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.