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.

Samir Khalaf's Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon is a study in the sociology and history of communal violence and how political conflicts in Lebanon have deteriorated into protracted and visceral violence. However, on another equally profound level, this is a book that seeks to imagine and narrate a Lebanon that goes beyond the contradictory clichés of its past as either Switzerland of the Middle East, or a failed and inherently dysfunctional nation. On both levels, Khalaf succeeds in crafting a narrative that is engaging, scholarly—and, perhaps most refreshing—hopeful.

Hilal Khashan's book is a sweeping indictment of the myriad Arab failures since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the modern Arab state system. It is a story of overwhelming Arab failures at all levels: political, military, developmental, intellectual, cultural, and social. Common to these failures, however, is a basic foundational dislocation—one that has doomed everything Arab. It is the crisis of identity and legitimacy bedeviling Arab society and politics. This crisis is not without cause, however. It is rooted in the decline of traditional forms of political legitimacy and the concomitant failure to replace them with modern ideas, attitudes, and institutions. Consequently, Khashan contends, “Arabs” suffer from “a severe identity crisis” (p. 1), and the “Arab mind” is utterly confused. Moreover, it is this crisis of identity, and its socio-political ramifications, that explain the failure of the “Arabs” in the aforementioned spheres. In fact, and on Khashan's reading, everything that transpires in the Arab world is either caused by the “Arab mind” or has a direct impact on it, but only to confuse it even more.

There have been three waves of studies on Iran after the Islamic Revolution. The initial series of studies debates the causes of the revolution. A second collection investigates the ideological and theological underpinnings of the Islamic Republic. Most recently, a set of monographs has begun to probe the praxis of the regime and the dynamics of post-revolutionary politics. Mehdi Moslem's Factional Politics in Post-Khomeini Iran is an insightful and thought-provoking contribution to this newer research agenda.

The term “terrorism” is normally applied to activities of small and scattered groups who pursue their goals with fanaticism and press their political and religious agenda by the force of fear and insecurity. There are also states that sponsor terrorism. However, whether a major country such as the United States can be labeled a terrorist country is not often addressed. A few writers on the left have explored that notion. They claim that the United States' militarism abroad is similar to what terrorist groups do. Moreover, most terrorists, from the Islamic fundamentalists of the Middle East to the right-wing assassins of Latin America, are products of U.S. imperial policies. Osama bin Laden was groomed by the CIA, as were Manuel Noriega of Panama and Roberto D'Aubuisson of El Salvador.