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).

Iranians have often been criticized for overestimating the role played by external forces in the domestic history of their country; they also have been accused of attributing “occult powers” especially to the British and of cultivating a paranoid style in political discourse. Yet as studies of early-20th-century Iran have repeatedly shown, such myths, far from being purely irrational fantasies, had their origins in actual historical realities. In the first quarter of the 20th century, British and British Indian military officers and civilian officials were widely and intimately involved in Iran's political and economic life, both in Tehran and in the provinces, providing levels of political, financial, and military support to their clients, which profoundly affected the political landscape and rearranged local, national, and regional balances of power.

The position of Jews in Arab societies is an arena of enduring controversy in Middle East scholarship. In the hands of some writers, the persecution of the Jews by a Muslim majority serves as a central theme and an implicit justification for the Zionist position. Other, more measured studies have emphasized a dynamic of relatively peaceful coexistence, if not always harmony, that presents a more complex and, at the same time, more convincing picture of Jewish life in the Middle East. In The Jews of Lebanon, Kirsten Schulze takes up a position in the second camp in her presentation of a case study in which two large Christian and Muslim communities in a multi-confessional society provide the backdrop.

This handsomely bound, well-written volume (remarkably devoid even of typographical errors) on the period from 1914 to the end of the century continues a series of works by Martin Sicker that deal with the Middle East from early antiquity on. In fact, the volume deals almost exclusively with international politics—what the author calls the area's “geopolitical history” (p. 1)—and is far from providing comprehensive coverage of that. Aside from the Conclusion and Introduction, the book consists of twenty short chapters (some of which are extremely sketchy considering the nature of the subjects being dealt with) in chronological order, starting with “Britain and the Arabs, 1914–20” (some other aspects of this period were covered in the preceding volume) and ending with “Conflict in the Persian Gulf Region, 1973–99.” The bulk of the book deals with the Arab–Zionist/Israeli conflict and matters pertaining to Egypt and Arab Asia, although there are chapters on Iran, on oil in the period leading up to 1947, and even on Transcaucasia in 1917–21.

Mandatory Palestine experienced changes in land tenure and land administration that had tremendous social, economic, and political impact on the state and its transformation after 1948. Warwick Tyler's State Lands and Rural Development in Mandatory Palestine reflects a growing interest among historians in the Mandate period. It is the first book to focus on British policy on “state land,” an issue that was hotly debated by Palestinian leaders and proponents of Jewish colonization at the time.

The scholarly attitudes toward the socio-historical diversity of Turkey vary from benign neglect or indifference to confusion and tension. Quite common among state-centric scholars (e.g., Bernard Lewis, Stanford Shaw, and Feroz Ahmad) is insensitivity toward religious, ethnic, and regional differences, as well as a general lack of interest in the connection between domestic and foreign policy. These attitudes have recently been tempered by the work of new scholars such as Nilufer Gole, Jenny White, and Michael Meeker.

From rather different perspectives Paul Rivlin and Ray Bush sound alarm bells about the economic plight of the Arab world, which may contribute to serious political instability and—after 11 September 2001—to more recruits for the Usama bin Ladens of this world. Both authors raise serious criticisms of the economic-reform programs propagated in the region by international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Rivlin is a mainstream economist from an Israeli university who is sympathetic to the latest strands of World Bank thinking, whereas Bush is a more radical skeptic from a British university who is grounded in the details of the political economy of Egyptian agriculture.

Agrarian issues and rural development have been among the most controversial themes of scholarly studies in contemporary Iran, especially in the post-revolutionary era, when dramatic restructuring of the socio-economic and political order, often dominated by intense ideological debates and political fiction, has largely impeded critical examination and empirical investigation of the issues. This makes Ali Shakoori's sociological enquiry a timely contribution to the understanding of rural politics and development during the past two decades. The book's primary objective is to explore the socio-economic impact of state rural-development policies and programs at the societal level, as well as at the village-community level. The author contends that, despite various development efforts initiated by the state and considerable improvements in the rural economy and its infrastructure, the revolutionary goal of increasing peasant participation in decision-making, with progress toward a more equal distribution of income and wealth, is yet to be realized.

David Jacobson's 1997 study, written in the early 1990s, was completed before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. In his author's note, he states that “if I had not completed the manuscript before the assassination, I would have referred to it in parts of the book that deal with this theme”—the chapter on the Arab–Israeli conflict and the section on secular Israelis and religious faith. Although the author cannot be faulted for the intrusions of history into scholarly inquiry, one wonders whether today's reader might not agree with his assertion that Rabin's murder is “not representative of mainstream trends in religious Jewish thinking in Israel”. Many observers of contemporary Israel would disagree.

Most Muslims will maintain that the Islamic prohibition of drinking wine or any alcoholic beverage is clear and unambiguous, based on the Qurءan and the hadith. It is true that some Qurءanic passages seem to mention wine as one of God's blessings, but a later revelation “abrogated” these and called wine an “abomination” from Satan. Without wishing to undermine this belief, Kathryn Kueny sets out to investigate the various early Islamic discourses that helped to shape the general condemnation of wine and to point out the ambiguity of the issue. She uses Mary Douglas's concepts of purity and impurity, draws parallels with Jewish and Christian traditions, and discusses the debate about wine as it is found in the Qurءan, in the “canonical” hadith compilations, and in (mostly Arabic) poetry.

In its incessant focus on the universal battle between good and evil, the Hollywood film industry has traditionally regarded Arabs as a source to provide the dark side of the equation. Jack Shaheen's recent book Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People is an encyclopedic attempt to catalogue and document all Hollywood films that include Arabs, exposing the sheer magnitude of the film industry's bias against Arabs. For film after film, listed and discussed in alphabetical order, Shaheen provides plot summaries and brief examples of how these films have libeled Arabs, from classics such as The Sheik (George Melford, 1921) to more recent films that include Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Stephen Spielberg, 1989) and The Siege (Edward Zwick, 1998).

The well-deserved success of Virginia Danielson's consummate monograph The Voice of Egypt within an English-language academic culture largely devoid of Arab musical biography has (unintentionally) resulted in the overestimation of Umm Kulthum's centrality in the Arab world within that academic culture. Although Umm Kulthum's mythical reputation has continued to grow since her death in 1975, her legend today is larger than her sound space. Likewise, Umm Kulthum faced stiff competition during her lifetime, particularly in the earlier portion of her career, when her legend loomed less large. Of her competitors none was more formidable than the brilliant and beautiful Druze Princess Amal al-Atrash (1917?–44), better known as Asmahan.

I thank Ali Abdallatif Ahmida for his thoughtful and generally positive review of my book The Making of an Egyptian Arab Nationalist: The Early Years of Azzam Pasha, 1893–1936, IJMES 33:4 (2001). However, I take issue with several of his remarks.

I read professor Ralph Khoury's response to my positive review of his book. I found no new convincing argument to some of the questions I raised in my review, and hence I stand by it.