Kate Fleet is curator of the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Newnham College, Cambridge. Her book is a study of trade between Genoa and Asia Minor from about 1300 to shortly after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, a time period corresponding to commercial strength of Genoa and the development of the Ottoman state toward empire. Citing the scarcity of Turkish sources, other than chronological lists, Fleet depends heavily on Western materials, particularly notary deeds in the Genoese archives and published primary sources such as Balducci Pegolotti's La practica della mercatura. She also includes, however, some Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources.

This work is the result of a survey done in 1969 prior to the breakup of united Pakistan into Pakistan and Bangladesh. The author conducted the survey among groups he categorizes as ulama, East Pakistani professionals, and West Pakistani professionals. The questionnaire and the results are included in appendixes.

For more than a decade, scholars and writers of various stripes have been revisiting the events surrounding the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948, whose outcome heavily shaped subsequent Middle East politics. Basing their work primarily on newly available Israeli, British, and American archival materials, they have shed considerable light and generated much heat regarding the origins, consequences, and degrees of responsibility for the events surrounding the birth of the State of Israel, the uprooting of two-thirds of the Palestinian Arab community, and the defeat of neighboring Arab armies.

For a closer understanding of Islamic legal practice and for the application and social function of Islamic fiqh, medieval al-Andalus offers some highly fascinating source materials. Apart from a wealth of legal textbooks of the Maliki madhhab that originate from that region and a wide range of biographical and historical texts covering the different stages of the history of Islamic Spain, al-Andalus provides some of the earliest surviving collections of reported court cases (nawazil and ahkam) whose coverage of decisions in some cases reaches well back into the 9th century.

In Women and Men in Late Eighteenth-Century Egypt, the historian Afaf Marsot has set for herself the task of shattering myths about Egyptian history and the manner in which it is written.

Uri Davis has written a valuable book in which he advances a very progressive project indeed. Davis is first and foremost committed to human rights. Whereas he acknowledges that liberalism, the ideological narrative of Western universalism, informs this discourse, Davis dismisses the critique of human rights as mere cultural imperialism from the West. Human rights, according to Davis, are spared what may otherwise be a justifiable critique of liberalism by virtue of their incorporation into the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In other words, this declaration is universal law, and state membership in the United Nations necessarily implies respect for it.

With nearly a half-century of intermittent civil war in the background, it is becoming impossible to write a social-science monograph about Sudan without referring to contested national, ethnic, and religious identities. Few such works are gendered, however, and perhaps even fewer attempt a class analysis. Sudanese scholars contend more successfully with class; Euroamericans with gender. Despite good intentions, Sudan is usually explored through the binary model of “north” and “south.” Ann Lesch is no exception, but her ability to complicate matters is a welcome addition to the “integration–segregation” or “unionist–separatist” literature on Sudan.

With few exceptions, Orientalist polemics and nationalist inventions of history have dominated the study of nationalism in the Arab Middle East. The lack of a critical framework and historical analysis has led many scholars to doubt the very existence of nationalism in the region. Nationalism has been treated either as a political instrument of ambitious leaders and intellectuals or an insignificant phase in Arab history, soon replaced by political Islamic movements, regionalism, and tribalism.

As Margaret Meriwether notes in her Introduction to this well-crafted study, until recently there has been little history of the Middle Eastern family. There were “histories of families,” which is not the same as a solidly researched sub-discipline within the broader field of Middle Eastern history, because these “did not deal with the family as an institution, its evolution over time, nor the relationship between family and society” (p. 2). The difficulty derives in part (as it does for other sub-fields of Middle Eastern history, particularly social history) from problems of sources that are partial, limited, or sometimes non-existent, and often where they do exist are unavailable. There are few written records on certain subjects, particularly private lives. Scholars of social history and anthropology have relied increasingly on the use of Islamic court records as sources for social history. The growing body of works produced from this scholarship has been highly sophisticated, nuanced, and exciting, opening windows into the history of private life in the Middle East. This book is a welcome contribution to this growing field of scholarship.

Elisabeth Özdalga's book is an important introduction to one of the issues that has been front-page news in Turkey since the 1980s. The most visible and controversial sign of the increasing participation in public discourse of Islamic revivalists has been the marked increase in numbers of women in urban spaces and institutions who wear the particular form of dress called tessetür, a public symbol of a personal commitment to a certain form of Islamic values. Özdalga's focus is timely and of interest to both a Turkish audience and a Western one, although it speaks mainly to the latter. The banning of the Islamist Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) from Turkish politics since the publication of the book, as well as the internationally noted furor surrounding the election to, and subsequent dismissal of, a headscarf-wearing woman in Parliament, show that what the author calls Turkey's “large-scale attempt to integrate Islam within the institutions of a modern, liberal democratic polity” (p. viii) continues to be a vitally important and controversial subject. Her book attends both to the symbolic power and legal status of women's clothing in public debate and to women's actual participation in the re-formations of public and private definitions of citizenship.

Hisham Nazer, chairman of the Nazer Group of Saudi Arabia, former minister of planning, former minister of petroleum, and chairman of Saudi Aramco, has written a powerful and provocative book. In this highly original tour de force, Nazer analyzes the deleterious effects of the technological globalization of information on the cultural integrity of Third World nations and sets forth a strategy of resistance for the developing world. The work is directed at intellectuals in these countries, whom he challenges to “not just exist in this world; [but to] create our own world.” Rejecting the narrow definition of culture as “object-focused” acts and artifacts, he argues that culture should be understood as “the collective and dynamically active perspectives of living individuals.”

Ever since Max Weber posited the ideal-typical distinction between Oriental and Occidental cities in his essays on the economic history of Europe, many historians of the Middle East have grappled with his model. The debate about the existence of the “Oriental” or, more specifically, the “Islamic” city and the validity of Weber's construct have led to the growth of a sizable body of literature on the topic. In this collection of their essays, Masters, Goffman, and Eldem approach this question from a different angle. They ask not so much whether the “Islamic City” exists, but whether there was such a thing as an Ottoman city. Based on their work on Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul in the 17th and 18th centuries, they come up with an answer that can be described as a qualified no.

Scholars often acknowledge reproductive behavior as a core issue in Israeli politics but they seldom examine how public policies affect family size. Israel has designed no official government fertility program, but the country's leaders are nevertheless obsessed with Jewish natality. Israeli women are bombarded with regulations affecting access to contraceptives and abortion procedures and with all sorts of unsubtle massages about the importance of mothering as a factor in the state's continuing vitality and fulfilling its national purpose. Jacqueline Portugese explains Israel's ongoing efforts to encourage a high Jewish birthrate by focusing a feminist lens on public discourse, popular culture, and particular policies, all of which, she argues, have a highly pernicious impact on women. Despite the differences in feminist perspectives on the issue of fertility, they share a critical stance toward state regulation of the family, and all aid Portugese's narrative in uncovering and explaining the large repertoire of relatively intrusive regulatory mechanisms at the disposal of the government. The special insight of Fertility in Israel lies in its clarifications of the connections between seemingly benign welfare benefits and tax incentives and denying women autonomy with regard to the decision to bear children.

Pressures to lift economic sanctions against Iraq and Iran make studies of such sanctions, along with other restraints on investment and commerce, welcome additions to the political-economy literature. Uri Bialer's book is a diplomatic history of the effects of the Arab League boycott on Israeli oil supplies and the countermeasures Israel took to overcome them. The story he tells is powerful, and it has made me rethink carefully my former position on economic sanctions. This highly sympathetic consideration of Israel's difficult situation under sanctions reveals the extent to which desperation lowers inhibitions against actions that might have been disdained by policy-makers facing happier choices. Perhaps the ultimate irony is that this story shows that even when sanctions are operationally effective, they rarely achieve the strategic goals the initiators had in mind; indeed, sanctions are more likely to work at crosspurposes to those goals.

The Other Kurds: Yazidis in Colonial Iraq offers an ambitious effort to reinterpret communal identities in Iraq during the British Mandate. Although this work focuses explicitly on Yazidis, Fuccaro engages the ongoing debate about the process of group identity formation in non-national states. In this monograph, Fuccaro argues that changing Yazidi communal identities are constructed within a broader context of government centralization, national identity formation, and British Mandatory rule. She shows that this context is crucial in understanding the reconstruction of Yazidi collective self-definitions.

Eugene Rogan's book on Transjordan in the later Ottoman period offers a narrative and an analysis that will interest Middle East historians in various fields. Using central Ottoman archives, local Jordanian records and memoirs and European accounts, Rogan paints an intriguing and nuanced picture of a frontier society's experience of incorporation into the modern state. The book frames its material in a way that allows historians in other fields to compare the Transjordanian experience to their own specialized areas. The author's major thesis is that the modern state was introduced into Transjordan by the Ottomans and their associates in the 19th century, laying the groundwork for the redefinition of the country as a political entity by the British and Hashemites after World War I. In arguing his thesis, Rogan is sensitive to regional variations in local society and politics. Each of the עAjlun, Salt, and Karak districts is finely drawn, allowing the reader to understand the distinct features of each district's engagement with late-Ottoman modernity. The book explores the indigenous population's relationship with newly arrived immigrants, colonists, merchants, and missionaries. Themes of general historical interest include state formation, population movements, integration into regional markets, crystallization of modern identities, and the creation of new forms of consciousness. The icing on the cake is Rogan's fluent prose and nimble use of character sketches, which together make this one of those rare scholarly books that is also a pleasure to read.

Despite the long-standing political and practical difficulties of doing research about Iraq, the scholarly world has recently witnessed the publication of several outstanding historical works on the Ottoman period. Hala Fattah and Dina Rizk Khoury in particular have set in their books a high standard of thorough research, careful analysis, and thoughtful conclusions. Now, in this long-awaited book, Sarah Shields lives up to her predecessors' standard by making her own excellent contribution to the study of Ottoman Iraq.

Like a mega-earthquake, the end of the Cold War sent lasting shockwaves throughout the international system. Outside the former communist bloc, the epicenter of this earthquake, nowhere else were those tremors more dramatic in their impact than in the Middle East—a region of long-standing geo-strategic standing and a legacy of incessant foreign conquest and intervention. The end of the Cold War exposed clearly the structural weaknesses of the region and drastically reduced its system immunities. As at previous turning points, the Middle East faced formidable constraints as well as luring opportunities. Middle East at the Crossroads is a collection of articles addressing the contours of this new environment and its challenges for both Middle Eastern states and the major powers. It is a welcome addition and an important contribution to Middle Eastern studies.

Vincent Cornell's Realm of the Saint is a masterly work, indisputably authoritative, the result of more than twenty years of research on Sufism in Morocco and Al-Andalus. Drawing on a critical reading of a vast array of textual sources, including hagiographies, histories, didactic treatises, devotional works, and poetry, this book brings to light material that has been virtually untouched in academic studies on Moroccan Sufism. As Cornell points out, Morocco has become a paradigm for the anthropological analysis of Sufism, but the vast archival resources of Morocco had been hitherto largely untouched by academicians. Through detailed analysis of the lives of many Sufi saints as presented in hagiographical literature, exploring both the ideological and sociological dimensions of sainthood in the Moroccan context, he convincingly argues that the “doctor” versus “saint” topos that prevails in the anthropological literature does not do justice to the reality of pre-modern Moroccan Sufism. He also deconstructs the centrality of “maraboutism” and rurality in Moroccan Sufism. Cornell compares his findings with studies of saints in Europe by scholars such as Peter Brown and Thomas Heffernan, as well as with the Weberian theories of charismatic leadership that have prevailed among social scientists, displaying an extraordinary range of competence in the literature of several academic disciplines. It is a rarity to find a scholar of Cornell's deep understanding of Arabic and Islamic tradition who also places his research within the broader context of the study of religion. Nevertheless, scholars outside Islamic studies are unlikely to read this book because of its length, excessive detail, and frequent use of Arabic terms, despite the presence of a glossary of technical terms at the end of the book.

Much has been written about Jerusalem since the Madrid peace conference in 1991, most of it by partisans on both sides. Sir Martin Gilbert's work is one of the most entertaining, but least objective. Gilbert is a fellow of Merton College, Oxford University, and a biographer of Sir Winston Churchill and historian of World War II. He begins where his earlier volume, Jerusalem: Rebirth of a City, ended—around the turn of the 20th century. He starts his story with the last few years of Ottoman rule; dwells on British rule (1917–48) and the 1948 war; skims over the years between 1948 and 1967, especially the Jordanian rule of East Jerusalem; then gives a long account of the years after 1967. He ends his book with an endorsement of a plan to return part of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians. Gilbert is a master of the art of compressing an enormous amount of materials about the city's social, architectural, cultural, religious, and political history during the past century into a compelling and readable narrative. His book thus provides a panoramic account of the city, and, because he relies on newspapers, it has an eyewitness quality to it.