Uri Kupferschmidt's study of Henri Naus is a welcome addition to the material for the study of Egyptian inter-war politics and economics and to the very sparse biographical material on members of the Egyptian elite during the 20th century more generally. Naus, a native of Belgium who was intimately connected with the Egyptian sugar industry in the first three decades of the 20th century, was one of a rather large community of expatriate businessmen in Egypt at the time. Theirs is a story that, as Kupferschmidt's copious and intelligent comments on the existing literature make clear, has been told from a variety of viewpoints other than their own. Robert Tignor's State, Private Enterprise and Economic Change is a large overview of Egyptian business. Robert Vitalis's study When Capitalists Collide focuses on the business community through its Egyptian-born rather than foreign members.

In his Aesthetic Occupation: The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestine Conflict, Daniel Bertrand Monk opens with a critical analysis of the rhetoric employed to explain the violence surrounding the 1996 Jerusalem tunnel crisis. By tracing the discursive relationship between architecture and politics in Palestine/Israel during the Mandate period, Monk offers readers an innovative, theoretical approach to the uses of architecture in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. Through a concise, historical examination of how British, Israeli, and Palestinian political players assumed an equation between Jerusalem's architectural sites and political realities, Monk proposes that it is exactly this conceptual paradigm that allows for the normalization of the continuing violence within the representation of the conflict itself.

This book is well researched in both content and form. The author's methodological approach to the subject at hand is both robust and lucid. The major drawback of the book, however, is that it is old. The book is based on the author's doctoral dissertation completed some thirty years ago and, alas, does not address any of the issues that have emerged since 1972. The focal point of this book is to maintain that the politics of oil should not be looked on in isolation from policies pursued by Western governments—in particular, the United States.

This volume, a collection of essays by a group of mostly European-based, young scholars, should open the public sphere in Muslim societies to the same level of attention civil society enjoyed in the two-volume Civil Society in the Middle East, edited by A. R. Norton almost a decade ago.

Popular perceptions frequently characterize militant Islamic groups such as Hamas as uncompromising, ideological movements trapped by rigid adherence to dogma. Such understandings view radical groups as irrationally beholden to strict religious doctrine, engendering fatalistic assessments of the possibility for peaceful political change. Against this general perspective, Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela offer a more nuanced view of Hamas (and implicitly of Islamist movements in general) as a strategic actor constrained by the realities of political context rather than doctrine. In a manner akin to rational-choice theory (though not explicitly recognized as such), they detail the strategic decisions of Hamas as it balances ideological and pragmatic imperatives to ensure the survival of the movement in a dynamic environment.

This is a brisk, refreshing book that helps all of us look at the Middle East in a different way. There are many points at which, it can be claimed, the modern Middle East was formed. One obvious candidate is 1967, the date of the third Arab–Israeli war, and of the effective demise of the conflict between Arab radical nationalist and conservative forces. Another turning point would be 1991, the year of the last Gulf War and of the collapse of the USSR. An earlier conventional starting point for the history of the modern Middle East is 1918, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of the states system that has, more or less, endured to this day. David Lesch, a historian working at Trinity University in San Antonio, takes 1979. In his view, there are three major, somewhat inter-related, events that together marked this as being the decisive moment for the ensuing decades: the Iranian Revolution in February, the Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty in March, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.

Simon Murden has written a timely book mainly to describe and highlight the position of Islam and the Middle East in the overall global environment, characterized by Western—and particularly, American—hegemony. The book is valuable to undergraduate students, but it can also be a quick refresher on the topic for some graduate students. The book does not attempt to provide new theories in explaining the inferior position of the Middle East in the global system; nor does it claim to be an in-depth analysis of the reasons behind a global system dominated by the West. Murden focuses on the challenge posed to Islam by Westernization and how Islam and the Middle East have responded and adapted to this challenge: it describes the advent and evolution of modern globalized politics and economics and how Muslim societies in the Middle East are responding and adapting to it. The book is divided into an Introduction and two main parts, with a total of seven chapters. Part 1 deals with Islam and global hegemony, and Part 2 discusses Muslim resistance and adaptation in the liberal international order.

This work is part of Arnold's Historical Endings series and is presumably intended for university students. However, the book has some inherent limitations that may restrict its usefulness in the classroom, especially for courses on the Middle East.

Anthony Shadid is a talented correspondent for Boston's Globe who is now based in Washington, D.C. and who has covered the Middle East with distinction in recent years. As I discovered during the past year while I lived in Boston, his articles routinely provide important insights into the politics and people of the Arab world, routinely capturing the human complexities of issues that other correspondents often miss.

Dal Seung Yu's The Role of Political Culture in Iranian Political Development represents an attempt to demonstrate the vitality of political culture in the process of political (under)-development in 20th-century Iran.

By now it is a platitude to claim that social scientists have long underlined the important role of the state in Turkish political life. The “strong Turkish state,” the “centralizing Turkish state,” the “transcendental Turkish state,” the “bourgeois Turkish state” have all been problematized, elaborated, and questioned by students of social studies. However, Yael Navaro-Yashin's work is the much needed and most welcome anthropological study of the state in Turkey. Faces of the State, unlike any other book on the subject, shows us what the state means in people's lives and how people endorse and cultivate statism in their public life. The author focuses on the issue of secularism that has long defined the state in Turkey, and she interrogates in all its complexity how secularism is lived in private and championed in public in a context of increasing religious observance.

Theoharis Stavrides has produced an exhaustive study of one of the founding fathers of the Ottoman grand vizierate, the “second-in-command” and deputy to the sultan, an office that acquired most of the duties and obligations that characterized its imperial version with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The work is divided into three parts, consisting of ten chapters, as well as an Introduction, a brief Conclusion, extensive footnotes, three appendixes, a bibliography (pp. 418–32), and an index.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Caucasus and Central Asian regions have emerged as two of the most complex regions in international politics. The emergence of the new republics and their detachment from the communist state and its economic system have brought about a sudden decline in economic conditions and an increase in social problems in most of these countries in addition to the outbreak of ethnic and national conflicts.

Stéphane Valter's book raises a legitimate question: how did the Baעthist regime of Syria (since 1963), and especially Hafiz al-Asad (from 1970 to 2000) succeed in remaining so long in power? Crude brutality, as documented by Middle East Watch (Syria Unmasked: The Suppression of Human Rights by the Asad Regime [1991]), was not enough. Neither were the threats and expectations of external wars, as Fred Lawson argues in Why Syria Goes to War (1996). Coercion had to be blended with some sort of legitimacy to explain the durability of a regime that could not be labeled totalitarian.

Offering a useful survey of historical developments in Algeria since 1830, Algeria, 1830–2000 focuses on persistent problems of historical memory, struggles over identity, and the (until now) failed effort to create a state based on law and secular-republican principles. The book consists primarily of English-language translations from three books written by Benjamin Stora, a noted French historian of Algeria, in the early 1990s.

The word “between,” in the title of this book also occurs in a dozen of its chapter headings to underline a host of Islam's other unavoidable and unenviable choices between “past and present,” “ belief and reality,” “divine law and spirituality,” “secularization and de-secularization,” “modernity and neo-absolutism,” and so on. Bassam Tibi is himself an in-between observer, not merely because he is a naturalized German citizen of Syrian origin who currently resides in the United States, but mainly because he straddles the disciplines of international relations, Middle East studies, anthropology, and sociology. Based on a unique, interdisciplinary grid of social sciences, Tibi's narrative of Islam in the modern world flows with the confidence of a native's account.

This book, the author's dissertation, is an excellent contribution to our field and should be held up as a model to university professors and Ph.D. hopefuls of how to be engaged in Iranian studies. Werner's objective is to demonstrate that the history of Iran can also be told by using Persian archival materials. In fact, he wants “to present a methodological alternative to counter standard perspectives originating from the reliance on Western sources, and to offer a different, often microscopic view of the social and economic history of an Iranian town in transition.” To do so he has made use of unpublished decrees, sales contracts, waqf deeds, and other legal documents as well as an unpublished manuscript of a local history in addition to under-used published Persian sources. He also has used Western sources, but only as additional material, seldom (he claims never) to base an argument entirely on such a source out of fear that it would dominate the study. To focus his new approach, Werner has concentrated his study on the role of the elites of the city of Tabriz during the period 1747–1848, mainly because this period represents a black hole in Iranian history.

Mullahs on the Mainframe is an ethnographic account of Daudi Bohras, an Ismaili sect in India, and a rare subject of research. It has both the blessing of the community and the reflexivity of the author. The title of the book promises an interesting exploration of the intermingling of religion and new media. But the interesting vignettes are more proto–Internet glimpses than solid analyses of the subject. However, the book has other things to offer. It is about the history and ethnography of a Shiעi community, and it examines questions concerning their encounter with modernity.

Among Indonesia's movements of Islamic reform, Persatuan Islam (Islamic Union, or Persis) has been the most puritan in doctrine and practice and the most polemical opponent of traditionalist Islam and local religious practices. Although much smaller than better-known movements such as Muhammadiyah and Sarekat Islam, Persis has had an influence far out of proportion to its modest size because of the intensity of its message and the forceful personalities of its leaders. Its leading intellectual, Mohamad Natsir, became one of the first prime ministers of independent Indonesia; went on to lead the largest Muslim party, Masyumi, until it was banned in 1960; established the Indonesian Council for Islamic Predication (daעwa); and was for many years one of the vice-chairmen of the Islamic World League. As the most rigid and literalist of the reformist currents, as well as the most polemical, Persis often set the terms of the debate with traditionalists and syncretists, and the numerous fatwas issued by its ulema were often used as a reference by the followers of other reformist currents.

This work charts the political, organizational, and ideological development of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement from its birth in the early 1980s through to the era of the Oslo Accords. Hatina examines the movement's growth in three stages: first, a period of political indoctrination (1981–83) in which the organization was established by a group of Gazan academics led by Fathi Abd al-Aziz al-Shiqaqi, a medical doctor, which spread the message of “militant Islam” through mosques and universities and also built a network of underground cells; second, a phase of armed confrontation (1984–87), when the movement shifted to a policy of military struggle, undertaking a series of attacks against Israeli military and civilian targets; and third, the Intifada and the transfer of the movement's center to Lebanon and Syria as “the mantle of leadership in the Islamic camp in early 1988 clearly shifted to Hamas” (p. 39) and the Islamic Jihad leadership was expelled by Israeli authorities.