Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2022 -

'Uthman ibn 'Affan was praised as an early convert to Islam, the pious third caliph who expanded Islamic rule and standardized the Qur'an. But as Keany (Westmont College) retells in this excellent biography, the caliphate unraveled after achieving initial successes. Chapter 5 ("Crisis") delineates complaints under the rubrics of relatives, revenue, religion, and responses, culminating in rebellion and regicide. 'Uthman's murder in 656 CE ignited the great fitna, the first Islamic civil war, leading to the Umayyad dynasty and the Shi'a/Sunni split. Keany reconstructs 'Uthman's story from Islamic and external sources, showing how debates about his legacy and the "fear of fitna" echoed throughout Muslim history, informing historiography, heresiology, and theology up to the present, including, for example, debates about Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and the Arab Spring in 2011. With professional discipline, Keany demonstrates the difficulty of reconstructing and assessing the early Islamic period, yet she writes in a style that is both academic and highly readable. She proves that 'Uthman was a crucial figure by virtue of his accomplishments, his failures, and his continuing relevance. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in controversy that shaped and continues to shape the Islamic world.Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty.

Writing a comprehensive history of the Ottoman Empire is a daunting task at which few have succeeded. Even more difficult is striking a balance that meets the needs of both scholars and students. Worringer (Univ. of Guelph, Canada) has produced such a book. Written in a fine narrative style that is not bogged down by minutia, this volume is enjoyable even for casual readers. Worringer argues that Ottoman flexibility and pragmatism were the keys to the empire's success. Such an approach allows the author to present a wide-ranging political, social, and cultural history. She incorporates recent scholarship on topics such as gender, sexuality, and ecology, which makes this work stand out from other histories of the empire. Notable is her section on animals in Ottoman life. Another significant aspect of the book is the 92 images and 29 maps, which bring the text to life. Finally, Worringer does not shy away from discussing the Armenian genocide, including a textbox of a survivor's testimony, maps, and images to highlight this subject that is often overlooked in Ottoman textbooks.Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty.

Bread and Freedom, whose title is inspired by the slogan that emerged during the mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square, is an outstanding scholarly study of the abortive Egyptian revolution of 2011 and the emergence two years later of an even more repressive, counterrevolutionary regime. El-Ghobashy (liberal studies, New York Univ.) relies heavily on published documents and draws on Charles Tilly's analysis of social movements, particularly of "revolutionary situations," but she also demonstrates a mastery of works by a host of other theorists. She shows that revolutionary situations have many contingencies and that the course of events produces outcomes that cannot be anticipated, concluding with a warning about "how formidable it is to construct democratic accountability from scratch" (p. 265). This is an essential work for students of contemporary Egypt and the politics of the Arab world generally and also for those with a comparative focus on revolution, social movements, or democratization. Though the author fails to ask some questions, this book's rich analysis should induce many scholars to read it from cover to cover and to return to it again and again.Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

In this original exploration of how war in Syria and Lebanon over the last century contributed to enduring psychological instabilities in these countries, Tsacoyianis (Univ. of Memphis) offers a valuable contribution to the study of the modern Middle East. In her investigations into the psychological toll of conflict in the Middle East, the most rewarding sections reflect on how people's experience of war frames their trauma both spiritually and religiously. This necessarily infuses a study that wishes to contribute new ways to theorize conflict with useful references to social, cultural, and medical historical methodologies. Tsacoyianis's book opens new channels into disability and trauma studies, demonstrating a deep history of mental illness in Lebanon and Syria since at least the 1890s. Such foundational traumas necessarily need inclusion in any attempt to heal such societies. In what can be read as a sincere engagement in peace and conflict studies that demands an investment in appreciating diversity and inclusion when writing histories of conflict in the Middle East, this book successfully opens new avenues of research that ethically engage social justice and disability rights' themes.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

In this well-written scholarly work, Gordon (Council on Foreign Relations), who previously served as White House Coordinator for the Middle East (2013-15), ably demonstrates the recurrent failure of US intervention in pursuit of its "regime change temptation" in the Middle East and North Africa, and indeed how initial declarations of victory eventually make way for unanticipated, catastrophic consequences. Seven case-study chapters, which the author calls "tales of hubris, overreach, and magical thinking" (p. 6), make up the bulk of the volume, starting with Iran and continuing with Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and Syria. While the basic thrust of the book is hardly new, Gordon presents it in a readable way and--particularly in relation to the last four case studies, when the book sometimes takes on the character of a memoir--from the perspective of a policy maker during the Obama administration, which got pulled into catastrophic intervention despite its original intentions to end conflicts. Losing the Long Game is essential reading for students of contemporary Middle Eastern history and politics and of US foreign policy. It should be even more important for policy makers and influencers if they are to avoid future disasters.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

This latest contribution to Middle East/Central Asian history from Manz (Tufts Univ.) is an invaluable overview of mobile peoples who have shaped Asia for more than 1,500 years. Stressing the need to not treat the nomadic and settled peoples over this period as being in conflict, this important intervention recalls a rich history of cooperation and synthesis that ultimately accounts for the emergence of the cultural, political, and economic dynamics of the Islamic world. A must-read volume for anyone looking to explore Middle Eastern history, Manz's treatment of the interactions between nomads and sedentary societies demands that readers recognize the continuation of this process through the 20th century, a continuity that upsets conventional treatments of this complex history. This book constitutes an invaluable corrective that restores the history of nomadic peoples in the Middle East and Central Asia to the place it deserves. Comprehensively engaging with the integral roles Turks, Mongols, and Arab Bedouins command in shaping the histories of a vast tract of humanity inhabiting the lands between Afghanistan and Syria, this entirely readable work will inform students of the important role mobility plays in shaping human history more generally.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.

This is the best book yet published on the ongoing civil war in Syria. Vignal (Ecole Normale Superieure, France) documents how the war may result in Syria's collapse as a state, further suggesting that even if the current borders remain largely intact, the regionalization that has occurred has yielded a complete reorganization of the state and the emergence of different centers of power, industry, and trade in cities, towns, and agglomerations in the borderlands. Many changes result from the mass movement of people to other countries. As of 2019, more than 3,000,000 Syrians had fled to Turkey, more than 1,000,000 to Lebanon and Jordan, about 300,000 to Egypt, and roughly 240,000 to Iraq. Vignal postulates that the war in Syria "calls into question the ... Westphalian model," which relies on controlling territory and borders for authority, legitimacy, and sovereignty. This model is central to the theory and practice of international relations. Ultimately, the Syrian civil war suggests that the center of gravity concept may have "greater explanatory power for the relationship between the state and its borders in the contemporary Middle East." This is a major revision of current scholarship dealing with Syria and the entire Middle East.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.