Islamic Politics in Palestine charts the evolution of political Islam's responses to the changing political environment in Palestine from the 1920s through the mid 1990s. Through extensive fieldwork based on oral evidence, ethnographic interviews, and an impressive compilation of primary source material, Milton-Edwards provides her readers with perhaps the most detailed, comprehensive, and informative account of Palestinian Islamic politics in recent years.

David Ayalon died in June 1998 after a scholarly career of well over half a century, during which he molded the historiography of the Mamluk sultanate, to say nothing of Mamluk studies generally. Throughout his career, he remained an unabashedly old-school empiricist, poring over Arabic narrative sources to recover the elusive realities of the Mamluk sultanate and earlier Islamic polities. His output consisted principally of lengthy, unassailably scholarly articles, each a model of painstaking source criticism and meticulous argumentation. As a result of those articles, we know the structures of the Mamluk sultanate's armies; the true nature of the Mamluk sultanate's relationship to the Mongols; the uses of banishment in the Mamluk sultanate; the place of Circassians in the sultanate; and the overall history of the mamlu¯k, or military slave, institution, to list but a few of the many key topics on which his research shed light—more often than not, the first rays of light. Surprisingly, Ayalon produced only two books before his death: L'esclavage du mamelouk (Israel Oriental Society, 1951) and Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom: A Challenge to Medieval Society (Frank Cass, 1978). Nevertheless, his English-language articles alone easily fill four Variorum reprints volumes, with many to spare.

It has long been recognized that Iranian silk constituted the principal source of foreign exchange of the Safavid state in the reign of Shah [ayn]Abbas I (1589–1629), and widely appreciated that Armenian merchants of New Julfa, Isfahan, played a critical role in marketing Iranian silk both within the country and abroad. It is all the more remarkable therefore to consider that Ina Baghdiantz McCabe has produced the first major study of the Iranian Armenian community's business organization, their relationship with the Safavid state, and the nature of their involvement in the production and marketing of Iranian silk. Based on Armenian, English, French, and Persian sources, this well-illustrated publication in the University of Pennsylvania's Armenian Texts and Studies series represents an ambitious work of political economy. In it, Baghdiantz McCabe argues forcefully that the Armenians' position reflected the implementation of systematic economic goals by Iranian monarchs; that Armenians during the reign of Shah [ayn]Abbas I became part of the political elite; that Armenian trade, far from being the work of itinerant peddlers, was directed by a highly organized, extremely wealthy commercial elite; and that Armenian merchants operating within the Safavid system were successful in excluding European companies from gaining significant influence in the Iranian silk trade.

As Islamist movements have gained strength across the Muslim world, their commitment to democratic means of achieving and exercising power has been repeatedly analyzed. The question of whether resort to violence to achieve its goals is inherent in the Islamist project (that what some Islamists understand as a divine mandate to implement shariעa ultimately sanctions the use of force against dissenters) or contingent (that the violent exclusion of Islamists from the political arena has driven them to arms, best expressed by François Burgat's contention that any Western political party could be turned into the Armed Islamic Group in weeks if it were subjected to the same repression Islamists had endured1) looms large in this debate. Where Islamist movements have not had the opportunity to participate in elections for political office, analysts willing to give these movements the benefit of the democratic doubt argue that their peaceful participation in the student body and syndicate elections that they have been allowed to contest proves their intention to respect the results of national-level elections.2 They also point to these groups' repeated public commitment to play by the rules of the electoral game.3 The fact that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan and members of the Islah Party in Yemen have successfully competed in not one but a series of parliamentary elections and evinced a tendency to wage their battles through parliament and the courts rather than by force suggests to many that the question of whether Islamists can ever be democrats has already been settled in the affirmative.

With the series of critical editions and studies of Arabic medical texts from the Middle Ages he has published in recent years, Gerrit Bos has made a significant contribution to the history of medicine in the Islamic world. He has dedicated special attention to the work of Abu Jaעfar Ahmad ibn Abi Khalid ibn al-Jazzar of Qayrawan, a 10th-century physician and prolific author of medical texts. Ibn al-Jazzar was famous and influential not only within his own Arabic– Islamic cultural domain but also—thanks to widely circulated translations of his works into Greek, Latin, and Hebrew—among Christian and Jewish physicians in the East as well as the West. (For Bos's publications on Ibn al-Jazzar's writings see p. 406).

The social and economic history of the Qajar period has not received much attention from Iranian or Western scholars. The present book has partly filled this gap by focusing on the biography of a leading Iranian merchant and entrepreneur, Haj Muhammad Hasan Amin al-Zarb. It complements the few existing studies by Issawi (1971), Ashraf (1980), and Natiq (1992) on the economic history of 19th-century Iran. The author shows that the expansion of foreign trade in Iran benefited many native merchants, who successfully used their entrepreneurial skills, experience of the internal market conditions, and family networks to gain an important social and economic place during the 19th century. The Qajar ruler Nasir al-Din Shah encouraged and supported native merchants and provided them with important privileges and concessions. Many leading Iranian merchants, such as Amin al-Zarb, engaged in regional and international trade, set up family firms, and performed important banking functions for the state. Further, they used their capital to invest in manufacturing, mining, communication networks, and education. In the absence of an economic and political infrastructure and state support, their achievements were of limited success. Nevertheless, they left an important legacy of social and political engagement that continued to shape the course of Iranian history in the 20th century.

Though Sir William Jones's captivating English version of a ghazal of Hafez, first published in 1771, inspired many translators in the final years of the 18th and early years of the 19th century, none succeeded in producing a living, breathing body of Hafez's work in English. Goethe, of course, lavished his admiration on Hafez in the West–Östliche Divan, and Ralph Waldo Emerson echoed and amplified this praise in America with a number of English translations of von Hammer-Purgstall's German renditions of Hafez. All this attention from trend- and style-setting literary figures did Hafez the favor of creating an interest in and a ready market for translations of his poems. At the same time, however, it burdened him with a literary reputation the expectations of which were difficult for translators to meet. Once FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, perhaps the most successful English verse translation in history, demonstrated the possibility of creating a native English idiom for a poet such as Khayyam, readers' expectations for Hafez only intensified. Though a score of translators have tried their hand at Hafez, none has managed anything more than a satisfactory result.

In The Fortress of Faith: The Attitudes Towards Muslims in Fifteenth Century Spain, Ana Echevarría presents a study of four mid-15th-century texts and argues that their polemical tone toward the Muslim world was inspired by contemporary historical events and revealed a Christian Spain preparing itself to end Muslim rule on the Iberian Peninsula. She argues that the events of 1450–70 are key to understanding Fernando and Isabel's renewed march against Granada in 1474 and that ecclesiastical literature of this time—as a manifestation of a “frontier church”—can provide a glimpse of the ideas common at court and among the clergy. At the center of her book are the works of three theologians (Juan de Segovia, Alonso de Espina, and Juan de Torquemada) and one layman (the Aragonese Pedro de Cavallería)—all written between 1450 and 1461—and Echevarría juxtaposes these texts with a wide selection of similar treatises written in Spain and elsewhere since the Muslim invasion of Iberia in 711. For each of her four primary texts, she provides the historical context of the author's life as well as an analysis of each work's style, sources, symbolism, and mode of argumentation against Islam (which, in general, involved allegations about the illegitimacy of the Muslim Prophet, holy text, or tenets). She then compares the views of these authors with the legal norms governing interactions among Muslims, Christians, and Jews in 15th-century Spain and concludes that both reveal an “evolution towards intolerance and violence which was common to the society and its rulers” and that impelled the eventually successful conquest of Granada.

Over the past several decades, many scholars have attempted to develop a general theory explaining the causes and consequences of revolution. Some of the most notable of these scholars are Crane Brinton, Barrington Moore, Theda Skocpol, and Jack Goldstone. Their theories—as well as those of others—continue to be actively debated even though they were published many years, or even decades, ago.

The historical study of women and gender in the Middle East and Islamic world has come of age. Not so long ago, it was difficult to find good monographs or collections of essays on women's experiences in the past, even as studies of women and gender in the contemporary Islamic world proliferated. As a result, our ability to make sense of women's lives and experiences in the late 20th century suffered from a lack of historical perspective. An enormous amount of work still confronts us in recovering women's experiences, but exciting historical studies, solidly grounded in primary sources, are already changing the way we think about women in Islamic and Middle Eastern history—and, indeed, in some cases they are changing the way we look at that history as a whole. The greatest gains have occurred in the study of the 19th and 20th centuries, when changes in women's lives were particularly visible and the wealth of sources has allowed us to deal with a range of important questions. What we know about women in the early modern period, especially in the Ottoman Empire, is also expanding rapidly. The absence of work and the huge gaps in our knowledge of earlier periods, despite important works such as those by Denise Spellberg and Leila Ahmed, remains a serious problem, however. This collection of essays, Women in the Medieval Islamic World, edited by Gavin Hambly, is therefore a very welcome addition to the literature on the history of Muslim women in the pre-modern era.

This book is a translation and edition of the work written by Spandounes in 1538 and published and edited by C. N. Sathas in Documents inédits relatifs à l'histoire de la Grèce au moyen âge, vol. IX (Paris, 1890). Theodore Spandounes, or Spandugnino, was probably born in Venice and died after 1538. He was sent when young to his great-aunt Mara, widow of Murad II, who was then living in eastern Macedonia, and seems to have visited Istanbul in 1503. At the end of 1508, he was exiled from Venice as a suspected Francophile and was in France from 1509. By 1516, he had returned to Venice.

Geographers study places, and the geographer Joseph Hobbs has studied a place that holds sanctity in the three monotheistic religions, has been caretaken by Greek orthodox monks in the Egyptian wilderness, is replete with a microscopic landscape of holiness, and is now subjected to thousands of tourists each year. Mount Sinai, the Jebel Musa of the southern massif of the peninsula, has attracted hermits, ascetics, and pilgrims since the earliest generations of Christianity. Hobbs's story is a disquisition on Mount Sinai, which is, above and beyond its dramatic physical setting and curious human characteristics, a place of no small spiritual dimensions.

One could assume from the misleading title of this work that it is a new analytical history of the fall of the Safavid empire and the nine-year Afghan usurpation of the Safavid throne. More than forty years after Laurence Lockhart published his monumental work, The Fall of the Safavi Dynasty and the Afghan Occupation of Persia, a new study based on subsequent research would be a major contribution to the field. But Willem Floor has made a different, yet extremely significant, contribution. He has performed a yeoman's service by annotating, translating, and compiling primary source materials from the archives of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), or the Dutch East Indies Company, that someday will assist such an effort.

This edited volume, the outcome of a conference held in 1996 in Istanbul, consists of seventeen articles, sixteen of which concern [ayn]Ali-oriented communities in the Middle East. Ten of the articles are focused on Alevis in Turkey, and the others discuss Ahl-i Haqq studies, the Druze, and the Alawites of Syria. The reader is immediately drawn to the gorgeous, vividly colorful artwork on both covers and the high-quality glossy paper used in this volume, both of which are rare in academic books published in the West. This book will be of interest mainly to Islamicists who are interested in [ayn]Ali-oriented religions, even though Tord Olsson's brief Epilogue is methodologically encompassing for a wider history of religions audience. Libraries should have it in their collections.

Baber Johansen is perhaps the most original scholar currently working in the field of classical Islamic—predominantly Hanafi—law. It is useful therefore to have fifteen of his articles, not all of which were easily accessible, collected in a single volume, together with a new Introduction. The themes that emerge in the Introduction serve to highlight some of the leitmotifs that occur in the articles that follow. In it, he sketches the development of fiqh as a discrete branch of Islamic learning and outlines some of the characteristic Western approaches to its study. The theme of fiqh as a development independent of theology and formal ethical literature is one that occurs in several of the articles that follow. In “Die sündige gesunde Amme,” Johansen discusses in detail how the systematic reasoning of the jurists and the principle of judging according to only external appearances often led to a sharp distinction between religious ethics and legal rulings. This distinction is also the subject of “Le jugement comme preuve: preuve juridique et verité religieuse dans le droit islamique hanéfite.” Here, he shows how in Hanafi law only what is externally apparent is acceptable as evidence, and how legal proof depends on a formal procedure that recognizes a fixed hierarchy in the different forms of testimony. A consequence of this procedural formalism was that judgments could be unjust but nevertheless valid in law. The injustices that this distinction between legal and ethical norms could on occasion produce was something that the fuqaha¯ acknowledged. However, although a judgment could not be reversed, the aggrieved party could bring a new case with new evidence if a court's decision appeared unjust.

Daniel Panzac's newest book is both refreshing and sad. It is refreshing because, so often, books on Mediterranean commerce tend to paint a picture of the eternal sea, where ships ply their trade in 1700 much as they had in 900. Panzac's book is a story instead of abrupt shifts and the ability of individuals—in this case, Muslim North Africans—to respond to new commercial opportunities by venturing into previously untested waters. It is a sad book because it documents, in great detail, the ultimate exclusion of this same group of people from the ports of southern Europe, particularly Marseilles. This exclusion was one of the reasons that the North Africans returned to piracy. The French, of course, used the extirpation of piracy as one of the main justifications for their invasion and subsequent occupation of Algeria in 1830.

This is an exhaustive study of French economic interests in Egypt, the development of a particular type of capitalism in Egypt, and Franco-British relations in Egypt between the British Occupation in 1882 and World War I. It is based on an extraordinarily wide range of sources from Belgium, Britain, Egypt, and France, including British, Egyptian, and French diplomatic documents and material from a variety of banks and business enterprises, such as the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, Crédit Lyonnais, La Compagnie du Canal de Suez, and La Société Générale. The book was published in 1997, but—and this is the only negative remark I shall make—it is a matter of some regret that (apart from some of the author's own more recent papers) its very wide-ranging bibliography stops somewhere around the end of the 1980s, possibly because the doctorat d'État, of which this book is “une version réduite” (p. xi) was defended in 1991. There is a warmly appreciative preface by Saul's maître, Jacques Thobie, author of Intérêts et impérialisme français dans l'Empire ottoman (1895–1914), and Saul expresses his own debt to Thobie and other French historians of overseas investments in Morocco, Russia, and Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Allain, Girault, Guillen, Poidevin).

“Modernization,” or processes of modern socio-political development, and identity formation have been among the most recurrent and pertinent themes of scholarly studies undertaken on 19th- and 20th-century Egypt. Works on intellectual thought; economic, political, and social history; folk culture; and gender implicitly and explicitly grapple with the issue of the country's transition to, maintenance of, struggle with, or rejection of modernity. Modernization has often been understood through a hegemonic nationalist discourse—that is, through governmental rhetoric, the writings of establishment intellectuals, and uncritical examinations of state institutions. Alternative and counter-hegemonic manifestations and representations of modernity have been largely overlooked, which makes Walter Armbrust's anthropological inquiry into Egyptian mass culture an absolutely vital contribution to the study of modern Egypt.

Hassan Khalilieh's work presents a broad survey of Islamic maritime law from the 9th through the 13th century. As a survey, the treatment is general and introductory; nevertheless, any reader with an interest in Islamic maritime law or medieval maritime law and practice in the Mediterranean will find this book an invaluable reference. Khalilieh argues that the Qur[ham]an, sunna, and fiqh sources from the 1st and 2nd centuries (hijra) are generally silent on the rules of seafaring. In some of the primary documentary sources of that period, one can find the beginnings of what would become Islamic naval supremacy in the Mediterranean. But to understand the laws of seafaring, one should look to fatawa collections and legal texts of the 9th to 13th centuries.

In Waqfs and Urban Structures, Richard van Leeuwen gives a clear and coherent thesis regarding the evolution of Damascene waqfs throughout the Ottoman period. Since the takeover in 1516 of Greater Syria by the Ottomans, “waqfs were an integral part of imperial policy and were used as a mechanism to foster the cohesion between the centre of authority and the conquered provinces” (p. 148). A number of phenomena point in that direction, all of which seem to confirm the thesis of the strengthening of ties between Damascus and Istanbul. A number of sultans, beginning with Selim, who entered Damascus in 1516, erected their own waqfs within the city. Ties were strengthened with local families either through iqtāע grants or prestigious appointments to religious positions. Positions of judges, muftis, and administrators to major public waqfs, were all intermittently infused with elements from outside the city—or, at least, with elements known for their loyalty to the “center.” These elements were not exclusively from within the hierarchy of aעyān and ulama, and the local would be mixed with loyal elements from other provinces. Above all, the local governors were for the most part—with the notable exception of the עĀzms—Turkish, or at least from non-Arab provinces. Van Leeuwen argues—and that is his main thesis—that such phenomena constituted a clear indication of “centralizing tendencies” (p. 114) whose aim was for the imperial state to interfere in and control some of the major local institutions, among them, of course, the waqfs. Even though van Leeuwen makes it plain that such practices of “interference” did not imply that “waqfs were appropriated by the central government” (p. 87), there was nevertheless a deliberate urban policy of spatial control (the way waqfs were distributed). Control was imposed either through resource management (how rents and leases were granted) and appointments to major religious and judicial positions or through a reframing of the law to buttress the imperial grip over the city. Van Leeuwen's main thesis is indeed far broader than a study of urban waqfs. It uses the example of waqfs to show that, contrary to many theses of “decentralization” in which the “center” is portrayed as losing its grip over the provinces (the so-called peripheries), the state did its best not to relinquish control over major urban institutions. In short, the “centralizing efforts” (p. 115) of the imperial state is the motto of this study.