This edited volume presents recent directions in the growing scholarship on the visual arts, film, dance, and music from the Middle East. It is a much needed collection of eighteen essays and interviews that addresses several imbalances in academic scholarship and lay understanding of Middle Eastern expressive cultures. In part, the book is intended to counter negative images of the region by providing rich analysis of local art forms. The editor uses tarab, translated for the title as “enchantment,” to conceptualize the aesthetic particular to these forms. She argues that this aesthetic depends on a reflexive interaction among audience, performer, and art that is different from the distanced “appreciation” common to Western high art audiences. Images of Enchantment also aims to contribute to the growing academic literature on modernity in the Middle East. It does so by tracking the changes in expressive culture from the early 1900s to the present, and by looking at the relationship among Middle Eastern artistic production, Western art forms and technology, and political and economic changes. This analysis of the relationship between art and modernity is also intended as a counterpoint to the materials on “traditional art forms of the region” (p. 3). The editor also rightly states that the book's focus on arts such as music, dance, film, and painting offers a corrective to the massive scholarship on text-based art forms (e.g., poetry) and textuality more generally. Finally, the collection attempts to go beyond the confines of the academy by including authors who write for the popular press and short pieces by art producers reflecting on the political and social motivations of their craft.

Even before the publication of this book, William Hale enjoyed a reputation as a well-informed and productive scholar of Turkish politics. He has greatly enhanced his place in Turkish studies with the publication of this outstanding book on Turkish foreign policy.

Aziz Abbassi has rendered a useful service to scholars of contemporary Arab thought in providing the first English translation of the Moroccan philosopher Mohammed עAbed al-Jabri's writings. Al-Jabri is one of the leading voices in the discourse of cultural authenticity in the Arab world. Among his best-known works are Nahnu waءl-Turath (We and Our Heritage, 1980), al-Khitab al-עArabi al-Muءasir: Dirasah Tahliliyyah Naqdiyyah (Contemporary Arab Discourse: A Critical and Analytical Study, 1982), and Naqd al-עAql al-עArabi (Critique of Arab Reason, 1984–90). The present collection, translated from a French translation (from the original Arabic) published in 1994, includes selections from Nahnu waءl-Turath, as well as al-Jabri's reflections on patterns of reasoning in Arab philosophy. The choice of texts was made with the advice of al-Jabri.

Rothschild and Early Jewish Colonization analyzes the Jewish settlements of late-19th-century Ottoman Palestine within a consideration of colonialism. Focused on the 1880s, the volume examines Zionism using a comparative approach. Employing archival sources, Aaronsohn provides a detailed overview of the administration of the colonies by the Baron Edmond de Rothschild. The volume sets the settlements as an idealist endeavor supported by a patron who did not have explicit exploitative intentions. The discussion of the administration seeks to redefine the significance of Baron Rothschild in Zionism, as well as to bring forward the complexities of the Jewish colonial endeavor in Palestine and its lasting implications for Zionism.

Writing a historical dictionary of a country is a difficult task. The author encounters fundamental questions in defining the scope of the academic enterprise and faces hard choices in setting its boundaries and goals. Subsequently, the author has to make careful decisions about entries that should be included and others that should be discarded. For example, what makes a certain event more or less important, and on what basis should this judgment be made? Similarly, who should be recognized? Should the author consider a person's fame, contributions, or a mixture of both factors?

Joseph Heller, associate professor of international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has previously written about the transition from the Palestine Mandate to Israel (including a study of the Stern Gang and of Zionist politics in the pre-state period), examines a period of great interest to students of contemporary Middle Eastern history and politics, as well as to those who focus on Zionism, Israel, and the Arab–Israeli conflict. He analyzes the internal decision-making of the Zionist Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine) leadership in Jerusalem from the end of World War II until the armistice agreements at the termination of the first Arab–Israeli War (the Israeli War of Independence; al-Nakba for the Arabs)—in other words, the events leading to and immediately following the creation of the State of Israel.

Within the field of Middle East women's studies, many scholars have analyzed the veil in terms of opportunity and constraint, confinement and liberation, imposition and choice. Veiling has, for instance, freed young women from the constraints of patriarchal families and community social controls to enable them to move about in the public space, enter occupations that previously were off-limits to such young women, and even to join the military (albeit with sex segregation still intact). Scholars note that the veil has been a symbol of cultural identity, religious assertion, gender oppression, and sexual mystery. The book under review describes the extent of this versatility in the popular cultures and print materials of both East and West.

This detailed and clearly written book is an invaluable window onto a period of Jewish history that has remained largely unknown to all but a handful of specialists. For more than six centuries two important institutions of Jewish learning and leadership dominated Babylonia, a loose geographic term used by Jews to refer to an area roughly corresponding to modern-day Iraq. From the middle of the 6th to the middle of the 11th century, the heads of these yeshivot (s. yeshivah), known as geonim (s. gaon), exercised a combination of spiritual and political authority over Jewish communities throughout the Near East, North Africa, and Europe. Their most enduring impact on Jewish civilization, however, was the canonization of the Babylonian Talmud, which, as a result of their efforts, became the cornerstone of all forms of medieval rabbinic Judaism. Brody's book, based on a mastery of the primary sources as well as recent work in the field, provides the first comprehensive summary of the achievements of the geonim in almost fifty years, a task made both challenging and imperative by the progress of research on materials from the Cairo Genizah since the publication of S. Assaf's Tequfat ha-geءonim ve-sifrutah in 1955.

This book is not about Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. It is about Islam in relation to Christianity and Judaism. And despite its subtitle, it is not an explication of theological and historical affiliations. In fact, because the author never establishes his intent, methodologies, or conceptual approaches in writing this book, it is rather difficult to understand exactly what its purpose is.

If the history of the Middle East in the 20th century is a history of fundamental social changes and dislocations, then surely one important part of that story is the transformation that took place in the agrarian sector of many Middle Eastern societies. The politics of landownership and the projects of land reform in the 20th century were indeed among the most ambitious of the statist projects undertaken during what we can now look back on as the “age of modernization.” Like so many large-scale projects of social engineering, land reform in the Middle East captured the optimism and idealism of modernization while producing some of its most brutal and unforeseen consequences.

Kashmir and Neighbours is a remarkable book for its detailed and in-depth knowledge of various facets of the Kashmir problem in both its narrower Kashmiri and larger, Subcontinental context. The sweeping analysis covers history, religion, ethnography, society, and politics. Of the fourteen chapters, two deal with the northeastern insurgency problem in India and that of Sikhs, Bengalis, and Tamils. The author demonstrates a high degree of sensitivity and understanding of all the nuances of the peoples of the Subcontinent. Innumerable books have been published on Kashmir in the past fifty years, with a surge in output since the revolt in Kashmir from 1989 onward. Yet this book is original. The author's familiarity with the peoples of the Subcontinent and his knowledge of Hinduism and Islam and of the related Hindi and Urdu languages, which he uses often (with translations), appears to be that of a desi (native) rather than a farangi (foreigner).

In The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Ottoman Lebanon, Ussama Makdisi focuses on sectarianism as the defining experience in modern Mount Lebanon—indeed, as the core of Lebanese modernity itself. This work is a meticulous deconstruction of sectarianism as a discourse spawned by a particular historic conjecture—Ottoman reform in the age of European domination—in and around the tiny peripheral society of 19th-century Mount Lebanon. It is also an impassioned insistence not only on the historic but also the moral urgency of recognizing the contingency of, and the human agency in, the emergence of sectarianism and an invitation for hope in a Lebanese future that might yet dare to embrace an alternative modernity. Makdisi's book is not only illuminated by the scholar's insight; it is also animated by empathy for his subject matter and a talent that brings local society and its mountainous vistas vividly to the mind's eye.

Shirin Ebadi has earned her fame in Iran and internationally the hard way—by fighting tenaciously for what she believes in and paying the price for combating injustice. The price? Harassment by the Islamic Republic's ruling clerics, culminating in charges that she collaborated in preparing videotape cassettes to reveal the involvement of conservative officials in terrorism. This charge, and the guilty verdict against her in July 2000, resulted in a jail sentence and a five-year suspension of her professional rights and privileges as an attorney.

This volume, which succeeds in being both brilliant and riddled with weaknesses, appears at a time when the lines between proper academic study of the Bahai movement on the one hand and faith-based scholarship on the other are being blurred and even derided. To make my own position clear, I am deeply committed to a strictly academic approach to the study of religion and thus find myself alienated by apologetics dressed up as academic studies. I am in particular profoundly worried by increasing attempts by orthodox Bahais to seize the academic high ground through organizations such as the Association of Bahai Studies, the Bahai Chair at the University of Maryland, Landegg International University, and, most recently, the Bahai-funded Chair at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, while resorting to the use of excommunication against Bahai scholars who take unorthodox positions. The Bahais, like the Unification Church in the 1980s, are using their financial muscle to set the academic agenda relating to their faith.

The origins and early development of Islam as determined from its most important and foundational texts is the project this book undertakes. As such, it stands in a tradition of Orientalist scholarship on early Muslim historiography that reaches back to the 19th century and that continues to generate debates among historians. Narratives of Islamic Origins is important for many reasons, not least because it clarifies the history of the issues that have divided historians, offering pointed critiques of major, particularly recent, works in the debate, while at the same time marking out a position that the author consistently defends in the Introduction and twelve chapters and appendixes. The use of the term “Orientalist” here is not meant to evoke, but rather to recognize—as Donner states at the outset—that European scholars of the 19th and early 20th centuries took Arabic sources seriously and made them available to succeeding generations. Donner's purpose is not to question their motives for doing this; rather, it is to analyze the textual evidence, arguments, and conclusions they adduced. The author has also written numerous articles and chapters on early Islamic history as well as the acclaimed and not uncontroversial book The Early Muslim Conquests (1981).

Laila Parsons situates her study alongside those of the so-called new historians of the Arab– Israeli conflict who in recent years have rewritten large parts of the dominant narratives of the “traditionalist” historians. One of elements of these narratives has been the assumption that the struggle between Arabs and Jews was a starkly bipolar affair, with a relatively small number of Jews in conflict with a much larger, monolithic population of Arabs. Recent “revisionist” works, however, have shown that this interpretation is inaccurate. For example, an integral part of Zionist policy was to make contact with various Arab leaders and groups before, during, and after the emergence of the State of Israel and forge relationships that could advance the movement's geopolitical agenda. Scholars who have worked on this question include Avi Shlaim (Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine and The Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, the Zionists and Palestine, 1921–1951) and Kirsten Schulze (Israel's Covert Diplomacy in Lebanon). In The Druze Between Palestine and Israel, a compact and narrowly focused study based on the author's doctoral thesis, Parsons skillfully employs archival sources in Israel, as well as published accounts in English, Arabic, and Hebrew, to show how Zionist officials developed relationships with Druze leaders and representatives and how these links could benefit both sides.

Palestine 1948 is an interesting yet odd work of scholarship, of some value to specialists who are already familiar with the literature and controversies on the subject, and almost useless for anyone seeking an introduction to the topic or guidance for further study.

Nasser's Egypt has made a timely appearance just as political and scholarly circles in Cairo are reassessing the subject in connection with the fiftieth anniversary of the coup that brought the Free Officers to power on 23 July 1952. This tightly focused monograph examines the formation and execution of Egyptian state policy toward the Arab world from that revolution through 28 September 1961, when Syria seceded from the United Arab Republic (UAR).

Histories of the medieval Maghrib mention that the three dynasties (the Almoravids, Almohads, and Marinids) that ruled the region of present-day Morocco were founded by Berbers (or “Imazighen”). How this affected the dual processes of religious Islamization and cultural-linguistic Arabicization in the region is a question that has largely gone unexamined due to a dearth of documents written in the Tamazight (Berber) language. Indeed, there is little scholarship addressing the question of what it meant to “be” Berber in the pre-modern period, or whether an Amazigh (Berber) culture or Tamazight language in itself served as grounds for forging group solidarity. In July 2001, King Mohamed VI announced the creation of the Institut Royal pour la Culture Tamazight to integrate the Tamazight language into Moroccan schools. This decision came in the wake of the Kabyle uprisings in neighboring Algeria over police brutality and discrimination against Imazighen. Negotiations over the role of Tamazight in Maghribi state institutions and national sentiments date back a thousand years. Clearly, the long-established Islamicization of North Africa has not led to an uncontested Arabicization.

Charles Tripp, in his excellent book A History of Iraq, examines the means by which the Iraqi state consolidated its position throughout the country in the 20th century and, just as important, how individual Iraqis used “strategies of co-operation, subversion and resistance” (p. 1) to benefit from its services or to combat its ever-increasing power. While acknowledging that a number of alternative historical narratives can be studied, Tripp specifically places his analysis within a state-centric framework because of the pivotal role Iraq's governmental institutions and leaders have played in reconfiguring the centers of power in the country. As a result of successive governmental activities, the state became the focal point for political power and competition, just as an increasingly narrow group of Iraqis came to hold the reins of that power.