Asma Barlas's objective in this book is to uncover the essentially egalitarian message of the Qurءan by defining the best methodology for reading the Qurءan and by applying this methodology to better understand its message concerning the ontological and social status of women. In Part I, she draws on the work of previous scholars to fashion a critique of interpretations that conflate the Qurءan with secondary texts such as a hadith and tafsīr, texts she views as instrumental in the incorporation of misogynist beliefs and customs into Islam. She calls for a reaffirmation of the primacy of the Qurءanic text but read in a new way—holistically and as a historically situated text. A Muslim who does not question the divine origin of the Qurءan, Barlas insists on the individual responsibility of its readers correctly to uncover its meanings through the use of their intellects, using the tool of ijtihād rather than the blind acceptance of traditional interpretations.

Michael W. Dols's posthumously published Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society (Oxford, 1992) is a magnum opus, a voluminous enterprise, and a piece of meticulous research that equals—if not surpasses—Dols's earlier work on plagues in medieval Islam. Dianne E. Immisch, Dols's long-time research assistant who took up the job of seeing the manuscript to the press, briefly points out in her Foreward the richness of topics dealt with in the book. Indeed, writing about madness in a particular society involves the history of medicine, law, and other subfields, but it is above all a study in the history of culture, certainly from the perspective of the present, when there is increased interest in the formation of categories of deviancy. The attitude of a society toward madness and its mad people is a crucial cultural topic—a “big issue,” as one reviewer has put it.2

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in British rule in Palestine. Although invariably selective, recent scholarship has nevertheless attempted to deal with the administration of the Palestinian Mandate over its entire time span. These studies provide an opportunity to reconsider more generally some of the methodological problems posed by the writing of Mandatory history. There already exists for Palestine a large body of literature, one that has prompted several historiographic reviews identifying particular assumptions, preoccupations, and conceptual frameworks.1 They include the extent to which histories of Mandatory Palestine invariably reflect current thinking and are thus not solely concerned with the past; the reliance on official archives, particularly British and Israeli; and the tendency to concentrate on Zionism as the moving force behind developments during the Mandate period (thus committing a conspicuous act of retroactive determinism).

The books under review here variously demonstrate the progress made in the recent historical writing of the late Ottoman period (c. 1750–1922). They also reflect the problems that persist in this important sub-discipline of the historian's craft. In the West, the writing of Ottoman history began as an offshoot of European history, often the purview of historians interested in the “Eastern Question.” A notable example is William Langer's Diplomacy of Imperialism, a series of essays on various aspects of European diplomacy that gave prominent place to the Ottoman Empire.1 These European specialists, well grounded in their discipline, correctly treated the Ottoman past as part of European history. For all their disciplinary skill, however, they studied the Ottoman experience from the outside, using a rich array of European-language material but not indigenous sources generated from within the Ottoman world. This scholarly pattern began to shift with the appearance of a number of seminal works that opened new paths for research into Ottoman history.2 These studies are still noteworthy for their often extensive use of Ottoman primary sources, especially the writings of the Ottoman chroniclers and contemporary observers. The work of Bernard Lewis was particularly influential, expressing a paradigm that focused on Westernization during the Ottoman 19th century that inexorably—indeed, inevitably—led to the Turkish republican 20th century. Thus, these 1960s works also misdirected the field in a serious manner, creating a set of false assumptions that we live with now, in the present day—namely, all of them worked from the presupposition that “Ottoman Empire” and “Turkey” were synonymous terms. While speaking of the Ottoman past, their real agenda was to discuss the origins of the Turkish nation-state. In so doing, they dumped into the trash bin of history those Ottoman experiences that were not directly related to the formation of the Turkish republic. And so, the histories of the Balkan and Arab provinces of the empire became largely irrelevant and off the Ottoman historians' agenda.

In the field of Islamic history, the publication of a Variorum volume of a scholar's reprinted articles signifies that that scholar has attained an unassailably authoritative status. No Ottomanist would deny that Colin Heywood has achieved this status. Although retired (prematurely) from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, he is still a very active scholar of the Ottoman Empire.

A significant overlap of subject matter explains the decision to review these two books together. Paul Cobb's study concerns itself with the political history of Syria in the late Umayyad and early Abbasid periods. Jacob Lassner's book is more far-reaching, but nearly all of the eleven essays in his book deal with the history and historiography of the early Islamic period. The longest chapter considers the ninth Abbasid caliphate during the Samarran interlude, and in this case he and Cobb are on shared ground.

Of all of the “Oriental churches,” it is the Coptic church that has garnered the greatest scholarly attention. Nevertheless, the state of Coptic studies leaves much to be desired. Certain aspects have been studied in some depth at the expense of others that are equally important. Thus, while the Gnostic texts, the Christological controversies, the position of the Alexandrine church, and—to a lesser extent—the modern Coptic renaissance have received a good deal of attention, social history in the pre-modern period is sorely lacking, as is any serious attempt to understand the Coptic community in its Islamic context after the 7th century. Several previous synthetic works on the Coptic church, moreover, now appear problematic for their apologetic or polemical approaches to the subject. The present book, while not filling the lacunae, does provides a welcome, balanced synthetic history of the Coptic church.

Now we're getting somewhere. This collection of fifteen studies on the general topic indicated in the carefully worded title is one of the more enjoyable reading experiences in Qurءanic studies of recent memory. A wide variety of problems and subjects are treated in the key of deep and engaged appreciation for the powerful artistry of the Qurءan. The articles are divided into three major groups. The first comprises studies of specific or peculiar modes of “religious meaning.” Sells discusses here again the relationship uniting spirit, gender, and aurality as a vehicle of meaning; Zahniser addresses the problem of the unity of the sura by examining what he takes to be transitional passages in two longer chapters; McAuliffe revisits Q.3:7 but this time tries to connect implications of the earliest tafsīr of this verse with some recent developments in literary criticism; Welch explicates commonalities among various punishment narratives; Rippin succinctly meditates on the implications of wajh Allāh, for individual responsibility (it may be helpful here to read for the prepositional, rather than nominal, content of “face of God”—namely, “direction of God”); and Shahid attempts, in novel terms, to unravel the secret of the mysterious disconnected letters.

In this book, M. R. Ghanoonparvar describes his experience of translating Shahrokh Meskoob's Guftugū dar bāgh (Dialogue in the Garden), a fictionalized dialogue between a writer and his painter uncle during the course of which many aspects of Iranian culture are discussed through the prism of gardens, long held to be significant to the Persians. The author clearly states the thesis of his book on the very first page: “[this book] is about the act of translating, the actual process of translating.” In what follows, the reader accompanies the author–translator along the path that leads from the latter's interest in Dialogue in the Garden to his numerous struggles and decisions regarding individual words, passages, and concepts, and then ultimately to the completed translation of the work, which is presented at the end of the book (pp. 125–68).

This monograph is a revised version of a doctoral dissertation completed at the Centre for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto in 1996. At the beginning, the author enunciates clearly his purpose, method, and organization, and he adheres closely to the agenda he has set. His purpose is to provide a sophisticated comparison of early Syriac Christianity with the Bahaءi faith as enunciated by its founder Bahaullah. His method rests primarily on adaptations of concepts developed for cultural anthropology by Sherry Ortner and for comparative religion by Ninian Smart. Briefly characterized, his approach is a comparison of central symbols drawn from the two religious traditions as represented by a normative set of texts. While eschewing a strictly historical method, Buck strives to avoid the pitfalls of older comparative studies by attending to the distinctive historical contexts of the 4th-century Syriac Christian authors Ephrem and Aphrahat and the 19th-century articulation of the faith of Bahaullah.

In the Leaven of the Ancients, John Walbridge studies the appropriation of non–Peripatetic philosophical ideas by an anti–Aristotelian Islamic philosopher, Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi (d. 1191). He proposes a comprehensive explanation of the origin of Suhrawardi's philosophical system, a revival of the “wisdom of the Ancients” and its philosophical affiliations “grounded” in Greek philosophy (p. xiii). Walbridge attempts to uncover the reasons for Suhrawardi's rejection of the prevailing neo–Aristotelian synthesis in Islamic philosophy, Suhrawardi's knowledge and understanding of non–Aristotelian Greek philosophy, the ancient philosophers Suhrawardi was attempting to follow, the relationship between Suhrawardi's specific philosophical teachings (logic, ontology, physics, and metaphysics), and his understanding of non–Aristotelian ancient philosophy and the relationship between Suhrawardi's system and the major Greek philosophers, schools, and traditions—in particular the Presocratics, Plato, and the Stoics (p. 8).

In certain fields of study one sometimes finds a long-awaited book—a book by one of the field's most venerable senior scholars; a book that is expected to be the crowning glory of the sage's career. The Politicization of Islam by Kemal Karpat is just such a book. It is precisely for this very reason that it is so disappointing. The book comprises seventeen chapters spanning a very broad range of topics, from “Islamic Revivalism” through the “Turkishness of the Community” and “Reconstruction of the State and Ethnic–National Identity.” One of the central problems is that Karpat tries to do too much at once. “Identity,” “State,” “Faith,” and “Pan-Islam” are colossal topics, each of which merits a book on its own.

This book, adopting the method of Rubin's earlier work on the image of the Prophet Muhammad, The Eye of the Beholder: The Life of Muhammad as Viewed by the Early Muslims (1995), examines hadith reports of the first three Islamic centuries that draw on Qurءanic/biblical material. He analyzes these reports as attempts on the part of Muslims to define themselves vis-à-vis the People of the Book—primarily Jews, and to a lesser extent Christians. Each of the work's three parts reflects a particular historical attitude toward the Jews and definition of the relationship between Jews and Muslims.

This volume does not “distill more than four decades of research,” as its jacket blurb asserts, but brings together eleven articles on Farabi's “political philosophy” by Muhsin Mahdi published between 1963 and 1999. They are arranged in the book in three parts. The first, introductory part contains two general essays titled “The Political Orientation of Islamic Philosophy” and “Philosophy and Political Thought,” and a historical study on “The Foundation of Islamic Philosophy.” The second and third parts contain seven articles, which present detailed readings of eight selections from Mahdi's canon of Farabi's “political” writings: Enumeration of the Sciences (chap. 5), Book of Religion, Virtuous City (second half), Political Regime (second half), Attainment of Happiness, Philosophy of Plato, Philosophy of Aristotle, and the second part of the Book of Letters (some of Mahdi's renditions of the titles are misleading; see later). Another general essay on “Religion and the Cyclical View of History,” roaming from Plato to Nietzsche, concludes the collection.

Sachiko Murata has given the growing field of Chinese Islamic studies a great gift and has made a major contribution to its future development. For the most part, scholars of Chinese Islam are trained in East Asian studies or Chinese history and at best have only secondary knowledge of Islam or of Islamic languages such as Arabic and Persian. Similarly, scholars of Islam generally have little interest in or knowledge of China. This is despite the fact that from as early as the late 7th century the two civilizations, the Chinese and the Islamic, have maintained vibrant economic, political, scientific, and cultural ties. Muslim settlements in China can be traced back to the 8th century, and the Muslim Chinese—the Hui—are today one of the largest “national” minorities in China.

Albrecht Fuess has written a detailed history of the Syro-Palestinian frontier during the Mamluk era in order to discover why this Turko-Muslim state, which occupied such an important geographical position astride Asian-to-Mediterranean trade routes, did not develop a naval force. Because this issue arises during a period that oceanic voyages of Europeans and the Indian Ocean expeditions of the Chinese marked the beginning of a new era in maritime history, his research will have wide appeal among historians.

Abdelmajid Hannoum's Colonial Histories, Post-Colonial Memories is a fascinating study of the many inventions of the historical-mythical figure of al-Kahina, the Berber leader who is said to have stopped, for a brief moment, the advance of Muslim armies in the Maghrib during the 1st century A.H. Hannoum's account reviews a long series of debates about the figure of the Kahina, debates that have taken place in Arabic, French, Hebrew, and now English. As Hannoum notes, the Kahina to date has appeared as man, woman, eunuch, sorceress of the Jahiliyya, queen, Christian, Jew, anti–Semite, Joan of Arc, feminist, fortress, and so on. Hannoum's list is exhaustive, although undoubtedly, as he says, there are other inventions of the figure hiding elsewhere, especially in those oral traditions now lost to us.

The title and publication series of Prefacing the Image initially suggest that it treats a topic of interest only to specialists in art history—a dozen or so rhetorically ornate prefaces composed for bound albums of calligraphies, drawings, and paintings (muraqqaע) during the 16th century. However, it quickly becomes apparent that the scope of this study extends far beyond such disciplinary boundaries. “The primary objective of this book is to study the preface through a variety of approaches—historical, cultural, social, and intellectual” (p. 17). By integrating the album preface into a broad network of social practices and literary discourses, Roxburgh's well-researched and probing study should be of interest not only to art historians but also to any reader with an interest in the cultural and intellectual life of the later Persianate world.

Research on the Safavid period has come a long way in the past ten years with the publication of several studies, conference proceedings, and printed editions of primary sources, including historical texts. Willem Floor has been at the forefront of this activity, with a number of monographs most notably on economic history. His new work, Safavid Government Institutions, is a detailed examination of the principal offices of the Safavid state, including the organization of central and provincial government and of the army. The book evolved out of a commentary on the administrative manual, Mirza Rafiעi's Dastur al-muluk, begun toward the end of the reign of Shah Sultan Husain (1694–1722). It is unfortunate that Floor has been unable to take advantage of the new and more complete text recently published by Iraj Afshar (Daftar-i Tarikh, vol. 1 [Tehran, 2001], 475–651). The newly discovered portion, for instance, contains details of the (minor) offices of daftardār and עazab-bāshī (pp. 618–19), discussed briefly by Floor (p. 59). Other elements of Safavid state organization, such as the judiciary and the religious establishment, are excluded but already largely dealt with in other studies by the same author (ZDMG 150 [2000]: 461–500; Studia Iranica 29 [2000]: 9–60). The material in the Dastur al-muluk (and, for that matter, in the comparable Tazkirat al-muluk) is entirely rearranged in a way that helpfully regroups most of the relevant offices according to their primary function in the administration or the army. The author pays fitting tribute to the pioneering work of earlier scholars, such as Röhrborn, Savory, and Aubin (whose work is oddly described as “less accessible”; p. x) but justly remarks that a great deal of new source material has become available since then.

Of the four or five names one associates with the founding of the modern study of Islamic mysticism, Fritz Meier's is perhaps the least appreciated in North America because most of his seminal contributions to the subject have remained in their original German, and since the end of World War I North Americans have been not inclined to give Islamicist scholarship in this language its due. Such foundational works as Nöldeke and Schwally and Goldziher in Qurءanic studies, Ritter on עAttar, and the present author on Kubra and Baha al-Walad, remain untranslated and insufficiently studied or even referred to by recent generations of scholars and specialists.