In the 1990s, the concept of civil society has inspired a variety of publications by Western scholars studying the Middle East and has become the rallying cry for representatives of Western governments interested in promoting democracy in the region. The great majority of such publications and government promotions assume that the Middle East does not have, or has only in very weakly developed forms, the institutions that constitute a civil society. By “civil institutions” they mean such things as labor unions, political parties, independent newspapers and universities, and, most important, voluntary associations—for example, human-rights organizations, professional associations, charitable organizations, and non-governmental organizations.1 Discounted in this discussion is the possibility that the Middle East has its own resilient civil institutions undergoing their own transformations in the global society at the end of the century. In Jordan, this gigantic oversight reflects a misunderstanding of what “tribal” institutions are and do.

Since the late 1970s, a voluminous body of scholarship has examined the socio-economic roots of Islamist politics. Much of this literature presents Islamist movements as angry responses to corrupt authoritarian regimes and broken moral economies in the post-oil boom era. In this view, Islam offers a culturally authentic alternative to a disinherited and disenfranchised generation.

The victory which the Zionists have achieved…lies not in the superiority of one people over another, but rather in the superiority of one system over another. The reason for this victory is that the roots of Zionism are grounded in modern Western life while we for the most part are still distant from this life and hostile to it. They live in the present and for the future while we continue to dream the dreams of the past and to stupify ourselves with its fading glory.1

The expected renewal of peace negotiations between Syria and Israel is likely to bring up again an issue that has been the central component of territorial conflict between the two since 1948: sovereignty in what were, between 1949 and 1967, three demilitarized zones (DMZs) declared on the Israeli side of the Syrian–Israeli frontier. The DMZs, the regime that maintained them, and the significance they had for Syrian–Israeli relations have been studied at some length.1 This article contributes an analysis of the history and implications of one of the three DMZs from the point of view of those for whom the zone was and still is a homeland—the Kirad bedouin moiety, who are now displaced and dispossessed.

Yasin Dutton makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the juristic activity in early Islam. His book produces a systematic and thorough study of the methodologies and legal techniques of Malik's Muwatta⊃, and in so doing, it sheds important light on the origins of Islamic law. Dutton carefully documents Malik's reliance on the Qur⊃an and the ⊂amal (practice) of the people of Medina in formulating early Islamic legal doctrines. In this context, Dutton challenges much of Western scholarship, which tended to minimize the role of the Qur⊃an and the Prophetic sunna in the development of early Islamic jurisprudence. The Qur⊃an, sunna, and ⊂amal, Dutton argues, formed integral components of early Medinian juristic discourses. Importantly, Dutton calls for a more sophisticated understanding of the concept of ⊂amal. He distinguishes between sunna and ⊂amal and between sunna and hadith. Sunna, Dutton contends, consists of the collective inherited precedent of the Prophet. In many ways, it is the Qur⊃anic precedent as well as the interpretations and ijtih―ad of the Prophet as remembered, in a general sense, by the early Muslim community. ⊂Amal, on the other hand, is the Qur⊃an and sunna in action as well as the interpretations and ijtih―ad of the companions, successors, and successors of the successors. Therefore, in a sense, Dutton argues that all ⊂amal includes the sunna, but not all sunna includes ⊂amal.

Al-Sa⊂di's Ta⊃rikh al-sudan is an essential source for the history of West Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries and a significant volume in the library of Muslim history. Although a French translation by Octave Houdas has been available for more than a century, al-Sa⊂di's history has been used primarily by specialists and is known more generally only through references to it in textbooks and monographs. The publication of John Hunwick's translation makes this important work readily available to a broad audience in a readable and very usable form.

The First Crusaders, 1095–1131 is a mature work of a leading scholar in the field of Crusade history that displays the results of years of detailed research and thought. The greatest strength of this work is that Riley-Smith draws extensively on documentary evidence from cartularies and archives surviving in European religious communities. Such thorough and extensive use of cartulary evidence is surprisingly rare. The result is a largely fresh view of the old topic of the Crusaders' motivation and a vastly more detailed portrayal of the mechanics and logistics behind the First Crusade. The author supports his views with the cumulative weight of scores of observations regarding the identification and origins of participants in the early Crusading movement. Riley-Smith has complied (and made available in an Appendix) detailed and judicious lists of all those who certainly, probably, and possibly participated in the Crusades between 1096 and 1129. Culled from all the narrative sources and many collections of documents, the lists provide a substantial body of evidence that many scholars will find useful.

Scholars have been reluctant to undertake a comprehensive history of science in Islamic civilization when a great deal of original material still lies unedited, unpublished, unexplored, or partially investigated in spite of prolific research. Even extensive collaborative attempts at a synthesis (see the Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science, 3 vols. [1996]) reflect the level of research to date in specific areas rather than present a definitive survey within a cultural perspective. One therefore admires the courage of Howard Turner, who is not a historian of Arabic science, in taking on this ambitious publication, which extends beyond the limits suggested by its title. In fact, Medieval could be omitted from his title, as it does justice neither to the content of his book nor to the historical reality. The term refers, as we know, to some interim period of shifting chronological boundaries between the so-called Dark Ages and the Renaissance in European civilization. The comparable time period in Islamic civilization, however, encompasses the rise, a series of peaks, and the seeds of decline in the sciences. It is not a transitional phase between “dark ages” (the J―ahiliyya) and a “rebirth.” The content of Turner's book is best conveyed simply as “An Illustrated Introduction to Science in Islam or in Islamic Civilization.”

Arabia is the cradle of Islam and the homeland of the Arabs, who spread that faith in a wide belt around the globe that extends from Central Asia to Western Europe. Because Islam's roots are in Arabia, that peninsula has claims on the attention of the historian of Islam both as a religion and as a world civilization—that of Medieval Islam. Although the history of Arabia before Islam is important, there is no doubt that the rise of Islam within the peninsula's confines imparted new significance to the history of the region. Because of its history in preIslamic times, the significance of the peninsula remains, relatively speaking, marginal, but has been relieved of that marginality by the fact that it became the birthplace of Islam.

Islamicists interested in Sufism have benefited from a growing number of worthwhile publications in recent years. Studies of South Asian Sufism in particular have broadened scholarly horizons by increasing the range of materials with which to reconstruct a complex history. One aspect of the history of Sufism that has been getting significant attention in various contexts lately is the role of authority in the person of the shaykh. Arthur Buehler offers in his study of South Asia's Naqshbandis something of a parallel to what Vincent Cornell has produced in his work on the role of the shaykh among North Africa's Shadhilis. He argues that Naqshbandi Sufism has witnessed an important shift in the role of the shaykh, from one of hands-on mystical tutelage to one of intercession. Buehler sets his chief argument in the context of evidence that major transformations occurred in the nature of Sufi spiritual authority beginning in the 9th through 11th centuries. In his first two chapters, Buehler lays out the general historical background. Before Sufism had been fully institutionalized into discrete orders, the “teaching shaykh” (shaykh at-ta⊂l―im) instructed all comers in the growing body of Sufi tradition. Imparting the wisdom of already legendary characters, they equipped their students with a working knowledge of the essentials of Sufism. They and their pupils were often quite mobile, and the teacher-student relationship remained relatively informal and distant. Beginning in the late 9th century, that relationship began to change. Over the next 200 years or so, a new kind of shaykh emerged as the normative type of Sufi authority. From a fixed abode, the “directing shaykh” (shaykh al-tarbiyya) provided increasingly proprietary instruction on the actual pursuit of the spiritual path to a select few disciples who pledged their sole allegiance to one spiritual guide. Now the shaykh imparted not merely generalized instructions on spiritual etiquette, but also soul-challenging advice and do-it-or-depart requirements for advancement on the mystical path. Regarded as virtually infallible, the directing shaykh initiated followers into a lineage, bestowed the khirqa, and generally exercised total authority over the disciple's daily affairs.

This annotated translation of selected works by the early Muslim mystic al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi of northeastern Iran, who died some time between 905 and 910 at about ninety years of age, was produced by the felicitous collaboration of two scholars. One of them, Bernd Radtke, has previously published studies in German on al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi and meticulously edited some of his works, while the other, John O'Kane, is known for his fine English translations of various Persian sources of Islamic mysticism. Though titled “Two Works,” the book actually includes three translations: (1) the translation of al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi's autobiography on pages 15–36 (which Radtke previously translated into German in Oriens 34 [1994]: 242–98); (2) the translation of al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi's Sirat al-awliya (The Way of Life of the Friends of God) on pages 38–211 (which, in a slightly different German translation, appeared as the first part of B. Radtke, Drei Schriften des Theosophen von Tirmid. Zweiter Teil: Übersetzung und Kommentar [Beirut, 1996], 9–154); and (3) the translation of an appendix of text passages selected from other works of al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi on pages 213–39, also previously published in German (Drei Schriften: Zweiter Teil, 154–74). The Introduction to the annotated translations is rather short, and its references are somewhat sparse and cryptic. The reader is frequently referred to Radtke's German dissertation on the author (cf. Bernd Radtke, Al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi: Ein islamischer Theosoph des 3./9. Jahrhunderts [Freiburg: Klaus Schwarz, 1980]) and to his edition of the Arabic texts written by al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi (Drei Schriften des Theosophen von Tirmid. Erster Teil: Die arabischen Texte [Beirut, 1992]).

This book, based on a Ph.D. thesis submitted at Princeton University about ten years ago, is a welcome contribution to historians' relatively narrow preoccupation with Islam as practiced rather than the Islam of textual production. Its author, currently associate professor of religious studies at Drew University, sets out to describe and analyze a vital practice of Islamic piety that is the cult of Muslim dead “saints” (ziy―ara) in Egypt between 1200 and 1500 C.E. The choice of the topic is certainly pertinent, for, as Taylor notes, the saint phenomenon has not received the study it deserves. Goldziher's pioneering article, although written more than 100 years ago, remains to a large extent unsurpassed, and most of the research since has been done on the geographic peripheries of the Islamic world and largely in a modern context.

As van Doorn-Harder rightly states, recent research on women in the Arab world has focused nearly exclusively on Muslim women. In this study of contemporary Coptic nuns, van Doorn-Harder offers us richly detailed observations of the lives of a rarely studied group of Egyptian women. Situating this discussion in the context of Coptic revival in Egypt, van Doorn-Harder gives a sense of the dynamic and evolving functions of the Coptic church, and how these have been reflected in Egyptian convents since the mid-1950s.

Originally published in 1994, The Innocence of the Devil, by the Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi, has been reissued in a paperback edition with a striking cover. Included in this edition is a well-written and well-documented Introduction by Fedwa Malti-Douglas, which provides a review of El Saadawi's life, a summary of the story, and insights into many aspects of the book. Malti-Douglas is a professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington, and a commentator on El Saadawi's works and life. El Saadawi, a medical doctor and a writer, has used both her fiction and nonfiction as social commentaries on Egyptian—and more specifically, Muslim—society. She was educated in Cairo and the United States, practiced as a physician in Egypt, was director of health education in the Egyptian Ministry of Health from 1958 to 1972, has served on United Nations commissions, and is a practicing psychiatrist. Over the years, she has written several nonfiction books along with numerous short stories and novels. In this book, she comments on many facets of Egyptian culture, but the main thrust is that religion is the underlying cause of women's oppression. She emphasizes theological patriarchy in terms of monotheism (a single male god), the weakness of Eve as fallen woman, a male Satan (the serpent), and males designated as religious leaders who hold authority over women.

The work under discussion is the slightly revised version of the author's Ph.D. dissertation, which she completed in 1995 at the University of Hamburg. Its aim is to show the treatment of the subject of slavery by Ottoman men of letters. In doing so, it investigates the question of when and how the specifically Ottoman attitude toward slavery was influenced by European ideas.

Napoleon, like many other great conquerors before him, not only dreamed of invading India; he also dreamed of striking a blow against England, France's eternal enemy. Persia was the key to that dream, as it lay en route. Napoleon needed a country nearby in which to build up his troops and a port from which his navy could operate. Therefore, the establishment of friendly relations with Persia was an essential part of Napoleon's strategy. This book is an account of Napoleon's efforts at creating diplomatic relations with Persia and a dream that ended in dust and ashes.

For once, the title of a book matches its contents. Criss sets out to describe the conditions of occupied Istanbul immediately upon the surrender of the Ottomans to the Allies at the end of World War I. Acknowledging the contribution of other scholars to the general history of the immediate post-war period, Criss declares her intention to trace the underground resistance movement to British and French occupation in Istanbul. To do so, she has drawn on a tremendous range of secondary sources, English and Turkish, including memoirs, personal interviews, and documentary materials, public and private, from United States, British, French, and Turkish archives, although much archival material for the period is still inaccessible in Turkey. She is particularly to be commended for making information that is found exclusively in Turkish sources available to English-speaking readers.

İsmet İnönü had one of the longest public careers of any statesman of the 20th century, serving as soldier, diplomat, revolutionary, prime minister, president, and party leader in a career that spanned eight decades, from the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 to his retirement from politics, at age 88, a year before his death in 1973. Moreover, for most of his career, İnönü was at the very center of the events and decisions that shaped the Turkish Republic and its involvement in regional and global affairs. But as Metin Heper points out in his eloquent study of İnönü's career, this is a “neglected statesman.” One of the major lacunae of Western studies of modern Turkish history has been an English-language biography of İ smet İnönü. Heper's study is not a biography as such, but it has three main goals: to cover İnönü's entire career; to explore how his self-education and personality shaped his views on the state and democracy, and thus his policies; and to present a picture of İnönü free of the deification or vilification that marks much of the existing scholarship (p. ix).

The year 1929 was a particularly disruptive period for the city of Kabul (perhaps the only comparable time was when the mujahedin fought over it in the 1990s). In January of that year, under pressure from a band of Tajik rebels who entered Kabul almost unopposed, the ruler of Afghanistan, Amir Aman Allah, abdicated his throne and fled the capital. The man who occupied his office was a former soldier-turned-highwayman from the village of Kalakân some twenty miles north of Kabul. He was named Habib Allah (and is so called throughout the work under review), but he is better remembered by the epithet “Bacha-i Saqqaw,” or “Water Carrier's Son,” his father having once served in that role for the military. A Tajik, he was the first non-Pushtun to occupy the throne since the birth of Afghanistan in the 18th century. He would hold it for only nine months.

Once one lets go of the expectation of a more scholarly treatment of the complex issues of identity in Israel and the Middle East, one can appreciate the less rigorous but nevertheless nuanced conversations that Nissim Rejwan brings to this volume. Despite a dearth of footnotes, non-existent bibliography, somewhat haphazard organization, and overly ambitious aims, there still emerges an astute critique of the Ashkenazi-dominated Israeli establishment. Without ever using the word, Rejwan details a particular brand of racism that creates an illusion of a homogenous “other” out of a diverse mix of Jewish Israelis of Middle Eastern, North African, and African origin, as well as non-Jewish Palestinian and Middle Eastern Arabs.