This biography of Kuwait's twelfth al-Sabah ruler is also a history of the country from the early years of the 20th century until the death of Emir Sabah al-Salim in 1977. Jarman's book, enhanced by the inclusion of both al-Sabah family and official photographs, is based on extensive research in British and American documents and includes material acquired through conversations with al-Sabah family members. In his acknowledgments, Jarman expresses gratitude to Emir Sabah's daughter, Shaikhah Hussah Sabah al-Salim al-Sabah. In the book's Foreword, the Kuwaiti diplomat Abdullah Bishara writes: “[w]e have tried in this book to present Shaikh Sabah's political legacy in every domain he involved himself in” (p. xix). Hence, at the very outset the reader is on notice that Jarman's work is likely to be a hymn of praise to Emir Sabah (p. 224). Indeed, it is, but at the same time Jarman provides the reader with an interesting picture of the history of Kuwait and its development from a poor desert shaykhdom, to an oil-rich independent state.

Although Indonesia is the most populous Muslim-majority society in the world, Western historiography has downplayed the role of Islamic actors and ideals in the development of the country's nationalism. Echoing earlier Dutch accounts, most historians present Indonesian nationalism as a product of the joint efforts of expatriate students in Holland and Dutch-educated elites in the East Indies. Both groups, the conventional narrative goes, promoted secular notions of ethnicity, language, and territory, at first creating regional ethno-nationalisms (Javanese, Sundanese, Minangkabau, etc.) rather than an encompassing Indonesian form. Under the twin influence of Dutch schooling and colonial subjugation, the elite proponents of these ethno-nationalisms eventually fused their varied ambitions into a single nationalist project. Islam, however, never became more than a background accessory to the larger whole.

The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews is Benny Morris's latest scholarly endeavor to shed light on the events surrounding the 1948 Palestine war. Although, as he notes in his Introduction, it was in Jordan where Glubb, a British general-on-loan to (Trans)Jordan from 1930 to 1956 and leader of the Jordanian Arab Legion, made his main contribution to history, Morris focuses on how Glubb Pasha's actions affected Zionists during the Mandate period and, subsequently, in the State of Israel. The main point of departure for Morris is the notion that Glubb may have been anti-Semitic, thus adversely affecting the Zionists' efforts to establish their state. Yet in reading this book, the reader should pay careful attention to the author's approach, his choice of sources, and his political priorities, all of which inform the book and call into question the allegation of anti-Semitism.

Studies on people on the move have recently gained new impetus, whether looked at from a migration, diaspora, or transnational angle. While dislocations, imagined sites, and belongings constituted virtually have sometimes made places disappear entirely, the idea that people on the move neither “belong” to where they came from nor should be viewed from a narrow nationalistic angle have become evident. Focus has been directed on everyday life and family formation in multi-localities, with people on the move, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. In the Middle Eastern context, people in a transnational state have become an important field where notions of family, gender, and citizenship are contested and theoretically re-evaluated.

Shahla Haeri would like to know why Muslim women who are accessible and visible in their own societies remain invisible in the West. Why have they failed to capture the interest of anthropologists, the media, and the public, in contrast to veiled Muslim women? Dismayed that despite the growing academic literature on Muslim women much of it still focuses on the veil and peasant women, Haeri seeks to document the lives of professional Pakistani women. While anthropologists have become more self-reflexive and critical of their relationship to their subjects over the past few decades, Haeri challenges them to rethink their focus on the subaltern. Deliberately focusing on educated and professional women of similar status to herself, she proposes a new ethnographic model, “shared ethnography,” which she demonstrates through her interviews with six Pakistani women, a methodology emerging from dialogues and collaboration with her subjects. Seeking to make professional Pakistani women visible, the title of the book, No Shame for the Sun, refers to women out in the public sphere, unabashed and in the sun, despite the multiple structures that render them invisible—be they veils, gender-role expectations, or academic discourses.

This thorough study deals with the dialects of the Arabic-speaking minority of Cilicia (Çukurova in southern Turkey), who live in some thirty localities. Before Procházka's fieldwork, Cilicia had been a dialectological terra incognita. The only information available consisted of some remarks on the dialect of Adana by O. Jastrow (ZAL 11, pp. 72–79). Procházka estimates the total number of Arabic speakers at about 70,000 (p. 12). They belong to different confessions—some 1,000 are Christians, 4,000–5,000 are Sunnis, both living in Mersin. The Christians claim origin from the Turkish province of Hatay, Syria, and Lebanon; the Sunnis claim origin from the Syrian coast. The most important group are the Alevites, a smaller group of them originating from Hatay. A list and maps of the Arabic-speaking localities are given (p. 4–9).

The Culture of Islam: Changing Aspects of Contemporary Muslim Life explores the shifting social, political, and cultural concepts of a contemporary North African Muslim community, extrapolating it to the rest of the Arab/Islamic world. Rosen uses for the most part his ethnographic experience, which goes back more than three decades in the Middle Atlas town of Sefrou as well as in other Moroccan environments. Stuck in his old paradigm of the “negotiating situated individual,” he reshelves his data, remaps it to include contemporary themes, and restructures “his” Moroccan society, with Sefrou still as its microcosm.

Since the late 19th century, modern nation-states have sought to fix pastoral nomadic societies through various policies of settlement and sedentarization. One of the most basic has been the transformation of open and permeable frontiers into closed borderlands. While many writers have assumed that the inevitable fate of nomads is to become settled and converted into agriculturalists, a few rare voices have called attention to the resilience of pastoral ways. In this respect, the work of M. Nazif Shahrani has been pioneering. In his classic The Kirghiz and Wakhi of Afghanistan: Adaptation to Closed Frontiers and War (originally published in 1979), Shahrani suggests that in the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan there has been no clear progression from nomadic to settled or urban life and that “both nomadization of agriculturalists and sedentarization of nomads has always occurred” in marginal environments (p. 221). While the closing of frontiers in late-19th- and early-20th-century Central Asia imposed dire limits on the Kirghiz, bringing them territorial loss and severing their socio-economic ties with Chinese and Russian Turkistan, they were nevertheless able to remain herders by moving to the high altitudes of the Afghan Pamir, “the roof of the world” (bam-i dunya).

In an Arab country that boasts the highest female literacy rate in the region (79.4% in 1998) and arguably the best educational system, how is it that Jordanian women's participation in the economy falls so terribly short of the hopeful expectations generated by these facts? In her study of women in Jordan, Amira El-Azhary Sonbol provides answers to this question. First, while the Jordanian constitution proclaims equal rights for women, specific legal codes limit these rights. Second, school curricula and classroom practices are gendered, encouraging early marriage for girls, not the pursuit of a career. Third, social attitudes continue to be patriarchal. While all the chapters of the book are written with the aim of addressing Sonbol's central concern, they are also intended to stand individually. The format serves a practical purpose: to facilitate discussion and promote legal change in Jordan and elsewhere.

Lynn Welchman's Beyond the Code is a very important book and a serious addition to the legal literature on family law in the contemporary Islamic world. Its most immediate task is to introduce to the reader the historical, institutional, and textual elements of the regulation of the family in the West Bank and Gaza of Palestine. It begins by surveying the history of codification of family law in this region, as well as the evolution of sharia courts in conjunction with secular courts, and proceeds to give a detailed account of how the marriage contract, marital life, and divorce are litigated in contemporary Palestine. It ends with a review of the debate on reforming family law in Palestine that was triggered by the signing of the Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority as an expression, for the first time in history, of a Palestinian (pseudo-) sovereignty. True to its description on the back cover, the book “presents a systematic analysis of the application of Islamic family law [in Palestine] in nearly 10,000 marriage contracts, 1,000 deeds of Talaq or Khul and 2,000 judicial rulings over a time span that includes Jordanian rule and Israeli military occupation, updating this with material from the beginning of the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority.”

The 11 September 2001 attacks and subsequent events brought not only almost daily coverage of Islam in newspapers and magazines throughout the world but also a continuous flow of scholarly books and articles about Islam in the world. One of the main issues, not surprisingly, is the position of Muslims in the United States and Europe. Muslims in the West, by Aldeed Abu-Sahlieh, fits within this category. Aldeed Abu-Sahlieh, a scholar of Islamic law based at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, analyzes the position of Muslims in Swiss society (numbering a little more than 150,000 in a total Swiss population of almost 7 million).

Many explanations have been proffered for why the Oslo peace process has unraveled into the latest violent phase of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In this book, Marc Gopin suggests an explanation not often found in standard political analyses: the failure to cultivate peace among the Israeli and Palestinian masses. Gopin himself has long been involved in such grass-roots efforts, and accordingly Holy War, Holy Peace is part personal reflections of a peace activist and part manual on conflict resolution. Both parts illuminate and inform each other, making this work a more readable and more poignant study than most books on this subject.

In the wake of 11 September 2001, the study of political Islam became a vastly more complicated enterprise. No other event in recent history demonstrated with such literal force how interconnected the phenomenon of Islamic activism—in all it forms—had become. Those scholars who had studied the Arab world suddenly had to pay attention to Iran and Turkey, and to such remote places as Pakistan and Afghanistan. Scholars of South and Southeast Asia had to consider how Indonesian and Malaysian Islam intersected with Khomeinism and Saudi Wahhabism. Thus, like it or not, 11 September set the stage for a rebirth of Islamic studies. Gilles Kepel's Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam marks this coming of age by providing a comprehensive account of the evolution of political Islam as a national, regional, and global phenomenon. No other work offers such a careful and well-written balance of analytical parsimony and empirical reach. For this reason alone, the book will be a classic for years to come.

The 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks spawned a cottage industry of instant analysis. The result has been an avalanche of books that purport to explain terrorism, Islam, and the relationship between religion and violence. Most of the books written in the shadow of these events are superficial efforts unlikely to be remembered a few years hence. Bruce Lincoln's is a rare and distinguished exception. It is sure to outlast its competitors both in providing an understanding of 11 September and in offering broader frameworks for analyzing the linkages between religion and political change.

The Islamist movement in Turkey has gained more global relevance since a center-rightist offshoot of the conventional Islamist Milli Görüs came to power in 2002 and expressed willingness to cooperate with the United States for the occupation of Iraq. Living Islam is a timely contribution at a conjuncture when both scholars and the English-speaking public want to know more about the ideological, social, and political background of the movement. Ayşe Saktanber introduces the book with a relevant conceptual intervention in the field of Islamist studies. Arguing that the now fashionable “cultural Islam versus political Islam” dichotomy is not very useful, she posits “living Islam,” which she defines as the strategy by which the cultural is channeled into the political, as an alternative concept. Saktanber contends that differentiating between “the political” and “the cultural” by attributing danger to the former and naïveté to the latter ultimately leads to “forgetting” the significance of Islam and Islamization in recent Turkish history.

The compatibility of political Islam with democracy is an enormously debated but slippery topic, often losing its balance over the definitions of the two elements. There are (at least) two ways to approach the topic—from the outside and from the inside. The usual approach is to stake out a definition of the two elements and then see whether they permit enough overlap to be compatible with each other. Variations are huge. If political Islam means consultation of the believers, and democracy is regular consultation of the governed, then they are compatible—at least, in a polity populated by Muslims. If political Islam means validation of rulers and their policies by vox Dei, and democracy means validation by vox populi, then they are not. In between are many variations.

Tayob's study of the sermon is unique. This is so because, as he suggests, a unique approach grounded in the discursive traditions of Muslims themselves is called for when studying a religious symbol. That this symbol's religious and metaphysical dimension has not been sufficiently explored is the justification for this contribution on the sermon in Muslim societies. More than a ritual and disciplinary practice, Tayob's Friday sermon holds out many possibilities, and his privileged position as a Muslim, he reminds us, means that he is able to unpack the layers of the sermon from the inside out. The results of such an approach, we are promised, are far-reaching. It affords an opportunity to look at the position of the “mosque and imam traditions” within Islam, which he maintains is the missing link to explain the matter sufficiently well. It also serves the purpose of rethinking Quranic revelation. This is so because the Friday sermon as the most significant occasion on which the Quran is “re-cited” will now be recognized for performing the cosmological function of the original text of Islam. Eventually in this approach there is even salvation for the Quran from being a “bounded” book.

The subject of this book is the recent political and economic history of the Central Asian republics as well as the state of Azerbaijan in the Caucasus since the end of the Soviet era and their subsequent independence. In addition, the author examines the present-day conditions of these republics up to the year 2000.

The author, a former German diplomat now affiliated with the Center for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin, presents a detailed and readable account of bilateral relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia from the Iranian Revolution through the mid-1990s. The work is based largely on English-and German-language secondary sources, with some reference to the secondary literature in Persian and to newspaper accounts in Arabic and Persian. The first section of the book is a chronological account of the relationship, with chapters on the immediate post-revolutionary period, on the Iran–Iraq War, and on the first Gulf War and its aftermath. The second section of the book focuses on main areas of rivalry, both geographic and issue-oriented. It includes chapters on Saudi–Iranian competition in the Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia, and for “religious and economic leadership.” The latter chapter focuses on the Iranian revolutionary challenge to Saudi claims of leadership in the Muslim world and on conflict within OPEC over oil policy.

Following the end of the 1991 Gulf War, the Bush administration sought to reinvigorate the peace process. Rather than begin a new round of bilateral talks, however, the administration undertook a radically different approach in opening the Madrid Conference. Based on a pragmatic, functionalist approach to the conflict, officials such as Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, Daniel Kurtzner, and Edward Djerejian convinced the president and Secretary of State James Baker to initiate a series of multilateral negotiations centered on three issue areas: arms control, economic cooperation, and the environment (including water issues). These talks, which became known as the multilaterals, lasted from 1991 through 1996 and included Israel, Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf Cooperation Council states, and the Palestinians.