Charles Tripp, in his excellent book A History of Iraq, examines the means by which the Iraqi state consolidated its position throughout the country in the 20th century and, just as important, how individual Iraqis used “strategies of co-operation, subversion and resistance” (p. 1) to benefit from its services or to combat its ever-increasing power. While acknowledging that a number of alternative historical narratives can be studied, Tripp specifically places his analysis within a state-centric framework because of the pivotal role Iraq's governmental institutions and leaders have played in reconfiguring the centers of power in the country. As a result of successive governmental activities, the state became the focal point for political power and competition, just as an increasingly narrow group of Iraqis came to hold the reins of that power.

Breastfeeding, as Avner Giladi amply demonstrates, is far more than the simple matter of providing nutrition to an infant. Who breastfeeds, for how long, and with what kind of encouragement, respect, and reward can tell us much about social attitudes toward infancy and the mother–child bond, as well as the value placed on motherhood in general. The extent to which the father alternately provides general support for mother and child or controls and limits the breastfeeding relationship, for example, can shape the father–child and husband–wife relationship in the long term. And a breastfeeding mother, as the primary nurturer of a child, finds herself in a unique position in relation to her children, her husband, and society in general: it is a moment pregnant with possibilities for the enhancement of a woman's power. A close study of breastfeeding, then, draws our attention to a society's attitudes toward young children, the construction of the family in relation to the needs of these children, and the ways in which relations between a husband and wife are informed by the rights and responsibilities surrounding this act of pivotal importance to the survival of the species, particularly in the days before pasteurization and infant formula, when the absence of a mother or wet nurse spelled almost certain death for a baby.

In this book, Judith Tucker attempts to understand how gender differences, family relations, and sexuality were legally constructed in Syria and Palestine during the 17th and 18th centuries. At the same time, she explores the avenues through which women were able to exert agency and control their fates in a predominantly patriarchal social and legal environment.

The Urdu novelist and short story writer Intizar Hussayn, in his story “Ihsan Manzil,” describes the anxiety produced in a northern Indian Muslim community when a magazine arrives addressed to the daughter of a respectable household. Set in the early part of the 20th century, the story depicts how the Muslim woman's name on the envelope, exposed as it was to the whole world, became a metaphor for modernity, the public, and the outside penetrating Muslim moral boundaries and domestic ethos. Similar to Hussayn's incisive depiction of changes within Indian Muslim households, Gail Minault gives us a sense of how religious reform, expanding opportunities for education for both genders, and colonial modernization in the first half of the 20th century undermined and challenged traditional aspects of middle-class Muslim life in northern India.

This book is unique in several ways. It is the product of unprecedented research collaboration between a Muslim feminist female anthropologist (Ziba Mir-Hosseini), based and educated in the West, and a Muslim feminist male cleric (Hujjat al-Islam Sayyid Muhsin Sa[ayin]id Zadih), based and educated in Islamic seminaries in Iran. For the first time, the Qom seminary (Hawzih)—the center of religious and political power of Shi[ayin]i clerics—opened its doors to a feminist female scholar, letting her engage in a face-to-face encounter on gender issues with several prominent Islamic ulema (clerical scholars). Much of the book is a transcription of dialogues between Mir-Hosseini and eminent clerics in the Iranian religious seminaries in the city of Qom. The central concern of these dialogues is the way religious knowledge is produced in Shi[ayin]i Islam and the complex relationship among the believer, religious authority, and political action.

In Sanctioning Iran: Anatomy of a Failed Policy, Hossein Alikhani has successfully organized a useful source that includes various ways to understand the American sanction policy. Numerous aspects of the policy have been elaborated in a book that contains ten chapters, a bibliography, and an index. The book provides an excellent and up-to-date, systematic accounting of the sanction's process.

The Pure and the Powerful, the second book by the Oxford-based anthropologist Nadia Abu-Zahra, is a case study of the rituals performed at the Cairo shrine of al-Sayyida Zaynab, patron saint of women, during the anniversaries of her birth and death. Considered by many to be the granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad, al-Sayyida Zaynab is the epitome of purity and has the power to heal the sick. Abu-Zahra sees religious practices at the shrine as a demonstration of Islam and Egyptian society's “integrated wholeness.” In short, the beliefs and practices of common people, intellectual elites, men, and women are more analogous than previously thought.

This work is a critically informative study of religious modernism in Iran from 1953 to 2000 in the context of Islam versus democracy. It examines the thoughts and works of seven religious intellectuals who either shaped or influenced the religious-political developments of contemporary Iran. According to Jahanbakhsh, although Iranians have failed in understanding the meaning of democracy, the yearning for democracy was the most enticing goal in both the 1906 and 1979 Iranian revolutions.

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.

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.

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.

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.