In this charming book, the late Charles Issawi, a prolific scholar whose work on the economic history of the Middle East helped at least two generations of scholars and students better understand the origins of the modern Middle East, discusses his life and scholarship. In the first half of the book, Issawi reminisces about his childhood and youth in the form of two essays that include many interesting anecdotes about life in the Middle East in an earlier age. He was born in 1916 in Cairo to Syrian parents. He spent his childhood in Cairo, Khartoum, and Lebanon and attended school in Alexandria. As he states in the book, Issawi considered himself culturally Lebanese and Egyptian. In the fall of 1934, he began to attend Magdalen College at Oxford, where he met Albert Hourani for the first time, beginning a friendship that was to last for more than fifty years. Actually, they had both attended a History Scholarship examination earlier that year and had taken two of the three history scholarships offered by the college, “leaving the third for the whole British Empire.” After receiving his bachelor's degree, Issawi returned to Cairo to begin working for the National Bank of Egypt. By 1942, he had grown restless working for a bank in the midst of the war and began writing a book on the Egyptian economy. This first book was published in 1947 and soon was banned in Egypt because of its criticism of the government, Issawi relates. He began teaching at the American University in Beirut, then moved to Washington, D.C., to work in the Arab Office there. In 1951, he began teaching in the Economics Department at Columbia University.

This volume collects some original chapters and some reprinted ones by a very well-known scholar of the Middle East. The chapters tend to be linked to one another by theoretical themes developed in the introductory chapters. These eleven chapters, plus a concluding one, “The Middle East at 2000: The Millennial Illusion,” appear under three headings.

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.

Vanessa Martin's second book begins like an intellectual challenge and mostly succeeds in giving an original and sophisticated view of Ayatollah Khomeini's political thought. Her previous field of study, the history of clerical militancy in the Constitutional Movement, resulted in a brilliant book entitled, Islam and Modernism: The Iranian Revolution of 1906 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989). A common query seems to characterize the two works: how have the Islamic theologians managed to adapt their political beliefs to modernity?

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.

As its title promises, this book attempts to provide a history of modern Persian literature in the context of the political changes and developments in Iran since the early 20th century. Drawing on theoretical concepts in the social sciences, Talattof offers an analytical model for the study of literature, which he terms “episodic literary movement.” Accordingly, he observed, “Persian literary history is not an integrated continuum but a series of distinct episodic movements” (p. ix). He then identifies four such episodes or episodic movements in modern Persian literature and examines each of these movements in separate chapters. “Persianism” is a term he uses to describe the first episode, which “refers to an ideology that not only inspired authors to write in a new style with the hope of modernizing literature but also made that ideology the theme of literary works” (p. 4). Usually referred to as modernism, and sometimes as nationalism, by other scholars to describe the works of one group of Iranian writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, according to the author, Persianism is a literary movement that “reflected upon and deeply criticized many aspects of Iranian national characteristics, including social life and traditional culture but excluding the Persian language” (p. 25). The second episode, according to Talattof, is the movement that became known as Committed Literature, in which “Marxist ideology shaped the works of the majority of writers, whose themes revolved around issues of equality, justice, and freedom, colored by Iran's own cultural particularities” (p. 5).

This concise and accessible introduction to the subject of Islamist movements in Egypt will be useful for those seeking a point of entry. More experienced students of the subject, however, may not find much new empirical material in this book. They may also disagree with the authors' reliance on the civil-society interpretive paradigm to the exclusion of other approaches and their sometimes schematic treatment of Islamist groups.

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).

Daniel Brumberg challenges what he terms “the fire-breathing fundamentalist vision of Khomeini” and takes up the view that Khomeini's vision was eclectic. He argues that the period since Khomeini's death has seen the emergence of contending ideals on both clerical rule and popular sovereignty that had their basis in his ideology. Thus, Khatami's struggle for pluralism, reform, and constitutional rights has its origin in Khomeini's ideological vision. The contradictory elements in Khomeini's worldview have made it next to impossible for any one faction of his followers to claim that their understanding of Islamic government is any more authentic than another. Brumberg traces the emergence and evolution of what he calls “a system of contending authorities,” which demonstrates how Khomeini's efforts to include in the new state various conflicting views of authority prepared the way for the ideological conflict over his legacy.

Rai is a form of popular music most closely associated with the city of Oran (Waharan) in the northwestern corner of Algeria. Marc Schade-Poulson's book considers the social significance of the genre in its place of origin and, in particular, its role in describing the complex gender relations prevailing there.

Based on a series of lectures given at the London School of Economics in May 2000, Fred Halliday sets out to give us a 360-degree overview of the contemporary issues and debates in international relations. The task is unenviable, but Halliday's effort is at once broad in its range of topics, deep in its analysis, and nuanced in its presentation—not only of the current debates but also in clearly articulating his own positions. Halliday includes a remarkably concise history of the 20th century: chapters on war and security and on major trends in world politics (all of which he critiques), including what he terms hegemonic optimism, liberal reform, the new anti-imperialism, and the new middle ages; a wonderful chapter that debunks much of the hype about globalization; a much needed critique of U.S. foreign policy under the title, “The Unaccountable Hegemon”; discussions of the difference between past efforts at global government and today's more practical and less centralized “global governance” and of the problems and pitfalls of defending cultural differences (for reasons I formulate later, I consider this perhaps the only weak chapter); and a conclusion on how to move toward what he calls a “radical universalism.”

This noteworthy book by Yerach Gover has been long overlooked. Gover demonstrates through his sophisticated analyses of selected Hebrew literary texts how Israeli liberal society constructs a moral conscience in bad faith. The book's implicit and explicit critiques of Zionism have likely contributed to the lack of critical interest in this important study. Perhaps in the public airing of such issues, in both the Israeli press and academic circles, this book may gain the belated recognition it deserves.

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.

A Poetics of Political Economy in Egypt is a post-modern study revolving around the role played by petty commodity producers in Egypt's incorporation into the global economic architecture. The author focuses on two periods: the early 1900s, when free trade was imposed by the country's colonial master, and the 1970s and 1980s, when Anwar Sadat's infitah policies reopened Egypt to the West after it had been largely closed off during the Nasser era.

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.

Setting out to “shatter the myth” that links Islam to political violence, to women, and to global economic development requires not only a thorough knowledge of the realities themselves that have suffered the alleged distortion, but also a solid grasp of the false images or misleading assumptions that stand in need of correction. A work such as this one, which announces rectification of blinkered, poorly informed, or prejudiced views as its chief intention, takes its shape in large measure from the assertions it chooses for its targets. In this case, Bruce Lawrence is returning to a key aspect of the theme treated in a wide comparative framework in his notable 1989 book, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age, and he has selected a rather broad facade against which to launch his rebuttal.

This is a book whose title invites the reader. Stephen Pelletière, a professor of national-security affairs at the U.S. Army War College and an intelligence officer since 1982, has covered the Iran–Iraq War and the subsequent Gulf War. For this reason, the reader who picks up this book may expect to find some firsthand accounts, hitherto untapped documents, or a new analytical approach that might shed light on how the struggle for oil has influenced the strategies of the various parties involved in these conflicts.

I found Robert Olson's letter unprofessional and full of factual errors. There is nothing in the letter that causes me to reconsider my position. Nor is there any substance that warrants a full response. I would kindly suggest that Dr. Olson read the article more carefully.

In “Nationalism and Kurdish Notables in the Late Ottoman–Early Republican Era,” (IJMES 33:383–409), Hakan Özoğlu states that his study “revises Olson's argument about the origins of Kurdish nationalism” (p. 405, n. 2). He also says, “Olson's praiseworthy study is based exclusively on British archives and can also be criticized for this reason.” Özoğlu explains that his “revision” consists of defining Kurdish nationalism as a World War I phenomenon, a view he contests contrary to the views of Wadie Jwaideh and myself, who characterized it as being defined during the rebellion of Shaykh Ubeydullah of Nehri in 1880–81.