The study of the history of the modern Middle East has reached the state at which scholars now have access to first-rate monographs, such as this one, even about urban centers as modest as Haifa was during the period covered by this book. This is certainly good news, particularly because books such as this one, and May Seikaly's, which covers a subsequent period of Haifa's history, are comprehensive, well written, and thoroughly grounded in local primary sources. We should be grateful in particular to Brill's “Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage” series for publishing this and other monographs covering the local history of different parts of the Ottoman Empire.

In this important book, Laurie Brand asks whether the all-too-brief political openings in the Middle East and North Africa had a positive or a negative impact on women's rights and whether the many Islamist and women's rights groups influenced that impact. She begins with a thoughtful statement describing her background and philosophical orientation vis-à-vis her study (pp. xv–xvi). Many authors of scholarly books find this very difficult to do, but it is helpful for serious readers and should be an expected practice. She also takes care to define her terms. “Women's status” here means women's legal status and women's rights to organize. She prefers to use “conservative forces” for “Islamism” or “Islamic fundamentalism,” though this varies in the text, and “conservative” for “traditional.” “Progress for women” means reproductive rights and access to divorce, though, as she notes, many women would ask for clean running water, good educational facilities, decent working conditions, and increased wages before reproductive rights and access to divorce. It is of course difficult to separate civil and political rights from social and economic rights; which comes first is like the chicken and the egg conundrum.

Mehrzad Boroujerdi's Iranian Intellectuals and the West explores the works of three generations of Iranian writers and academics who contributed to the formation of a counter-Western “nativist” discourse. It opens with an exposition of the concepts that constitute the theoretical grid of the book and provide the title of its first chapter. “Otherness, Orientalism, Orientalism in Reverse, and Nativism.” Informed by contemporary critical theories, Boroujerdi argues for the centrality of the “other” to the formation of modern self-identity. Re-encapsulating the main theses of Said's Orientalism, he recounts that “the Islamic world came to be perceived as the embodiment of all that was recently left behind in Europe: an all-encompassing religion, political despotism, cultural stagnation, scientific ignorance, superstition, and so on” (p. 7). He then explains “Orientalism in reverse,” a concept formulated by the Syrian critic Sadik al-Azm. Preferring this clumsy concept to “Occidentalism” or “self-Orientalizing,” Boroujerdi defines Orientalism in reverse as “a discourse used by ‘oriental’ intellectuals and political elites to lay claim to, recapture, and finally impropriate their ‘true’ and ‘authentic’ identity” (pp. 11–12). As a counter-narrative of Orientalism, this discourse “uncritically embraces orientalism's assumption of a fundamental ontological difference separating the natures, peoples, and cultures of the Orient and the Occident” (p. 12). Boroujerdi attributes the popularity of Orientalism in reverse to the “seductive lure of nativism,” which is defined as “the doctrine that calls for the resurgence, reinstatement, or continuance of native or indigenous cultural customs, beliefs, and values” (p. 14). Surprisingly enough, Boroujerdi does not divulge that this seductive and pervasive “ nativism” has no discursively significant equivalent in Iranian cultural politics.

Secularization of Iran: A Doomed Failure? is an extremely readable, insightful, and detailed contribution by Azadeh Kian-Thiebaut to the literature on Iranian society and politics in the 20th century. When I first started reading the book, I expected the pedantic descriptions that often characterize doctoral dissertations turned into books. Fortunately, however, I found the book much more than a dispassionate treatment of facts and theories. The author has perspectives and points of views that are not just hidden in the various descriptions of events and ideas. Yet her work is not an ideological treatment of Iranian politics and society, either. Events and historical facts are treated with a level of sociological objectivity and sound judgment that are not too common among Iran's observers.

On 12 June 1993, the Algerian feminist, educator, and political activist Khalida Messaoudi received a communique from the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) condemning her to death. Unbowed: An Algerian Woman Confronts Islamic Fundamentalism chronicles the life and experiences of this extraordinary woman. Through a series of interviews with the journalist Elisabeth Schemla, Messaoudi eloquently reflects on her childhood, education, and activism while simultaneously relating a rich perspective on Algeria's post-colonial history and contemporary politics.

This short collection of essays provides new insights into the medium of political cartoons in the Middle East, where it has long played an important role. Drawing on materials from Turkey, Iran, and Tunisia, contributors “focus on the multiple cultural spaces that political cartoons in the Middle East creat across societies” (cover text).

Has the time come for a free-trade agreement (FTA) between Egypt and the United States? According to the contributors to Building Bridges, an FTA is the logical next step in the Egypt–U.S. relationship. This policy-oriented volume explores the conditions under which the benefits of an FTA between the parties would be maximized. Although the contributors reach different conclusions regarding the optimal form of the Egypt–U.S. FTA, consensus is reached on one point: an FTA between Egypt and the United States will produce economic benefits for both nations.

Edgar O'Ballance is a military journalist and historian who has covered more than twenty wars and insurgencies and written more than fifty books or monographs on conflicts in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Europe, and Asia. His book is a chronological blow-by-blow account of the Lebanese War (1975–90), including a brief account of the events leading to the breakdown of April 1975 and the events immediately following the conclusion of the war in October 1990. Strangely, the title of the book describes the Lebanese War as having extended until 1992. There is no explanation for this odd dating, although it is clear that the author concluded his research in 1992; the book itself ends its chronological accounting in late 1991.

The national elections in Turkey this April were not the expected success for the Islamist Fazilet Partisi (Virtue Party). Under its former name, Refah Partisi (Welfare Party), the party was the actual winner of the elections in late 1995, and many supporters were deeply disappointed at the result this spring. Why was the party weakened? Commentators inside and outside Turkey speculated from different points of view. Many of them portrayed issues in Turkish Islamism as questions relating to the party as an organization and with an apparent disinclination to regard the party as an umbrella for quite conflicting interests.

Jeffrey Nedoroscik's book is a sensitive sociological survey of life in Cairo's City of the Dead, where more than 500,000 people are now enlisted to reside. In an attempt to both demystify and account for this phenomenon, Nedoroscik argues that life in the City of the Dead is as old, and as rich, as life in Cairo itself. Today, residence in and among the family tombs stretching across some five square miles at the base of the muqattam Hills, constitutes an informal housing sector that has developed as a response to Cairo's severe housing crisis. Historically, though, the cemetery also teemed with life as a religious center housing some of the Muslim world's most important monuments, and a site of temporary and permanent shelter to relatives to the deceased, guardians of tombs, itinerants, the poor, the sick, Sufis, and other religious leaders.

Few people can speak to the complex issue of Palestinian identity in Jordan with the degree of background of Adnan Abu-Odeh, a West Bank Palestinian who has made his mark in the Jordanian political establishment by serving in the Directorate of General Intelligence (mukhabarat), the royal diwan, the cabinet, the Senate, and Jordan's delegation to the United Nations, and as an adviser to King Hussein and his son King ⊂Abdullah II. Over the course of more than three decades of public service in Jordan, Abu-Odeh has been an inside observer and, at times, a direct participant in many of the major episodes in the Hashemite kingdom's recent history. He has also been a controversial and sometimes outspoken figure for both Palestinians and East Bank (Transjordanian) Jordanians.

This is the most complete and perhaps the best treatment of the origins and development of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia yet to appear in the English language. No serious library can afford to pass it up. The author is a Russian scholar who was Middle East correspondent for Pravda for many years, as well as the director of the Institute for African Studies and member of the Russian Foreign Ministry's advisory group. His knowledge of languages is used to great advantage in the book, and his bibliography of Arabic, Turkish, Russian, English, and French works is an impressive contribution to the history of the Arabian Peninsula. Rare indeed is the scholor who has read, let alone been able to retrieve, the number of valuable local histories that Vassiliev has used for the book. Despite its overwhelming attention to detail, his history is written in a fluid and accessible style, holding the reader's attention till the last. The narrative never flags, even when the author reconstructs the minutiae of the almost daily battles between the armies of central, eastern, and western Arabia in great and absorbing detail. In fact, some sections make for riveting reading, especially those in the latter part of the book, when Ibn Saud faces off against the Ikhwan or browbeats both the internal and external opposition to create his own imprint on the Arabian Peninsula.

The Soviet Union's collapse and the end of the Cold War have been accompanied by a declining interest in Marxian-inspired theories of political economy in the study of core–periphery relations. Concepts such as dependency and imperialism have been replaced by market forces and structural adjustment. Similarly, post-modernism's impact has been to erode interest in historical theories, especially those with a teleological bent. Thus, Robert Tignor's study, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire, is refreshing in raising issues that have not been central to the recent intellectual agenda in the study of non-Western societies.

Tony Cordesman has become a veritable institution among Washington policy analysts. Few are more prolific, especially in the area of comparative analysis of weapons systems. He can be depended on to produce data-rich, comprehensive, lavishly documented studies of military doctrine and usage, intentions to acquire or produce weapons systems, and willingness to abide by international arms-control regimes. These two books are no exception. They include indepth analyses of conventional and non-conventional weapons systems. It is the latter that makes these books so important to analysts of regional weapons development and arms control. Cordesman examines Iraqi and Iranian acquisitions, from purchase, absorption, production, and use of conventional weapons to efforts to acquire nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons—the so-called weapons of mass destruction—and the requisite ballistic-missile–delivery systems.

Among Middle Eastern and North African states, Libya has been under-studied, especially in recent years, because of difficulties in doing fieldwork and because of Libya's isolation by the American-led international boycott in the wake of the Lockerbie incident. Vandewalle's book is not only a much needed and fresh look at the inner workings of Libya; it is also a very valuable contribution to an ongoing theoretical debate over rentier states, state-building, and étatism. It is the culmination of fourteen months of fieldwork that included interviews with many high officials and access to primary source material available only in Libya.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin made an astute decision in the summer of 1992 when he entrusted the highly respected rector of Tel Aviv University, Itamar Rabinovich, with the task of reinvigorating the moribund Israeli–Syrian negotiations that had grown out of the Madrid Conference the previous October. Rabinovich had launched a stellar academic career by writing what remains arguably the best study of Syrian domestic politics during the Ba⊂thist era; his subsequent work explores the dynamics of the civil war in Lebanon, the intricacies of Egypt's relations with Palestine during the 1940s and 1950s, and the origins of inter-Arab diplomacy, among many other topics. More important, in 1991 Rabinovich published an authoritative yet accessible overview of the tangled history of direct talks among the governments of Israel and its Arab neighbors in the years immediately after the 1948 war. The book not only undermines the general presumption that the Arab–Israeli dilemma is inherently insoluble, but also elucidates the miscalculations and tactical errors that derailed early attempts to resolve the conflict. Rabinovich was clearly the right person to supervise delicate bargaining with the Syrians, and might have been expected to compose a notable account of his experiences once his term as Israel's chief negotiator came to an end.

David Waldner's book is a rigorously argued and impressively sustained account of the relationship between state-building and economic growth in four late-developing countries: South Korea, Syria, Taiwan, and Turkey. By systematically and crisply using a comparative method to bring a unified story to these different histories, Waldner demonstrates in a masterly way the benefits of genuine comparative inquiry; contributes to our understanding of the painful results of economic development in the Middle East; and uses Middle Eastern cases to advance our understanding of the complicated and mediated linkage between state formation and economic development. This ambitious book deserves a wide audience.

This book is a most welcome addition to the literature on Russian–Israeli relations. Although Yaacov Ro⊃i, in his study Soviet Decision Making in Practice: The USSR and Israel 1947–1954 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1980), covered the 1947–53 period thoroughly, and although there is an extensive body of literature on Russian policy toward Israel (and the rest of the Middle East) after the 1967 war, a gap has existed for many years in the scholarly coverage of Russian–Israeli relations from the death of Stalin in March 1953 until the June 1967 Six Day War. Yosef Govrin, a retired Israeli Foreign Office official who specialized in relations with the USSR, has gone a long way toward filling this gap. Having the advantage of access to the Israeli archives and internal political debates, Govrin presents a balanced picture of the Soviet–Israeli relationship, pointing out where, in his opinion, both Israel and the USSR made mistakes in developing their ties. He also goes into great detail on the question of Soviet Jewry (more than half of the book), noting how Israel's efforts to get the Soviet government to allow Jews to emigrate to Israel was a serious complicating factor in the relationship, although the primary cause for the USSR's breaking of diplomatic relations with Israel in June 1967 (Govrin was first secretary of the Israeli embassy in Moscow at the time) stemmed from Moscow's backing of the radical Ba⊃athist regime in Syria, which helped precipitate the 1967 war.

Yezid Sayigh's encylopedic history focuses on the role that the idea of armed struggle played in the Palestinian national movement as it evolved over the past half-century. His central thesis is that “armed struggle provided the political impulse and organisational dynamic in the evolution of Palestinian national identity and in the formation of parastatal institutions and a bureaucratic elite, the nucleus of government” (p. vii). The concept of armed struggle reforged Palestinian national identity, mobilized Palestinians, provided political legitimization to the Palestinian movement, made the Palestinians a distinct political actor in relation to the Arab states, helped to create institutions that could form the basis of a government, and established a well-defined political elite. Thus, even though Palestinian leaders never transformed the armed struggle into a people's war along the lines of Algeria or Vietnam, and never liberated any part of Palestine by force, armed struggle served other important, statist functions.

Yitzhak Rabin left a complex and paradoxical legacy. The man who for decades embodied a national security policy based on forceful deterrence adopted, in the 1990s, a rhetoric of coexistence and cooperation. Rabin began to articulate positions identified with the Israeli left: that the Palestinians were at the heart of the Israeli–Arab conflict, and that the conflict was at least partly a product of “psychological walls” on both sides. Despite his traditionally hawkish views and staunch opposition to recognizing Yasir Arafat and the PLO, Rabin oversaw a reversal of policy toward Israel's former arch-enemy. Indeed, it was Rabin's stature as “Mr. Security” that made the Israeli–PLO Declaration of Principles possible. Unlike Shimon Peres, his rival for Labor Party leadership, Rabin's unrivaled role as an architect of national security policy and practice afforded him relative immunity to charges of excessive dovishness. Efraim Inbar, professor of politics at Bar-Ilan University, offers a lucid account of Rabin's contribution to Israeli security. Concluding that Rabin's approach to security was pragmatic, ad hoc, and without an overarching strategic vision (p. 169), Inbar nevertheless begins from the premise that for Rabin and other leaders of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), the anarchic environment of Middle Eastern politics conditions Israel's security needs. In this environment, governments consider international law and treaties unreliable, so “self-help” and deterrence are the sole path to security. For Rabin, “What has assured Israel's existence…is primarily Israel's comprehensive power, with military might as the decisive element” (p. 11).