This is a fine, if somewhat simple, undergraduate introduction to the thought of Alfarabi—if you happen to be a student transported back to the late 1960s. There are a few entries in the bibliography dated after that, but these citations are mostly reprints of Alfarabi's published texts. Certainly, Fakhry's observations on Alfarabi's thought do not appear to have developed much beyond the scholarship of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the reader justifiably might think that this is a publication of a rather old manuscript, dusted off and given a pleasant cover. Fakhry's efforts here remind one of the recent publication of Muhsin Mahdi's Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy (Chicago, 2001) in that both are rather quaint products of an earlier time in the study of philosophy and science in Islam. It is difficult to say what has prompted this resurrection of mostly outdated scholarship, It may be a response on the part of publishers eager to get anything in print since the recent renewal of interest in things Islamic, though for all the wrong reasons.

Historians of the Ottoman Empire have until recently characterized the 17th and 18th centuries as a period of decline, wedged in between the glorious age of Süleiman and that of the Ottoman recovery in the Tanzimat era. As such, the Ottoman conquest of the island of Crete that began in 1644 and ended with the fall of Candia (Iráklion) in 1669 has often been reduced to a footnote, at best, or confined to discussions of Ottoman military tactics and siege warfare. Greek nationalist historiography sees the conquest of the island as a tragic historic rupture, with the island's people slipping from the mini-renaissance they had enjoyed during the last decades of Venetian control to the despotism of the Tourkokratía. Despite the very important re-imagining of the Ottoman past that has occurred over the past decade as scholars have examined a wider range of archival sources throughout the Mediterranean basin, this thesis has gone largely unchallenged. Molly Greene's monograph on Crete before and after the conquest shatters that simplistic characterization with a well-written, and much needed, bit of historical revisionism.

Classical Arab authors' use of anthologies for self-expression and their tendency to recycle familiar material from earlier authors make their works a gold mine for studying the relationships that link a person to a text. It is this tangle that Abdelfattah Kilito unravels and illuminates, deftly and unobtrusively, in The Author and His Doubles, a set of essays on plagiarism and forgery in classical Arabic literature. The fourth chapter, “The Paths of the Prophetic Hadith,” for example, points out both that few other texts have inspired as much discussion of the relationship of a man to a text as hadith collections and that scholars' emphasis on its isnād did not mean that they neglected “the contents of the Hadith” (p. 42).

This learned work is the accumulated harvest of more than twenty years of profound research, as shown by the inclusion in the book's bibliography of numerous publications on the subject by the author, Rafael Talmon. The subject at hand is the reconstruction of the Arabic grammatical tradition in its earliest phase up to the time of the most famous grammarian of Arabic, Sibawayh (d. ca. A.D. 796), author of al-Kitab, “the Book,” and his teacher al-Khalil ibn Ahmad (d. between 777 and 791), author of the lexicographical Kitab al-Ayn. The discussion was triggered by Michael G. Carter in a few thought-provoking publications dating from the 1970s in which he identified Sibawayh and his immediate teachers (besides al-Khalil, Yunus ibn Habib [d. 798]) as the first real systematic grammarians of Arabic. In Carter's view, Sibawayh had a group of enthusiastic but still amateurish grammarians in mind when reference was made, twenty-two times, to naḥwiyyūn in his Kitab. Talmon could not and would not accept the idea of a sudden creation of Arabic grammar in free space and became engrossed in approaching this subject matter from various angles, analyzing both grammatical and historiographical aspects of the early history of the Arabic grammatical tradition. In his previous monograph, the voluminous Arabic Grammar in its Formative Age (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), originally intended to be a mere chapter of the book under review here, Talmon deals exclusively with al-Khalil's role in the genesis and early development of the Arabic linguistic tradition. This was basically done to determine which parts of Kitab al-Ayn can be positively attributed to al-Khalil in order to compare al-Khalil's views with Sibawayh's and with those of other early grammarians from both the Basran and the Kufan schools to support the “Old Iraqi School” hypothesis, which is central in the present work.

Maan Abu Nowar, a member of a well-known family from Salt, joined the Arab Legion in 1943. In 1948, as a young lieutenant, he participated in the Palestine war. In 1957, as a colonel and commander of a brigade group, he was tried for involvement in a conspiracy against King Hussein (instigated by his cousin, Ali, the chief of the General Staff) but was acquitted. He retired from the army in 1972 as a major-general and commenced a second career as a diplomat and politician. Simultaneously, he pursued a third career—that of a prolific historian. In 1988, he gained a D.Phil. at Oxford for the study that constituted the basis of his book History of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan: The Creation and Development of Transjordan 1920–1929 (1989). His two recent books are a chronological and conceptual continuation of his first work.