the Mughal's foreign policy, and may well provide historians with an example of psychology overriding economics” (p. 6). This is the second major theme of this work. Babur, understandably, always dreamed of returning to his Central Asian homeland. Foltz, however, contends that his “obsession was to be the inheritance he bequeathed to his own descendants, which would haunt them mercilessly despite their successes and glories in India for two centuries to come” (p. 14). Another psychological factor, the author suggests, was the need of the Mughals to prove to the Uzbeks and the rest of the world that they had “made good in exile” (p. 68). By the late 16th century, the Mughals controlled a state with some 60 million to 90 million subjects, while Uzbek Turan could only muster some 5 million—and not always under stable rule. In addition to the psychological factors, which, with the exception of Babur's memoirs (a unique source) are difficult to document, there were also very good political reasons for the Mughals to maintain this Central Asian link. They were Timurids, after all, and Timurid descent was an important component of their ideology, especially when facing the Shibanid Uzbeks. Although they considered the Shibanid Uzbeks barbarians, the Shibanids' Chinggisid descent gave them even higher standing. Foltz correctly notes that “in a world where lineage was nearly everything, the Mughal descendants of Timur could not, ideologically speaking, abandon their paramount claim to Central Asia no matter how firmly established in India they became” (p. 22). Viewing themselves as the lawful rulers of Central Asia, the Mughals “were content to let the Uzbeks ‘house sit’ for them” (p. 33), sometimes referring to Uzbek rulers as “governors” or the Wali-yi Turan (p. 127). Although many Uzbeks eventually came to seek their fortunes in Mughal service, they were stereotyped as simpleminded and pious but obstinate ruffians and bigots, given to revolt. Foltz attributes their rebellious inclinations to the egalitarian traditions that they brought with them from the Turkic lands (p. 59).

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.

Islamicists interested in Sufism have benefited from a growing number of worthwhile publications in recent years. Studies of South Asian Sufism in particular have broadened scholarly horizons by increasing the range of materials with which to reconstruct a complex history. One aspect of the history of Sufism that has been getting significant attention in various contexts lately is the role of authority in the person of the shaykh. Arthur Buehler offers in his study of South Asia's Naqshbandis something of a parallel to what Vincent Cornell has produced in his work on the role of the shaykh among North Africa's Shadhilis. He argues that Naqshbandi Sufism has witnessed an important shift in the role of the shaykh, from one of hands-on mystical tutelage to one of intercession. Buehler sets his chief argument in the context of evidence that major transformations occurred in the nature of Sufi spiritual authority beginning in the 9th through 11th centuries. In his first two chapters, Buehler lays out the general historical background. Before Sufism had been fully institutionalized into discrete orders, the “teaching shaykh” (shaykh at-ta⊂l―im) instructed all comers in the growing body of Sufi tradition. Imparting the wisdom of already legendary characters, they equipped their students with a working knowledge of the essentials of Sufism. They and their pupils were often quite mobile, and the teacher-student relationship remained relatively informal and distant. Beginning in the late 9th century, that relationship began to change. Over the next 200 years or so, a new kind of shaykh emerged as the normative type of Sufi authority. From a fixed abode, the “directing shaykh” (shaykh al-tarbiyya) provided increasingly proprietary instruction on the actual pursuit of the spiritual path to a select few disciples who pledged their sole allegiance to one spiritual guide. Now the shaykh imparted not merely generalized instructions on spiritual etiquette, but also soul-challenging advice and do-it-or-depart requirements for advancement on the mystical path. Regarded as virtually infallible, the directing shaykh initiated followers into a lineage, bestowed the khirqa, and generally exercised total authority over the disciple's daily affairs.

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.