After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy

Middle East Quarterly ^ | 3-12-04 | Noah Feldman/Daniel Pipes

[FlyLow]

Feldman was briefly retained by the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Baghdad to assist in the drafting of a new Iraqi constitution. The 32-year-old assistant professor at New York University Law School may well have landed this extraordinary job because of his optimistic views about Iraq. "A post-Saddam Iraq will inevitably become," he writes in After Jihad, "a laboratory for trying out the mobile idea of democracy in front of the whole world." He calls the United States a "midwife" for democratization.

A review of his scholarship, however, reveals a simplistic and overly optimistic "why not?" approach to Islam and democracy. Using Western assumptions and pandering to a Western audience, he claims that Islam and democracy are two flexible ideas that are compatible if Muslims just put their minds to it. Feldman, however, fails to draw this conclusion from the great storehouse of Islamic jurisprudence that often argues to the contrary. Rather, it comes from his own skewed interpretation of modern history—one in which countries like Pakistan and Iran are on the cusp of democracy.

There are other problems with his analysis. As noted by Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan scholar of Islam, many Muslims have "fought against the advances of Enlightenment philosophy and banned Western humanism as foreign and ‘imported,' calling the intellectuals who study it enemy agents and traitors to the nationalist cause." Feldman makes no mention of this powerful challenge.

He also misses the mark in stating that "everyone is equal before God" in Muslim theology. In reality, Muslims have historically viewed fellow monotheists as second-class citizens, while non-monotheists and slaves rank lower yet. Feldman seems to think that ignoring this reality makes it disappear.

In the end, however, militant Islam is Feldman's most major failing. While he recognizes the ideas of Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, and other radical ideologues as problematic, he drastically underestimates the enduring nature of the movement they created. As his title suggests, Feldman lives in the happy delusion that we have reached an After Jihad era; he cheers himself with the implausible thesis that militant Islam has waned. The attacks of 9/11, he echoes Giles Kepel[1] in explaining, were a "last, desperate gasp of a tendency to violence that has lost most of its popular support," a description that willfully ignores reports from across the Muslim world of delight at bin Laden's achievement. And whence comes his conceit that the idea of an Islamic state created through holy war is "an idea whose time has passed"? One wonders how he would explain al-Qaeda's recent bombings in Casablanca, Riyadh, and Istanbul. As further attacks by militant Islamists prove Feldman wrong, one can only wonder and worry about his handiwork and be grateful that he left his position in Iraq.

Jonathan Schanzer The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

Against War with Iraq: An Anti-War Primer. By Michael Ratner, Jennie Green, and Barbara Olshansky. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. 78 pp. $6.95, paper.

As part of The Open Media Pamphlet series, this pocket-sized primer was published to mobilize Americans against the war with Iraq, March-April 2003. The result is poorly written, poorly researched, and thoroughly unconvincing.

For one, it argues that "there is no evidence linking Saddam Hussein's regime to al-Qaeda's terrorist network," ignoring the now-captured fugitive Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the 1993 World Trade Center plot organizers. Likewise, it ignores Abu Musab az-Zarqawi, an al-Qaeda operative who found refuge in Baghdad, not to speak of Ansar al-Islam, the al-Qaeda affiliate in northern Iraq that maintained ties to Saddam.

Oddly enough, the authors claim that attacking Iraq would make "the United States and the world less safe" by angering the likes of bin Laden and Ayman az-Zawahiri—two terrorists who swore to destroy the United States some ten years prior. Also curious is the authors' claim that "weapons inspections have been effective." Due to Saddam's intransigence, weapons inspectors were booted from Iraq in 1998 and did not return until the United States threatened war. The writers also state that "1.27 million innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed as a result of the economic sanctions" against Iraq. They fail to note, however, that this inflated number was issued by the corrupt Baathist regime in Iraq, and that, among the deaths that did occur, many were due to Saddam's snubbing of the Oil-for-Food program.

This primer also posits conspiratorially that the United States invaded Iraq for oil and that the "intense desire of increased access to cheap oil more than likely played a major part in the U.S. ability to finally obtain favorable votes from France, Russia, and possibly China" on U.N. Resolution 1441. Wrongly, the authors claim that "in the end, those countries can protest a bit, but they cannot hold out. Oil and economic and military power will win the day for the United States."

Other wrong predictions include the Vietnam-era argument that "communities of color will be commanded to bear the brunt of the war." There was also the prediction that the war would "cause American casualties in the thousands." In reality, there were 138 deaths through April 2003.

Instead of trying to prevent a war with these fallacious arguments, the authors would have done a better job in trying to protect the environment. Indeed, think how many trees they could have saved had they not published this derisory pamphlet.

Jonathan Schanzer

Al-Qaeda: The Terror Network that Threatens the World. By Jane Corbin. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002. 315 pp. $24.95.

Corbin, a British journalist, has compiled a solid account of al-Qaeda's exploits since the group's inception in the late 1980s. While not groundbreaking, her work is accurate, sober, and well researched, using both written sources and personal interviews.

Al-Qaeda has three parts. First, the author reviews the early years of Osama bin Laden's terror network and its attacks between 1992 (a hotel bombing in Yemen) and 2000 (the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen). The second part shows Corbin's journalistic skills to good advantage as she describes in detail what is known of the September 11, 2001 operation, including biographies of the nineteen hijackers and how their cells operated before the attack. Third, Corbin ends with a cursory account of the "War on Terror"; the lack of depth here is understandable, given how difficult it has been for journalists to uncover much on classified U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

Corbin is rightly critical of the U.S. government's pre-9/11 blunders. Bill Clinton's inaction after the 1993 attacks that killed eighteen servicemen in Somalia "branded his administration as weak" in the eyes of al-Qaeda. She finds that his administration "lacked the will to counter [al-Qaeda] even after the African bombings in 1998." Despite a steady stream of al-Qaeda attacks, Clinton declined the usual daily intelligence briefing, accepting "only a written submission."

U.S. intelligence is also in Corbin's cross hairs. She recounts that when Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents noted that "small aviation schools had been giving a group of Arab men [flight] lessons," the FBI issued a memo noting, "Osama bin Laden could be using U.S. flight schools to infiltrate the country's civil aviation system." High-level officials in the bureau buried the memo because it suggested measures that "smacked of racial profiling." Corbin recalls that six months after September 11, the aviation school where hijacker Muhammad Atta and a cohort had trained received "student visas approved for flying lessons" from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, clearing the pair for takeoff.

As Corbin shows, America learned many tough lessons. Since then, she states, this country has become "a sadder and a wiser place."

Jonathan Schanzer

Arab Economic Integration: Between Hope and Reality. Edited by Ahmed Galal and Bernard Hoekman. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003. 170 pp. $20.95, paper.

By the time the European Common Market was created by the treaty of Rome in 1957, the Arab League states had signed among themselves a treaty for joint defense and economic cooperation, a convention for facilitating trade and regulating transit trade, and an Arab economic unity agreement. In addition, they had created the Arab League in 1945 as an institution for political coordination. Ironically, though the Arab states pioneered regional economic and political integration, the Middle East today has the least trade within itself of any region in the world.

Arab Economic Integration, initiated by the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies, documents this depressing history and analyzes the failures. The study's seven chapters are brutally frank about the past and bluntly realistic in their forecasts. They show that the failure to integrate results only in small part from the countries' low degree of complementarity (does country A need what country B has to sell?). More important are inward-looking economic policies that discourage trade. Galal and Samiha Fawzy present simulations showing that in industry after industry, an Egyptian firm that sells on the domestic market does better than an identical firm selling for export. From 1990 to 1999, they point out, the share of exports in Egypt's national output fell by half, from 14 percent to 7 percent. From a simulation of the benefits to Egypt and Tunisia, Jamel Zarouk shows that the greatest benefits come from reducing the excessive state regulation of the economy, which prevents free trade in services. Even more important than bad economic policies, poor political leadership has held back Arab economic integration. Fawzy targets the unwillingness of political leaders to integrate, out of concern about which nations would benefit most and from fear about who would emerge as the regional political leader.

The two chapters on the relevance of the European experience at economic integration, one by L. Alan Winters and the other by Hoekman and Patrick Messerlin, seem less in touch with the Arab experience. For instance, Winters argues that Europe was successful because its integration was a political-ideological phenomenon: "It was not driven by the careful calculation of economic costs and benefits but by a grand vision that had fortunate economic side effects." The obvious question he does not explore is why, given the power of the Arab unity vision, no such dynamic worked in the Arab world.

Patrick Clawson

Arabie Saoudite: La Menace. By Stéphane Marchand. Paris: Librarie Arthème Fayard, 2003. 406 pp. € 22, paper.

Saudi officials have denounced their American critics, claiming there is an organized campaign to denigrate the kingdom—with some darkly hinting that it is U.S. friends of Israel behind the criticism. They dismiss as ill-informed and malicious the charges that Saudis finance much of the world's Islamist terror or that the Saudi system encourages bigotry and hatred of the West. For instance, Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan has described Dore Gold, the author of one critical book, as "simply hatred's scribe [who] has carried on a campaign of lies and unsubstantiated accusations." At the same time, it is a stretch to accept as unbiased those who plead the Saudi case, given how they nearly all have lucrative business dealings with the kingdom.

In this charged atmosphere, it is interesting to see how European analysts view Saudi Arabia. Consider the French, who can hardly be accused of pro-American political bias as regards the Middle East. Marchand's Arabie Saoudite is a serious book from a major publisher. The author is the deputy chief editor of Figaro, which is a highbrow Paris newspaper that has overtaken Le Monde to become the most influential newspaper in France. And his criticism of the Saudis is harsher than that of Stephen Schwartz or Dore Gold.

He covers the gamut: politics, the royal family, society, economy, and foreign affairs. His evidence is extensive and his conclusions damning, namely, the Saudi system breeds intolerance and extremism. He shows how the Saudi government finances the destruction of any Islamic history—be it institutions or historical monuments—which clash with their narrow-minded view of what Islam should be. He demonstrates the deep grip of extremist nonsense in the kingdom. For instance, a large proportion of the Westernized elite believe that the September 11, 2001 attacks were part of an anti-Saudi, anti-Muslim plot. He worries that the small islands of reason—the enlightened elements of the middle class, supported tentatively by some farseeing members of the ruling family—are being submerged in the sea of fanaticism.

Now if only the French and other European governments were to listen to such analysis and draw from it the obvious and sensible conclusion that the Saudi rulers must be pressed to liberalize at home and stop financing extremism abroad.

Patrick Clawson

The Battlefield: Algeria 1988-2002. Studies in a Broken Polity. By Hugh Roberts. London and New York: Verso, 2003. 402 pp. $25.

Roberts, director of the Algeria Project and an analyst with the International Crisis Group, has published a collection of his articles written in the period 1987-2002 that plot the points along Algeria's path of deterioration. The turning point was the military's nullification of elections that would have brought the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) to power in 1992. From there, Algeria plunged into a decade of civil war, marked by brutal violence at the hands of both Islamists and anti-Islamist vigilante groups.

Roberts jumps from one topic to the next, so that a clear theme is difficult to extract. Instead, his book might be seen as a sampling of issues worthy of deeper analysis. One short essay is devoted entirely to how the 1990-91 Iraq crisis radicalized the FIS. The support of FIS for Saddam not only alienated FIS from the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) but also had a negative impact on other Arab governments that otherwise might well have supported FIS, such as Saudi Arabia.

Other important aspects tackled by Roberts include Algeria's identity, economics, democratization, Berbers, and the complex relationship with France—all topics vital to understanding the complicated landscape of the civil war that has ravaged Algeria.

Not once, however, does Roberts mention al-Qaeda, despite the fact that Osama bin Laden's network had succeeded in exploiting the pandemonium of Algeria since the mid-1990s. It did so first through the radical Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which was comprised largely of "Arab Afghans," who returned from battle in the late 1980s. Nor does he mention the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), actually created by al-Qaeda and responsible for most of the continuing bloodshed today. Both groups were listed by President George W. Bush in his September 23, 2001 executive order on terrorist financing; both are seen as threats to U.S. national security.

Roberts, however, does not seem terribly interested in their activities. Thus, Roberts' depiction of the "battlefield" is incomplete. Two of the primary armies in Algeria's battle are ignored.

Jonathan Schanzer

Ben-Gurion against the Knesset. By Giora Goldberg. London: Frank Cass, 2003. 338 pp. $64.50.

Goldberg begins with a theoretical discussion on the status of legislatures and on the role of quasi-parliamentary institutions in the early Zionist movement. But he quickly turns to the main subject of the work: the unrelenting attempt by David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, to limit the power and effectiveness of the Israeli Knesset (parliament) in its first decade of existence. By drawing on a wide variety of primary sources, the author highlights Ben-Gurion's "utter contempt," "very low opinion," and "disparaging attitude" towards the Knesset.

Ben-Gurion thought the Knesset should be an assembly of notables, representing a cross-section of ethnic groups and interests within Israeli society, which would approve government decisions but not challenge them. He favored legislation that would prevent the Knesset from criticizing or overseeing the government, and he believed that the executive should have the right to dissolve the Knesset and call elections. He opposed immunity for Knesset members and the power of parliamentary committees to investigate government actions or decisions. Moreover, where possible, he denied the Knesset its symbolic status as a sovereign body superior to the government. (For example, he prevented the speaker of the Knesset from taking any official role in Independence Day celebrations.)

However, Ben-Gurion's deep antagonism towards the Knesset was not evidence of anti-democratic tendencies. Rather, he was motivated by his belief that since statehood, the Knesset had become a partisan talking shop guilty of "criminal sabotage" against the Jewish state and people. Worse, it legitimized the fascistic (as he saw it) tendencies of the revisionist Herut party and strengthened a local communist party that was loyal to Soviet Russia. This was unacceptable at a time when Israel's continued existence was still uncertain. His influence on the early development of parliamentary life may, as the author argues, have been "destructive." But given the challenges facing Israel at the time, it was understandable, perhaps inevitable, that the father of the democratic Jewish state would use his moral stature and political power to stem any threat to the state he had helped create.

Rory Miller King's College London

The Case for Israel. By Alan Dershowitz. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2003. 264 pp. $19.95 ($19.95, e-book, Adobe Reader).

In his conclusion to The Case for Israel, renowned Harvard Law School professor Dershowitz asks his readers to imagine the following fictitious scenario: An extraterrestrial messenger has been dispatched to earth to assess Israel's compliance with the rule of law. Based on the number and frequency of anti-Israel United Nations (U.N.) resolutions and the unparalleled complaints registered internationally and within academia against the Jewish state, the Martian would conclude that Israel is the world's worst outlaw nation. The point is that Israel elicits a disproportionate, unfair amount of criticism.

Dershowitz takes aim at the countless double standards applied to Israel that rely not only on distorting the empirical record but on ignoring far more egregious violations committed by other countries. His central proposition is that Israel's efforts to protect its civilian population against terrorists and invading Arab armies have been no worse morally and legally "and in many respects considerably better than protective efforts taken by other democracies that have faced far less virulent threats." Yet, Israel is singled out, particularly since Yasir Arafat walked away from Ehud Barak's peace offers at Camp David and Taba, Egypt, in 2000-2001.

Reflecting Dershowitz's legal background, The Case For Israel consists of thirty-two rebuttals to common allegations leveled against the Jewish state, an approach that strengthens the book. For example, Dershowitz points out that a full 27 percent of the U.N.'s country-specific resolutions critical of a state have been directed against it. In contrast, no resolution in the history of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights has condemned Syria, China, Saudi Arabia, or Zimbabwe, all of which are self-evidently far worse violators of human rights. Israel, asserts Dershowitz, has a "far better record on human rights than any other nation in the Middle East and most other nations in the world." As evidence, he notes that "Israel is the only nation in the world whose judiciary actively enforces the rule of law against its military during wartime" and that "Israel has killed fewer innocent civilians in proportion to the number of its own civilians killed than any country engaged in a comparable war."

Dershowitz makes more contentious claims, too, including a defense of Israel's policy of targeted assassination and destroying the homes of terrorists' family members. But, in general, his case for Israel is a mainstream one. He does not reflexively justify every Israeli policy. In fact, he repeatedly expresses his belief in the desirability of a Palestinian state and hints that the Israel Defense Forces have occasionally been "prone to overreaction."

The one major flaw is a too narrow focus on countering the claims of Noam Chomsky, as if Chomsky were at the forefront of Middle East analysis. Dershowitz could have broadened the appeal of his book, especially among academics, by paying more attention to more informed critics such as Israel's so-called New Historians.

Max Abrahms The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

Decision on Palestine Deferred: America, Britain and Wartime Diplomacy, 1939-1945. By Monty Noam Penkower. London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002. 384 pp. $62.50.

"When the historian of the future assembles the black record of our days," Chaim Weizmann once remarked, "he will find two things unbelievable: first, the crime itself; second, the reaction of the world to that crime." As the title suggests, Penkower focuses on how Jews died as the Allies dithered over whether to intervene on behalf of European Jewry during World War II. Although this topic has been addressed in other books, Penkower broadens the field by placing Diaspora advocacy in the context of the surrounding war.

Based on transcripts from the Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences, among other sources, Penkower reveals the Allied leaders' indifference to Jewish survival through the prism of war. Specifically, he skillfully juxtaposes the British and U.S. geostrategic concerns for establishing a Jewish state against the backdrop of systematic Jewish annihilation. Penkower's treatment of this emotive topic is largely detached and objective. He details Britain's preoccupation with maintaining Middle Eastern stability to maintain the commonwealth's system of communication, allay Saudi Arabia for oil access, and safeguard its sea route to India. Roosevelt's geopolitical justifications for opposing Jewish statehood are also explored, particularly his reluctance to compromise postwar Saudi oil concessions. In general, Penkower provides a surprisingly forgiving portrayal of Prime Minister Churchill's anti-Israel stances while correctly indicting President Roosevelt for embracing the State Department's callous policy towards the Jews.

Penkower also analyzes the interplay between the Holocaust and the creation of Israel by charting how the Third Reich's conquests in Europe constantly informed and altered the Diaspora's strategy to save Jews. He captures the growing consensus among American Jewish leaders during the war for easing discriminatory immigration quotas and, more controversially, establishing a Jewish state. Whereas most treatments of this period stress the American Jewish community's inaction on behalf of European Jewry during the war, Penkower vividly describes their oft-ignored, failed advocacy efforts to elicit Roosevelt and Churchill's support. In doing so, his nuanced, largely fact-driven approach allows readers to distill the Allied leaders' various positions on the "Palestine conundrum," as well as the diversity of views towards a Jewish state within the Diaspora.

Decision on Palestine Deferred provides an invaluable contribution to Holocaust and World War II scholarship, as well as the history of the creation of the State of Israel. Whereas historians have tended to address each subject separately, Penkower details their important interrelationship.

Max Abrahms

The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society, and the Military. By Baruch Kimmerling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 268 pp. $45.

What has become of Israeli identity since the establishment of the state of Israel, Kimmerling asks. He replies that the hegemony of the secular Zionist identity was broken following the 1967 war; since then, Israeli culture and identity divide into seven subcultures (secular Ashkenazi upper-middle class, national religious, traditionalist "Orientals," Orthodox religious, Arabs, Russian immigrants, and Ethiopians).

Kimmerling argues that this fracturing resulted from several factors. Following the Israeli occupation in 1967 of the West Bank and Gaza, the return to the biblical heartland prompted a group of what the author calls "modern fundamentalists" to challenge the secularism and paternalism of the state. This group presented its own Zionist-religious symbolism; the old ethos of the kibbutz, for example, was replaced with the image of an orthodox community of settlers and fighters. Other groups (the "Orientals") soon followed their lead in challenging the state's cultural hegemony. Today, new immigrant groups (Russians, Ethiopians) are little influenced by the Israeli melting pot. They change and shape the cultural face of Israel instead of being changed by it.

The author worries that this fracturing is leading the country to the brink of a culture war between secular and religious. Even the glue that holds Israel's identity together—a loose definition of "Jewishness" and a strong sense of nationalism—may not prevent the society from bursting apart.

Kimmerling offers an informative, interesting interpretation, but his work is laced with hostility to the settler movement and religious elements in general. And while he views these changes as a threat, might one not understand them as the result of a process of maturation? The decline of the state hegemony followed the completion of state building. Once the state had more defensible borders after 1967, what need was there for a state-imposed identity? Israeli society has moved toward a more normal patriotism, defined less by adherence to collective identity and more by a willingness to bear arms in defense of hearth and home. The emergence of Israeli subcultures follows the normal course of modern, democratic, multicultural immigrant societies.

Meyrav Wurmser Hudson Institute

Iraqi Kurdistan: Political Development and Emergent Democracy. By Gareth R.V. Stansfield. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. 261 pp. $80.

Iraqi Kurds hold five of the Iraqi Governing Council's twenty-five seats. Masud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) not only control an area the size of New Jersey, but since the fall of Saddam Hussein, they have expanded their sphere of influence inside Iraq. In November 2003, Talabani assumed Iraq's interim rotating presidency while the KDP's Hoshyar Zebari crisscrossed the globe as Iraq's new foreign minister.

Don't expect any reference to Iraq's new reality in Stansfield's study, written before Iraq's liberation. However, the KDP and PUK remain dominant in northern Iraq, and so Iraqi Kurdistan remains relevant. The author spent three years in Iraqi Kurdistan, interviewing politicians and observing the workings of government. He describes the structure of the two major Iraqi Kurdish political parties, as well as the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) umbrella under which they operate. His discussions of KDP and PUK decision-making distinguish between politicians who wield real influence and those who only hold a title.

Unfortunately, Stanfield's access contributes to Iraqi Kurdistan's main weakness. His analysis is often myopic, placing the Kurdish view front and center, but ignoring the reality of numerous other actors. It is curious, for example, how Stansfield can address the 1975 Algiers accords (which led to the collapse of the Kurdish uprising) without any mention of Henry Kissinger, who brokered the agreement that cut the Kurds off from their foreign patrons. Likewise, while chronicling the foundation of the PUK in Damascus, Stansfield mentions neither the Syrian government's role nor motivation. He breezes through Barzani's 1996 alliance with Saddam Hussein but fails to mention the Republican Guards' subsequent liquidation of Iraqi opposition forces. While corruption runs rampant, Stansfield prefers neat modeling and diagrams that confuse theoretical structure with on-the-ground reality. An accurate understanding of Kurdish politics simply is not possible without considering how Talabani and Barzani have compromised themselves for personal and political gain.

There are other gaps: with the exception of a single passing remark in the introduction, there is no mention of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) or the violent insurgency it waged against both major Iraqi Kurdish parties. There is only cursory mention of Barzani and Talabani's sophisticated intelligence networks and little mention of opposition tribal leaders Jowhar Sourchi or Karim Khan Bradosti, forced into exile as the Kurdish leaders consolidated their fiefdoms. Likewise, Stansfield ignores the Turkmen community, a small but active and politically complicated minority inside Iraqi Kurdistan.

Dry and detailed, Iraqi Kurdistan is well suited for a university library (and budget), but unless a reader wants to know who the minister of agriculture was in the second KRG cabinet, Stansfield's study should remain on the shelf.

Michael Rubin Washington, D.C.

The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times. Edited by Reeva Spector Simon, Michael Menachem Laskier, and Sara Reguer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 549 pp. $57.50 ($24.50, paper).

It is rare to find a multi-authored volume of essays (twenty-four writers in all) that reads like a single-author book; this useful, well-conceived volume achieves just that. Much has been written on the history and culture of modern Middle Eastern and North African Jewry, but until now, there has been no comprehensive survey that pays attention to social and cultural history and takes into account the Ottoman Empire's Balkan and Anatolian provinces, the Arabic-speaking lands, and the Iranian cultural sphere. The two-fold division of this volume into "Themes" and "Country-by-Country Survey" is particularly useful for teaching purposes, despite some minor repetitions. The suggested reading lists are excellent for classroom use.

Two pithy background chapters offer a survey of Jewish history in the Middle East and North Africa from the rise of Islam to 1700 (by Jane Gerber) and of Europe's impact on the region (by Reeva Simon). Eleven thematic essays cover the economic, religious, and intellectual life, the communal structure, education, folkways, material culture, music, Zionism, and the world of women. Zvi Zohar's essay, "Religion: Rabbinic Tradition and the Response to Modernity," is particularly satisfying and well crafted. Mark Kligman's tantalizingly brief chapter on music is supplemented by an accompanying CD and an appendix of texts. The chapter on Jewish languages written in part by David Bunis (Ladino), Joseph Chetrit (Judeo-Arabic), and Haideh Sahim (Judeo-Persian) is extremely useful but leaves the reader wanting more. (Also, there is regrettably no coverage of the Jewish Kurds' neo-Aramaic vernacular.) Ammiel Alcalay's packed survey of intellectual life in only a few instances slips into that author's penchant for Third Worldist polemic.

The thirteen chapters of the country survey successfully balance political and social history within limited confines. Most are written by leading specialists (e.g., Harvey Goldberg for Libya) and distill their own research. Most conclude their story in the 1960s or 1970s, by which time most Jews had emigrated, but the chapter on Morocco by Michael Laskier and Eliezer Bashan contains a valuable postscript on the contemporary scene.

Norman A. Stillman University of Oklahoma

Jews, Turks, and Ottomans: A Shared History, Fifteenth through the Twentieth Century. Edited by Avigdor Levy. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002. 395 pp. $34.95.

This volume, long-awaited by those interested in the topic, represents a major and stimulating contribution to the scholarship on what may be the most undervalued and instructive case in the long history of Muslim-Jewish relations: that of the Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey. It represents one of the finest, most encouraging, and most absorbing volumes on a Jewish or an Islamic topic to be published in years.

Levy, professor of Near Eastern and Judaic studies at Brandeis, has brought together outstanding and fresh essays. Israel Ta-Shma deals with late Byzantine and early Ottoman rabbinic literature, Levy himself with a Jewish view of the siege of Edirne of 1912-13, and Donald Quataert, a leading Ottomanist, with the working class in Salonika. Of particular note is Feroz Ahmad's essay on Jewish involvement in the Committee of Union and Progress.

These and other chapters offer provocative observations as well as solid research. Levy's piece on Edirne, for example, is based on a newly-researched source, the journal of a Jewish resident of the city. Thanks to the journal of Angèle Guéron and its use by Levy, we now have a remarkable account of the patriotic support for the Ottoman authorities forthcoming from the ranks of Edirne Jews.

Ahmad's paper covers one of the most relevant issues in the general history of modern Islam. Islamists have painted a distorted, conspiratorial picture of the Ottoman Jews' influence in the reform movement that led to the end of the Ottoman Empire. To this day, the Saudi state educational system teaches that the fall of the Ottoman caliphate (to which the house of Saud and the Wahhabi sect assisted avidly, by the way) was caused by Ottoman Jews. Ahmad reproves—gently but firmly—Aron Rodrigue and Esther Benbassa for their widely-cited, but perfunctory and second-rate historiography of the Ottoman Sephardim.[2]

Halil Inalcýk, the doyen of Ottoman history, writes something in the book's first chapter that should be read every few months by students of Jewish and Islamic history. The restrictions on dhimmis (Christians and Jews living under Muslim rule) were "ordinarily … overlooked by the Ottoman authorities." He deems it "an exaggeration to interpret these social limitations as reducing non-Muslims under Islam to the status of second-class subjects."

My only criticism of Jews, Turks, and Ottomans is the absence of studies on Bosnia-Hercegovina or today's Macedonia.

Stephen Schwartz Washington, D.C.

The Jordanian-Israeli War 1948-1951: A History of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. By Maan Abu Nowar. Reading: Ithaca Press, 2002. 515 pp. $49.50.

Abu Nowar's voluminous tome illustrates the dual denial in which the Arabs are living: denial of Jewish history and their own. This particular case is the more disturbing given that the author was a lifelong friend of Jordan's King Hussein, the monarch who maintained extensive relations with Israel and who had urged the author "to publish the whole truth based on both historical facts and ‘adherence to the dignity of history.'"

Abu Nowar does not succeed in achieving this goal. The chapter on Jewish history from antiquity to the present day is a travesty that anachronistically looks at biblical times in terms of the contemporary Arab-Israeli conflict. Thus, the author describes the ancient Israelites as barbaric and savage occupiers—"without culture and civilization"—of a prosperous and thriving country with which they had no connection whatsoever. "The settled and civilized people of Canaan surrendered to the Israeli nomadic raiders after suffering countless massacres in their villages and small towns," he writes. "Thereafter, the Israeli warlords divided the occupied areas between themselves and controlled the inhabitants of Canaan as landlords rather than landowners … Meanwhile the people of Canaan, the original people of the land, continued to live as sedentary farmers as they had done for the previous 3,000 years. In spite of all the massacres they inflicted on Canaan, the Israelites were never at any stage the sole inhabitants of the land."

The historical implications could not be clearer, as no term has dominated Palestinian discourse more than "occupation." Abu Nowar extends its use back to antiquity to deny any Jewish attachment to Palestine: "It was certainly not the land of their forefathers, because they only forced their rule over it as occupiers, not as landowners, for a short period of history." Nor do the Jews have any legal or moral claim to statehood since they "were never a separate nation during the previous 1,800 years [but rather] national citizens of more than fifty countries." In short, the Jews have no stronger historical claim to Palestine than to any other parts of the world in which they lived during the past millennia.

Abu Nowar's description of contemporary history is equally erroneous. He presents the mandatory era (1920-48), against all evidence, as a period of persistent British support for Zionism coupled with repression of the country's Arab population. The outbreak of hostilities in late November 1947 is not an Arab backlash to the United Nations partition resolution that month but the latest chapter in a long and uninterrupted series of Jewish terrorism dating back to the end of World War II. There's not a word about Arab violence.

The description of Jordan's participation in the 1948 war is equally remote from reality. Wanting to portray King Abdullah I, the kingdom's founder, as an ardent Arab nationalist, which he was not, the author presents his intervention in Palestine in 1948 as a move to defend the hapless Palestinians from the predatory Israelis—rather than the king's latest bid to incorporate Palestine into the Greater Syrian empire he had long been striving to establish. He makes no mention of Abdullah's secret contacts with the Zionist movement beginning in the early 1930s, including his two famous meetings with Golda Meir in November 1947 and May 1948. Ignoring these episodes, rather than explaining them on the basis of the Jordanian archives, offers yet another sad testament to the pervasive culture of unaccountability and self-denial plaguing Arab life.

Efraim Karsh King's College, London

The Malady of Islam. By Abdelwahab Meddeb. Trans. from French by Pierre Joris and Ann Reid. New York: Basic Books, 2003. 241 pp. $24.

On the subject of Islam, Meddeb presents a brave and insightful Muslim voice; on the subject of politics, he is just another group-think French intellectual. Fortunately, his thoughts on the first topic have real importance while those on the second do not.

On Islam, Meddeb (professor of comparative literature at the Sorbonne) sees militant Islam as the religion's endemic problem, comparable to fanaticism in Catholicism and Nazism in Germany. His lament about "the malady of Islam" emphasizes the loss of scientific creativity, cultural suppleness, and eros. Highly cultured in the French tradition, he openly admits his puzzlement with militant Islam ("I must confess that I cannot grasp the logic that predisposes a person to inscribe humiliation in the innermost core of his being"). As a connoisseur of Muslim culture—its poetry, mosque architecture, its tradition of travel, even its drinking songs—Meddeb fills out the picture of Muslim life so sadly missing from the "simplistic Islam, cut off from its civilization" that characterizes the Islamists. He rightly derides Wahhabism as aiming ultimately "to make one forget body, object, space, beauty."

For all its charm and erudition on the Islamic topic, Meddeb's writing degenerates into self-indulgence, quirkiness, and disorganization when he takes up politics. He blames the 9/11 hijackers, for example, in large part on a "world transformed by Americanization" and elaborates his bizarre notion that as "the Americanization of the world slowly began to replace its Europeanization," it spawned the Wahhabi sect. In passages of surpassing idiocy, Meddeb states that "Wahhabite Saudi Arabia and Puritan America were held over the same baptismal fonts" and "the Wahhabite sectarian walks hand in hand with the American," the two sharing much in common. And what Meddeb writes about Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and other current issues is best left unsaid.

Daniel Pipes

The Middle East Military Balance, 2001-2002. Edited by Shlomo Brom and Yiftah Shapir. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 400 pp. $37.95.

The Jaffee Center's annual compilation considers the ramifications of military power in the Middle East. While Arab states are examined, they are seen through the prism of Israeli security. Brom focuses on the role of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), finding that their addition to the mix implies that balance-of-power assessments must now include an ability to sustain a chemical/biological/nuclear attack. Israel has always depended on its high-tech weaponry and the Arab world's inability to breach that technological gap. The proliferation of WMD is in the course of fundamentally changing the region's military balance.

Shapir's extensive inventory of the region's military capabilities highlights Israel's new predicament—the fact that its qualitative edge loses significance when its forces are engaged in limited actions. "Operation Defensive Shield" in early 2002 was just such an operation when Israel reentered Jenin and was forced to target those responsible for terrorist activities instead of blanket bombing. Despite the restraint shown, however, Israel's use of targeted killings may have turned the tide in Israel's favor, as the fighting in Jenin decimated the leadership of those terrorist cells. In Brom's words "as the violence continued, the Palestinian ‘learning curve' swung upward; their forces effectively made a transition to guerilla and terrorist tactics, against which standing armies generally have difficulty formulating a response." Brom concludes from a survey of the Palestinian Authority's growing military force and its alliances with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad that it seeks to shift from escalating violence to enhanced military capabilities, something that has yet to be seen.

Brom and Shapir made a cautious assessment of pre-war Iraq. Given the Saddam Hussein regime's nuclear program, and in light of reduced international support for sanctions and the no-fly zone, they suggested that there remained a significant threat to the United States. They found Saddam confident of his ability to evade inspections and suggested that Saddam's nuclear program was reconstituted after inspectors were expelled in 1998.

Although the Middle East Military Balance offers much information on the region's militaries, it tends to be more a laundry list of capabilities than a clear guide to the policy implications of the arsenals. As both writers have extensive academic and military backgrounds, recommendations on future strategic initiatives for the region would be welcome.

Asaf Romirowsky Middle East Forum

The Oxford Dictionary of Islam. Edited by John L. Esposito. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 359 pp. $45.

In 1995, I wrote in these pages about an earlier co-production by Esposito and the Oxford University Press, the four-volume The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, that "Like many other reference works in the age of deconstruction, it faces problems of identity and purpose. An encyclopedia used to be a straightforward compendium of known and useful facts. But when scholars increasingly agree that truth depends on one's vantage point (and especially one's gender, race, and class), the encyclopedic function becomes far less obvious. A large number of the 450 contributors to this work would seem to accept the modern notion that objectivity being unobtainable, there's little point in even trying."

Eight years later, the same problems bedevil the much smaller Oxford Dictionary, but this time, the lack of objectivity seems to have more of an agenda: namely, whitewashing Islamism. This theme pervades the volume. Thus, Ahmad Deedat, the Islamist attack dog against Christianity, while called "controversial," is described as "widely respected" and noted as the winner of a prize for "outstanding service to Islam." Hizbullah, the Lebanese Islamist group, is said to finance a "wide range of social, economic, and media projects," while no mention is made of its being a mainstay of the U.S. government's terrorism list. The Tunisian Islamist Rashid al-Ghannushi might rant against conspiracies by "Jewish Masonic Zionist atheistic gangs" but our dictionary respectfully defines him as an "Islamic thinker, activist, and political leader." Steven Pomerantz, the FBI's former chief of counterterrorism, may say about the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations that the organization, "its leaders and its activities effectively give aid to international terrorist groups," but the Oxford Dictionary assures us it is merely "a civil rights organization defending the right of Muslims to live and practice Islam in America without having to suffer discrimination."

And on and on through the dictionary. One wishes that this handsomely produced and practical volume could be recommended but it should be strenuously avoided.

Daniel Pipes

Persian Pilgrimages: Journeys across Iran. By Afshin Molavi. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002. 315 pp. $25.95.

No book compares with Molavi's Persian Pilgrimages to give a feel for contemporary Iran. A young Iranian-American who has reported on Iran for The Washington Post and Reuters, Molavi has a master's degree in Middle East studies. He spent more than a year traveling in Iran on his own. He thus has the professional training to be a neutral observer while fitting into the social scene. He has made full use of these advantages to write a book simultaneously engaging and profoundly depressing.

Molavi shows that the Islamic revolution has been a disaster for Iran via scores of facts and hundreds of anecdotes. He describes the intellectual and cultural repression in great detail. He brings to life the crushing weight of the severe social restrictions on women and young people. He documents the collapse of what had been a promising economy. Noting that more than 200,000 young Iranians emigrated in 2001, Molavi joined the "visa pilgrimage," as it is called, to the Canadian embassy in Damascus. He quotes one of his friends, "Our best minds are lined up outside the Canadian embassy like common beggars. If you are an Iranian nationalist, you should cry at the sight."

To make matters worse, the prospects are dim for change within the context of the Islamic Republic. Molavi explains the traditional Shi‘ite clerics' distinction between the religious elite (khawas) and the popular masses (‘awwam). He quotes powerful hard-line Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi: "It doesn't matter what the people think. The people are ignorant sheep." Molavi demonstrates how this view underlies the hard-liners' concept of how power should be shared between the elected and nonelected leaders.

Molavi (wisely) stays away from offering advice for U.S. policy. But his account brings home how the Bush administration's policy is pro-Iranian because it supports the people's desire for freedom. Those calling for better relations with the mullah-run government are profoundly anti-Iranian because they would do nothing to end this regime, which undermines a great nation and deprives its people of hope.

Patrick Clawson

Saddam: King of Terror. By Con Coughlin. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. 350 pp. $26.95.

There is no getting around it: leaders of vicious totalitarian states (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Saddam Hussein) are fascinating. How they rose from humble backgrounds to such personal power, when all they had to offer was torture and twisted ideas, is hard to fathom for those who live in well-established democracies, accustomed to the rule of law. Saddam's story is made all the more timely by the prospect of his trial for his many crimes. Coughlin's exciting and very specific biography of Saddam Hussein provides a wealth of detail about the secretive Iraqi leadership: their decision-making, their interactions among themselves, and—most titillating but also perhaps most revealing—their intimate personal lives. It makes for a great read.

There is only one minor problem: much of what he writes may not be true. Many of the intriguing revelations are stated without any source for backup. When sources are cited, they are frequently "author's interview" with no additional detail about with whom, when, or where—which glides over the sticky problem that those who know have every reason to keep quiet, and those who talk have every reason to lie to exaggerate their importance.

From what can be checked, there is reason to worry about Coughlin's accuracy. On a number of well-researched points, Coughlin's account differs from what extensive investigation has shown. For instance, he writes, "Saddam had been promised the [Osirak] reactor would be ready to produce weapons-grade material by July 1981." While no one can know for sure who may have promised what to Saddam, there is a lot of material about what Saddam was told about the nuclear program, and there is no reason to think anyone told a whopper like that. After all, the Osirak reactor was physically incapable of producing weapons-grade material (instead, it was a step in the chain to get such material). His account of Iraq's chemical weapons use gets the context wrong (it was a desperate measure to stop Iranian breakthroughs, not to permit Iraqi advances) as well as many of the details. He seems to have done little detailed research: in all the footnotes and bibliography, one book in Arabic is cited (one of Saddam's—two of his other books are cited in French). Now that the United States has seized Saddam and the records of his regime, future accounts promise to be more thorough and reliable.

Patrick Clawson

Shaping the Current Islamic Reformation. Edited by B.A. Roberson. London: Frank Cass, 2003. 262 pp. $27.50, paper.

What "Islamic Reformation," the reader might correctly ask? Despite the eccentric title, this multi-author work has an unusually interesting assortment of essays. Here are three: Rudolph Peters traces the complex transformation of the Shari‘a (Islamic law) "from jurists' law to statute law." For centuries, the Shari‘a consisted of "open, discursive, and contractory" scholarly discussions of jurisprudence—not something readily applicable in a court of law. Peters shows the wrenching that this tradition underwent so as to fit the needs of a state system. He also notes the improbable but possible eventuality of a democratic Muslim state deciding the specifics of the Shari‘a via the electoral box.

Ann Elizabeth Mayer adopts the tripartite schema of Italian scholar Ugo Mattei, whereby the law is either traditional (small-scale, families as the basic unit, gender distinctions emphasized), political (law courts as the servants of the ruler), or professional (independent judiciary, rule of law). She establishes that much of the Muslim world suffers from political law; to escape it, Islamists are proposing an impossible return to the golden age of traditional law via the Shari‘a. In fact, she asserts—and is roundly seconded by the Iranian dissidents she cites—the real need is to move ahead to the rule of law.

Rodney Wilson reviews and explains the grudging policies of the Egyptian and Saudi governments to the emergence of Islamic financial institutions. So uneasy were the Egyptian authorities with this somewhat out-of-control phenomenon that they prevailed on a leading religious figure, Muhammad Sayyid at-Tantawi, to rule that interest paid by conventional banks does not constitute usury. Ironically, the Saudis have a hard time with Islamic banks because their whole system is supposedly Islamic already; creating explicitly Islamic institutions implies that the others are not.

Daniel Pipes

Syria's Terrorist War on Lebanon and the Peace Process. By Marius Deeb. New York: Palgrave, 2003. 285 pp. $49.95.

The title says it all: Deeb, an instructor of Middle East politics at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, has broken ranks with the pieties of his field and asserted that the Syrian regime is engaged in a "terrorist war" on Lebanon. Nor does he mince words in the text of his book:

"The ‘Alawi regime in Syria never had any intention of making peace with Israel." "Syria has deliberately kept Lebanon in an artificial domestic conflict at war with Israel for over a quarter of a century, for the interests of its own regime." Deeb even has the temerity to cast aspersions at the "latter-day post-Orientalist scholars on the Middle East," a declaration of intellectual war on his fellow specialists.

In a furious but meticulous, well-grounded, and powerful analysis, Deeb then establishes the above points, recounting the era 1974-2000, showing how in the course of this era, using many devious means, Hafez al-Assad gradually took over the once independent country of Lebanon and turned the "Switzerland of the Middle East" into a viper's den of extremism. It is not only an ugly tale but from an American viewpoint, an embarrassing one, as he shows how U.S. diplomats and politicians consistently misunderstood Assad's methods and goals.

Thoughts on two specifics: first, while Deeb devotes plentiful attention to the Israeli Labor governments' diplomacy with Syria, he flies through the Netanyahu years as though nothing took place then, when in fact, it witnessed some of the most dramatic developments in Syrian-Israeli relations. Second, even though the Libyan government has finally acknowledged responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Scotland in 1988, Deeb continues to believe that this atrocity "was linked to groups with strong ties to Syria and Iran," and sees the Libyan culprit as a "much needed punch bag to get Syria off the hook" and into the anti-Saddam Hussein coalition two years later.

Daniel Pipes

Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition. By Yohanan Friedman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 233 pp. $60.

What does Islam say about non-Muslims? The vast literature on this subject tends to wobble unsteadily on a narrow base of evidence—namely the Qur'an itself. Or as Friedman, professor of Islamic studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, delicately puts it, "some of the more substantial works on our topic are based exclusively on the few relevant Qur'anic verses and, surprisingly enough, have no recourse to the enormous amount of material in hadith, tafsir, and fiqh." The preference to focus on the Qur'an rather than the million or so hadiths (sayings and actions attributed to Muhammad) is certainly understandable, but for a true understanding of Muslim jurisprudence and ethos, the latter needs to be taken into account.

In a tour de force, Friedman reviews the hadith literature on a series of topics concerning pre-modern Muslim attitudes toward non-Muslims, including equality before the law, religious compulsion, apostasy, and interfaith marriages. The power of his analysis lies in the distinctions he finds between eras and madhhabs (schools of law). For example, he shows that whereas Muslims early on granted non-Muslims equal protection from murder, with time, only one of the four Sunni madhhabs held to this position. More broadly, he argues that this development over time signifies that "the idea of Islamic exaltedness gained the upper hand as the decisive factor in the determination of the law."

This theme of Islamic supremicism has key importance; in the words of one hadith, "Islam is exalted and nothing is exalted above it." With the most minor of exceptions, Friedman observes, Muslims throughout the pre-modern period "faced the other religions from the position of a ruling power, and enjoyed in relation to them a position of unmistakable superiority." To a great extent, this also defined their attitudes toward tolerance and coercion.

Daniel Pipes

The Tragedy of the Middle East. By Barry Rubin. New York: Cambridge Univ-ersity Press, 2002. 296 pp. $29.

The prolific Rubin, lately of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, has given us a brilliant but maddening book about one of the most contentious, controversial, and important topics in all of contemporary international politics: what is the matter with the Arabs?

The book is brilliant in several ways. First, Rubin is essentially right in his core analysis, which is that the dysfunctions of Arab politics are the fault of fearful rentier elites who have found a formula for preserving their power at their countries' expense. This success within failure works like a computer loop: as things get worse, elite demagogues manipulate elements of the sacred to blame outsiders for the people's woes, turning them back to these same elites whose policies produce only more woes.

It is brilliant, secondly, in the historical comparisons and metaphors it employs to get the basic thesis across. Rubin describes how a naked emperor manages to take the rhetorical offensive with such skill that he persuades the well-clothed that they are the ones running around in the nude. In a memorable passage, Rubin employs Churchill's famous metaphor about dictators riding on tigers to encapsulate the entire politics of the Arab world. More importantly, he compares Middle Eastern reactions to the fear of modernity with those of an earlier time in Europe to very useful effect.

And it is brilliant in some of the taxonomic formulations it provides. Rubin summarizes the Arab system as being composed of four legs: demagoguery, ideology, populism, and external conflict. A chapter on "The Regime's Success, the Nation's Disaster" impressively lays out the elements of the dysfunctional system in a comprehensive fashion offering no less than eleven elements: state control of the economy, state control of the intellectual means of production, communal solidarity around the ruling group, a well-organized benefits system for supporters, a well-organized punishment system for dissenters, redirecting the people's anger and frustration elsewhere, the building of national solidarity around the regime, the antidemocratic nature of the main opposition groups, the illegitimacy of the democratic alternative, the lack of class struggle, and the lack of accountability.

Rubin illustrates his argument with copious quotations from the region and uses case studies from Iraq, Syria, and Iran to deepen his observations. He also devotes effort to how Middle Eastern politics both interprets and confounds the policies of the U.S. government.

All that said, the book is maddening, too. It is repetitive and disorganized in places. Many flashes of insight are not developed. The economic side of the picture is insufficiently detailed. And, Rubin gives us little in the way of a practical guide for how the dysfunctions of Arab politics can be fixed. One hopes that this talented author's future books will go through a more thorough editing process.

Adam Garfinkle Washington, D.C.

The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change. By Muhammad Qasim Zaman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. 312 pp. $29.95.

Zaman's book might seem to have little to offer those interested in current Middle East issues. His focus is almost entirely on Pakistan and to a lesser extent India. And despite the title, he writes at length about the period of British rule, not more recent times, and deals primarily with one subgroup of ulema. But the great merit of The Ulama in Contemporary Islam is that Zaman happens to focus on the Deobandi, a group which in many ways inspired the Taliban and who run what are usually considered the most extreme, politicized, anti-Western schools (madrasas).

Zaman explores several paradoxes about the Deobandi. For one, their leaders insist simultaneously that the state must implement Islam in all it does while resisting state attempts to regulate its schools by claiming that education is a realm that the state should leave to religious bodies to carry out on their own. Then there are the reforms the British and Pakistani authorities have pressed on the madrasas (most especially in 1962), which have reduced the teaching of logic and philosophy on the theory that the schools should concentrate on religious subjects like Qur'an, hadith (sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad), and early Islamic history. Another paradox is that the Deobandi insist that the state adopt Shari‘a (Islamic law) as a set of codified and discrete laws drawn up with their guidance—when the Shari‘a is an ongoing discursive process that rejects state interference. The pattern is clear: the Deobandi adopt elements of Western practice, even where it conflicts with Islamic practice, if it magnifies their authority.

Disappointingly, Zaman provides little information about Deobandi influence on Islamists outside of South Asia, much less on Islamist terrorists. The international comparative perspective is of interest mostly for its discussion of Sayyid Abu'l-Hasan ‘Ali Nadwi (d. 1999), the most important Indian Muslim scholar of his generation whose criticism of Arab nationalism as anti-Islamic accorded well with the message of Islamist extremists.

Patrick Clawson

Unlocking the Middle East: The Writings of Richard Falk. Edited by Jean Allain. New York: Olive Branch Press, 2003. 306 pp. $18.95, paper.

Falk is a still-surviving totem of the 1960s leftist revolution in American academia and this collection might better be thought of as a tourist guide than a serious effort at comprehending the Middle East. The self-admiring author has a particular approach: he uses abstruse matters of international law to obfuscate the obvious moral problems faced by Arab states, and above all Palestinian politicians, in their conflict with Israel and the United States.

Under the careful hands of Jean Allain of the American University in Cairo, Unlocking the Middle East is more like a self-produced Festschrift in Falk's own honor. Furthering this impression, the book comes not from a distinguished academic or trade publisher, but from an obscure house, with a presentation suggesting a vanity press production, full of grandiosity and self-indulgence.

Thus, in the introduction, Allain records Falk's horrendously mistaken claim that in Vietnam, the conflict which made him famous, the United States was involved in trying "to reverse the outcome of a war waged against the French over the whole of Indochina, and then divid[ing] Vietnam." In this Alice-in-Wonderland view, the United States, invading southern Vietnam, had split the country and then committed aggression against North Vietnam.

It is no wonder, then, that Falk, having transferred his generous attentions from Southeast to western Asia, has written clogged, legalistic essays, republished here, in which he sympathetically discusses or quotes others on the Pakistani nuclear weapon, Palestinian terrorism, the Iranian Islamic state, and sundry additional symbols of anti-Western rage, with little or no new contribution or much nuance.

Allain describes Falk as a "New York Jew," so his mindless embrace of anti-Zionist extremism might prompt some to call him "self-hating." But Unlocking the Middle East suggests that the more accurate term would be "self-loving," as he is someone whose esteem for his own supposed brilliance outweighs any sense of responsibility to a personal and familial legacy or to the democratic culture that has fostered his work or that of others like him.

Stephen Schwartz

The ‘West', Islam and Islamism: Is Ideological Islam Compatible with Liberal Democracy? By Caroline Cox and John Marks. London: Civitas, 2003. 115 pp. £6, paper.

Cox and Marks bring to bear their considerable experience in studying Marxism in this study of contemporary Islamism and its clash with the West. The resulting book offers fresh insights into a topic that is fast becoming the most talked about issue in current Western journalism and scholarship.

The authors are at pains to distinguish between fundamentalist Muslims, or Islamists, and the majority of Muslims, finding that "it is very important to emphasize this distinction, in order to prevent the development of Islamophobia."

They provide valuable comparisons of Western, Islamist, and Marxists perspectives. When it comes to concepts of knowledge and truth, for example, they differentiate between Western principles of academic freedom on the one hand and Islamist and Marxist ideological approaches on the other; the latter consider certain basic principles sacred and beyond scrutiny.

On political and social structures, the authors argue that Islamists take advantage of Western societal freedoms to lambaste these societies but that "there is an asymmetry of criticism" in the opposite direction. The authors then scrutinize key aspects of traditional Islamic societies cherished by Islamists: Shari‘a (Islamic law), jihad, the low status of women, the dhimmi status of non-Muslim minorities (Jews and Christians, "peoples of the book," who have a protected but secondary status in Muslim-ruled countries), slavery, information control, and so forth.

One chapter provides a "Who's Who" of Islamist ideologues, including Mawdudi, Qutb, and bin Laden, followed by a consideration of the Islamist strategy via particular organizations, such as al-Muhajiroun in Britain and the international Hizb-ut-Tahrir. The Islamist attack on Western society comes into focus in terms of these organizations, especially in terms of specific Islamist tactics that the authors identify as deception.

Cox and Marks conclude their cutting-edge study with a clarion call: "Western societies must respond effectively to the challenge from ideological Islamists. To do so they need to use principles and analyses which have many parallels with the earlier conflict with ideological Marxism." The authors list a series of practical steps to monitor the activities of Islamist radicals, including "the active recruitment of moderate Muslims in the fight against Islamic extremism" and monitoring procedures in academic institutions so that academic freedom is maintained, especially where new university departments are established with Muslim funding and strings attached.

Peter Riddell London School of Theology

Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East. By Joel Beinin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 226 pp. $55 ($20, paper).

Beinin has produced a strange and difficult book, in large part due to the topic itself: the lives of working people and a chronological survey of Middle East labor movements from 1750 to the present. Surveys of the status and circumstances of the working class in Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Ottoman Balkans, North Africa, and the Maghrib are solid. While maintaining a clear affinity for a more heroic view of both Karl Marx and Edward Said than other subaltern social historians might offer, Beinin is less class-oriented than many a Marxist.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a dramatic increase in imperial control from Istanbul, but it was also a time of violent localized uprisings and increased Western involvement. Beinin presents these developments through the eyes of a changing peasant identity, and this is not without merit. But it is sometimes difficult to determine if it is the peasant or Beinin whose eyes we see through (e.g., the theme of communism as empowering).

The anecdotal glimpses Beinin offers into the lives of workers are vivid and interesting and enliven a dry topic. Egyptian peasant Fikri al-Khuli, who worked for the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company, turned communist, and later went to prison under Nasser, has a full chapter devoted to his 1950s memoir.

However, the book has an oddly selective coverage: for example, ignoring Lebanon, particularly the 1858 revolt of the northern Lebanese Maronite peasantry led by an apparently elected leader, Tanius Shahin, which receives but cursory mention. The revolt failed and expanded into an all-out religious war, engulfing the whole of Lebanon in violent reciprocal massacres. Napoleon III successfully intervened militarily and stopped the bloodshed. The European powers arbitrated an autonomous Lebanon and separate Christian sector, and nominal Ottoman rule was restored in 1861. In the wake of the peace, Beirut became a cultural center. For one as nostalgic about the hammer-and-tongs as Beinin, to write a book half on the peasantry and all but ignore a Lebanese peasant revolt (led by a blacksmith, no less) that proclaimed a republic and led, albeit bloodily, to enhanced autonomy for the Ottoman province and a cultural renaissance, leaves one perplexed. But then again, successful Western military interventions on behalf of oppressed civilian populations are perhaps not Beinin's favorite topic.

Jonathan Calt Harris

Zacarias, My Brother: The Making of a Terrorist. By Abd Samad Moussaoui, with Florence Bouquillat. Trans. from French by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. 143 pp. $14.95, paper.

In one of the more complete and insider accounts on the men of al-Qaeda, the elder brother of Zacarias Moussaoui, the "twentieth hijacker," tells his brother's story in a slim volume published by Noam Chomsky's and Howard Zinn's favorite press. The tale has a long run-up—grandparents, parents, childhood, teenage years—and a brief denouement, for the two brothers were close only until Zacarias went Wahhabi. Born in 1968, Zacarias experienced a childhood in which his parents (immigrants from Morocco) divorced; he moved from city to city, had no education in Arabic or Islam, and did quite well in school and socially. Still, he was increasingly alienated from French life ("they're all racists and fascists") to the point that racism became his obsession.

Partly to flee this and partly to learn English and become a successful businessman, Zacarias moved to London in 1991. Over the next four years, however, he fell in with a militant Islamic crowd. By 1995, he told his sister-in-law that she should not work outside the house and responded approvingly to a television husband hitting his wife ("Serves her right, that's what women need"). More generally, he had "become a stranger" to his family. On a visit to Morocco, he physically accosted the imam of a mosque in disagreement over his understanding of Islam. After an absence of several years, the next Abd Samad knew about his kid brother was his alleged complicity in the 9/11 atrocities.

Abd Samad draws some interesting conclusions from his experience. One is that Muslim children in the West need to learn their religion at home or they are susceptible to the extremist forces of the sort that seduced his brother. Another is that the Muslims with a public voice need to address the roots of the problem: "Though they condemn attacks and assassinations, they do not denounce Wahhabi ideologists … and Muslim Brotherhood ideologists."

[1] Reviewed in Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2003, p. 88-9. [2] Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 15th to 20th Centuries, University of California Press, 2000.

[Valin]

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