The Saudi File is a handy volume, with limitations, for those who write on Saudi Arabia: it is a compilation of various documents, statements, press clips, and reports that broadly concern politics in the country. The chapter titles reflect important subjects, such as the Basic Law, government and sh―ur―a council, political reform, an Islamic state, religious police, human rights, the press and freedom of speech, refugees, gender, labor, terror, security, international relations, dissidents abroad, and the Gulf War. The relevance of these issues and institutions makes the volume a convenient tool for research.

Secularization of Iran: A Doomed Failure? is an extremely readable, insightful, and detailed contribution by Azadeh Kian-Thiebaut to the literature on Iranian society and politics in the 20th century. When I first started reading the book, I expected the pedantic descriptions that often characterize doctoral dissertations turned into books. Fortunately, however, I found the book much more than a dispassionate treatment of facts and theories. The author has perspectives and points of views that are not just hidden in the various descriptions of events and ideas. Yet her work is not an ideological treatment of Iranian politics and society, either. Events and historical facts are treated with a level of sociological objectivity and sound judgment that are not too common among Iran's observers.

On 12 June 1993, the Algerian feminist, educator, and political activist Khalida Messaoudi received a communique from the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) condemning her to death. Unbowed: An Algerian Woman Confronts Islamic Fundamentalism chronicles the life and experiences of this extraordinary woman. Through a series of interviews with the journalist Elisabeth Schemla, Messaoudi eloquently reflects on her childhood, education, and activism while simultaneously relating a rich perspective on Algeria's post-colonial history and contemporary politics.

The national elections in Turkey this April were not the expected success for the Islamist Fazilet Partisi (Virtue Party). Under its former name, Refah Partisi (Welfare Party), the party was the actual winner of the elections in late 1995, and many supporters were deeply disappointed at the result this spring. Why was the party weakened? Commentators inside and outside Turkey speculated from different points of view. Many of them portrayed issues in Turkish Islamism as questions relating to the party as an organization and with an apparent disinclination to regard the party as an umbrella for quite conflicting interests.

This is the most complete and perhaps the best treatment of the origins and development of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia yet to appear in the English language. No serious library can afford to pass it up. The author is a Russian scholar who was Middle East correspondent for Pravda for many years, as well as the director of the Institute for African Studies and member of the Russian Foreign Ministry's advisory group. His knowledge of languages is used to great advantage in the book, and his bibliography of Arabic, Turkish, Russian, English, and French works is an impressive contribution to the history of the Arabian Peninsula. Rare indeed is the scholor who has read, let alone been able to retrieve, the number of valuable local histories that Vassiliev has used for the book. Despite its overwhelming attention to detail, his history is written in a fluid and accessible style, holding the reader's attention till the last. The narrative never flags, even when the author reconstructs the minutiae of the almost daily battles between the armies of central, eastern, and western Arabia in great and absorbing detail. In fact, some sections make for riveting reading, especially those in the latter part of the book, when Ibn Saud faces off against the Ikhwan or browbeats both the internal and external opposition to create his own imprint on the Arabian Peninsula.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin made an astute decision in the summer of 1992 when he entrusted the highly respected rector of Tel Aviv University, Itamar Rabinovich, with the task of reinvigorating the moribund Israeli–Syrian negotiations that had grown out of the Madrid Conference the previous October. Rabinovich had launched a stellar academic career by writing what remains arguably the best study of Syrian domestic politics during the Ba⊂thist era; his subsequent work explores the dynamics of the civil war in Lebanon, the intricacies of Egypt's relations with Palestine during the 1940s and 1950s, and the origins of inter-Arab diplomacy, among many other topics. More important, in 1991 Rabinovich published an authoritative yet accessible overview of the tangled history of direct talks among the governments of Israel and its Arab neighbors in the years immediately after the 1948 war. The book not only undermines the general presumption that the Arab–Israeli dilemma is inherently insoluble, but also elucidates the miscalculations and tactical errors that derailed early attempts to resolve the conflict. Rabinovich was clearly the right person to supervise delicate bargaining with the Syrians, and might have been expected to compose a notable account of his experiences once his term as Israel's chief negotiator came to an end.

Yezid Sayigh's encylopedic history focuses on the role that the idea of armed struggle played in the Palestinian national movement as it evolved over the past half-century. His central thesis is that “armed struggle provided the political impulse and organisational dynamic in the evolution of Palestinian national identity and in the formation of parastatal institutions and a bureaucratic elite, the nucleus of government” (p. vii). The concept of armed struggle reforged Palestinian national identity, mobilized Palestinians, provided political legitimization to the Palestinian movement, made the Palestinians a distinct political actor in relation to the Arab states, helped to create institutions that could form the basis of a government, and established a well-defined political elite. Thus, even though Palestinian leaders never transformed the armed struggle into a people's war along the lines of Algeria or Vietnam, and never liberated any part of Palestine by force, armed struggle served other important, statist functions.