On page 465, the line “Following a brief reference of the well-known emotional response to the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, the religious response to the Lebanese writers Salah al-Din al-Munajjid and Kamal Yusuf al-Hajj to the Arab defeat, Rejwan proceeds to a study …” should read “Following a brief reference to the well-known emotional response of the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, the religious response of the Lebanese writers Salah al-Din al-Munajjid and Kamal Yusuf al-Hajj to the Arab defeat, Rejwan proceeds to a study …”

In his book, The Taliban Phenomenon, Kamal Matinuddin does not offer a central thesis regarding Afghan politics or the Taliban movement. Rather, he discusses a number of important questions pertaining to the Taliban movement. Since the rise of the Taliban, their identity has been disputed. The opponents of the Taliban claim that many members of the movement are natives of Pakistan. In contrast, the supporters of the Taliban assert that they are ethnic Afghans. Matinuddin's discussion of the origins of the Taliban addresses this controversy. According to Matinuddin, during the 1980s a large number of Islamic seminaries (d―in―i mad―aris) were established in Pakistan. The government of Pakistan and oil-rich Arab states paid for most of the expenses of these institutions. In 1997, about 220,000 students were enrolled in these seminaries. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a large number of young Afghan refugees registered in these institutions. When the Taliban movement began, not only Afghan students (Taliban) of these seminaries joined the movement, but Pakistani Taliban from these institutions also joined their Afghan colleagues in their efforts to take control of Afghanistan. Thus, according to Matinuddin, the Taliban movement is an Afghan phenomenon, but occasionally Pakistani Taliban help their Afghan colleagues in the battlefield. However, Pakistani Taliban do not take orders from the government of Pakistan.

Jørgen Nielsen's Towards a European Islam provides a very good introduction to the role that Islam plays in the experience of most non-European immigrants to Western Europe. As Nielsen correctly notes, there is an overwhelmingly Muslim character to immigration in the region, but few of the recent studies on immigration have looked systematically at the issue of the role religion plays in the lives of these newly arrived migrants. This relative silence is surprising given that there are an estimated 9 million Muslims in Western Europe, which makes them the largest religious minority in the region. Nielsen's book, therefore, is a healthy corrective for a literature that too often ignores this important question. The book's greatest strength is its description of the complex process by which Muslims seek to integrate their religious values and practices into social and political cultures that are not well suited to accommodating those views.

In his review of my book Religion and Politics under the Early⊂Abbasids, Saleh Said Agha seriously misunderstands several of my arguments, then sets out to refute his versions of these arguments. The constraints of space do not permit me to take note of all his criticisms and misconstructions, though I should like to mention and clarify a few of them.

Sabri Sayari's review of my book The Kurds and the Future of Turkey concludes that “despite some … merits,” my book “fails to make a significant contribution to the existing scholarship and knowledge about an important and complex issue.” Given some of the criticisms he has made to arrive at his conclusion, one might instead conclude that my book fails to make the contribution Sayari, the executive director of the Institute of Turkish Studies, would have liked it to make. Because my subject concerns an increasingly important issue, I believe it would serve a useful scholarly purpose for me to reply to his criticisms.

I must express my surprise at the offensive tone of Michael Gunter's reply to my review of his book The Kurds and the Future of Turkey, since, in addition to my criticisms, I did enumerate some of the merits of his study. I can only assume, therefore, that he has either misunderstood my comments or chosen to ignore the favorable points I made and focus instead only on the critical ones.