Nissim Rejwan is an Israeli scholar who was born and raised in Baghdad. He does not fit the more common mold of Israeli post-nationalists, or post-Zionists, the majority of whom are of Ashkenazi background. He also has a much higher regard for Jewish tradition, including religion, than is typical of most post-Zionists. Indeed, it is that very regard for Jewish tradition and culture that underlies his post-Zionism.

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.

An Ayyubid Notable and His World delivers on its title. David Morray's careful study of Ibn al-⊂Adim's (d. 1262) Bughyat al-talab fi ta⊃rikh Halab (Everything Desirable about the History of Aleppo) exemplifies how this important local history can be used to shed light on the social history of medieval northern Syria, especially under the Ayyubids.1

This lengthy two-volume work is part of a long-term Greek project to make foreign archives concerning modern Greek history more accessible to researchers in Greece. Professor Eleutherios Prevelakis, who passed away one year before the publication of these volumes, became the director of the Research Centre for the Study of Modern Greek History of the Academy of Athens in 1963. This position allowed him to conceive and carry through his program of collecting in microfilm form British archival material of relevance to modern Greece. The two volumes under review grew out of the work that he and Professor Merticopoulou conducted over many years in the archives of the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office, which are stored in the Public Record Office.

Israel's May 1999 elections featured three newly retired generals, including Ehud Barak, a former chief of staff who was elected prime minister. There was consensus among most political analysts that Barak was elected primarily because of his military background. Moreover, a wellorchestrated public-relations campaign presented Barak as the most likely candidate to revive the peace process that his military commander, Yitzhak Rabin, had started. Few questioned, however, that military credentials have become almost a prerequisite to holding political office in Israel or that someone who devoted most of his life to war-making is indeed the best person to lead a peacemaking process. It would be quite difficult to understand the centrality of the military in Israeli politics, as in almost any other sphere of life, without paying close attention to the processes and practices that have shaped Israeli militarism over time. By providing readers with both the historical context and the socio-political background, Uri Ben-Eliezer's The Making of Israeli Militarism enables us to come to terms with how the “military way,” as he refers to it, came to dominate Israeli politics in general and its relationships with its neighbors in particular.

This book addresses a topic that has aroused much interest since June 1982: the relations between Israel and the Maronite community in Lebanon and the historical and ideological origins of these relations. Brought to the fore by Israel's invasion of Lebanon, this relationship so far has been the subject of three major—and one should add, conflicting—contributions, by Benny Morris,1 Avi Shlaim,2 and Eyal Zisser.3 Morris's and Shlaim's works are quoted extensively in Kirsten Schulze's book; Zisser's is not even mentioned (though the author is quoted as a source). This, I believe, has much bearing on the validity of Schulze's arguments, because these studies represent two differing views with regard to the matter at stake: how should one interpret archival material and memoirs, place them in their rightful context, and form a firmly grounded opinion as to past events.

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.

Most of us associate the 19th-century commerce in opium with the Opium Wars that propelled China into humiliating economic subjugation to Western powers. Opium was probably second only to slavery as a shameful economic underpinning to European domination of much of Africa and Asia. Consequently, it is important that we understand not only where the poppy was grown, who purchased it, and where and why it was marketed, but also the values and ideologies that led to its suppression by the very polities that earlier had encouraged its cultivation and habitual use.

Conventional scholarship views Baha⊃ism and its precursor, Babism, as intrinsically rooted in traditional Shi⊂ism—in both Shi⊂ism's central doctrines of messianism, millennarianism, and imamism, and its less important features of Neoplatonism, numerology, esoteric knowledge, ecstatic worship, and obedience to religious hierarchy. In short, Babism and Baha⊃ism have been treated as historic relics from a traditional worldview rather than birth pangs of the modern age.

Compared with the cottage industry that has grown up around the study of slavery in Africa and the Americas, slavery in the Ottoman East barely registers as a target of inquiry. Ottomanists and Islamicists have tended to avoid it altogether, and global comparativists have given little play to slave systems that, like the Ottoman, did not center on plantation labor. Military slaves and other varieties of “elite slaves” in the Ottoman Empire have been exceptions to the general indifference, although considering the long and complex history of elite slave (kul) manpower in the 600 years of Ottoman statehood, the pickings are slim there, as well.

Arnon Soffer has written a comprehensive study covering the geo-politics of water conflict in the Middle East. Soffer's major contention is that the region is rapidly heading in the direction of environmental disaster because it is running out of water. Although he believes that regional cooperation, combined with the development of new water resources through nonconventional means—particularly desalination—is a possible solution to the problem, he is pessimistic about the likelihood of cooperation because of historical distrust among the nations involved in each basin conflict.

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.

From its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been characterized by a paradox. Some of its most frequently employed slogans: wahdat-i isl―am (Islamic unity) and sud―ur-i inqil―ab (export of the revolution) reflect the apparent eagerness of its leadership to reach out beyond Iran and to make the rest of the Islamic community share in the fruits of the country's revolutionary experience. Yet the minority status of Shi⊂ism within the umma, coupled with the close and growing identification of the revolution with (Twelver) Shi⊂ism, has largely restricted the outside appeal of Iran's new order to the Shi⊂i world.

Studies of contemporary visual art in the Middle East are scarce compared with the vast literature on historical Islamic arts. In the past ten years, however, several notable books and articles have featured this important but under-recognized realm of visual culture in the region. These recent works often examine the ways in which art reflects social trends such as nationalism and struggles for religious identity. Karnouk's book is a worthy introduction to the world of contemporary art in Egypt, and is the first major English-language book of its kind on the subject (see also Wijdan Ali, Modern Islamic Art: Development and Continuity [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997]). Contemporary Egyptian Art is a sequel to Karnouk's earlier Modern Egyptian Art: The Emergence of a National Style (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1988), in which she outlined the prominent artists and styles of the first half-century of the modern art movement within the context of Egyptian nationalism. This recent book picks up from the 1952 revolution and presents the major trends in art since that time while offering possible socio-political explanations for these trends.

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.

Rashid Khalidi sets out to study the emergence of Palestinian nationalism at the dawn of the 20th century. He explores the early cultural beginnings of Palestinian identity, which precede the encounter with Zionism, and studies the different developments of Palestinian identity in light of that encounter. Whereas a large number of accounts stress that Palestinian identity developed exclusively as a result of the encounter with colonial Zionism, Khalidi sets the record straight. In line with predominant theories of nationalism, Khalidi demonstrates that national identities are defined in relation to an other. Palestine identity, which as early as 1701 manifested itself against a hostile European Christianity, remained Jerusalem-centered until the beginning of the 20th century. That is when a modern Palestinian nationalism was emerging, before the encounter with British colonialism and Zionist settler colonialism changed the configuration of both the Palestinian self and its other. Khalidi charts the changes in the forms of knowledge that the Palestinian intelligentsia was acquiring in the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, noting the shift from Islamic studies to modern social science and the humanities. Through an inventory of Palestinian libraries, Khalidi carefully chronicles these changes in forms of knowledge, correlating them with the new and emerging political ideas in the country.

Shireen T. Hunter and Bassam Tibi have both written thoughtful and useful books about the current Islamic political phenomenon, which complement and do not duplicate each other. Hunter presents a realistic, readable, and analytical argument showing, among other things, that the foreign policies of Islamic states are only to a small degree influenced by Islam and are much more determined by considerations of foreign and domestic interest, however Islamic the government may claim to be. She also demonstrates that there has been little unity in the foreign policies of Muslim countries. For both of these reasons, she states that Samuel Huntington's idea of a coming clash of civilizations, centering on the West versus Islam, is not based on reality and is extremely unlikely to come to pass. (Tibi's book is also concerned with disproving Huntington's argument with effective counter-arguments.)

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.

The subject of a promotional campaign by Harvard University Press, Empires of the Sand purports to challenge established scholarship with respect to the drawn-out demise of the Ottoman Empire from 1789 to 1923. The Karshes argue that European imperialism was more benevolent than threatening and coexisted with Middle Eastern imperialisms—Ottoman, Egyptian, or Arab. In their view, European imperial powers “shored up” the Ottoman Empire rather than sought to deprive it of territories under its domain during the 19th century. To be sure, there was some European “nibbling at the edges of empire” (Algeria, Tunisia, Libya), but these incursions had little impact on the Ottomans; Cyprus (1878) is ignored. The only true “infringement on Ottoman territorial stability,” the British takeover of Egypt, happened by “chance not design,” with the blame attributed to Sultan Abdul Hamid's mismanagement of the crisis. The same story of Ottoman incompetence and attempts to manipulate European powers explains Ottoman loss of territory in the Balkans.