Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2024 -

The term tour de force is used too often in scholarly book reviews. This book, however, is truly a tour de force. It is also not for the faint of heart. At almost 1,000 pages, it is a daunting undertaking, even for a diligent reader. However, any reader interested in the global history of premodern Islamic state formation or in the diversity of Muslim belief and practice will not consider the undertaking wasted. This is because the book's narrative voice is clearly indebted to decades of groundbreaking research as well as to decades of undergraduate and graduate teaching. A History of the Muslim World is not a textbook--the story it tells is too erudite and idiosyncratic for that--but it is not an academic monograph either. The absence of the traditional scholarly paraphernalia--a bibliography or more than a handful of notes--or hectoring attempts at persuasion disqualify it from that category. The book is instead something unique: an invitation to take advantage of a lifetime of scholarship, sometimes "old-fashioned" as Cook (Princeton Univ.) himself notes, packaged for consumption by readers of every background and interest.Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.

This groundbreaking work charts new territory in gender studies. In Between Banat Shomali (Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County) "develops [a] queer Arab critique grounded ... in attentiveness to the between: desires between bodies, bodies between nations, words between languages, nations between one another" (p. 3). In chapter 1 she examines how the character Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights limits discourses for Arab American authors, hedged in by heteronormativity, assimilation, and state violence. Chapter 2 hearkens back to the golden age of Egyptian cinema. While Shomali acknowledges that the stories end in heterosexual pairings, she argues that dance within homosocial environments, homoerotic desire, and close female relationships dominate the space of the films. Chapters 3 and 4 examine queerness in fiction and non-fiction through novels and essay collections, respectively. The concluding chapter calls upon readers to literally "smash" or "grind" the patriarchy with a look to the future through a critical reading of the film Bar Bahar (2016), an examination of the feminist Nol Collective fashion line, and a discussion of some of the publications from Maamoul press. The film, the fashion line, and the press all "imagine transnational Arab communities and collectives [and] reject respectability" (p. 172).Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers, advanced undergraduates through faculty, and professionals.

Suciyan (Ludwig-Maximilian Univ., Germany) addresses three linked and crucial topics: the historiography of Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century; the history of that empire as it has been distorted by the neglect of minority-held archives and the consequent, persistent misinterpretation of key events; and the problems that any responsible historiography encounters when it relies solely on the archives located in the capital of a ruling state, thereby neglecting provincial sources and minority peoples. Recently, Henry Shapiro's The Rise of the Western Armenian Diaspora in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (CH, May'23, 60-2692) took an important step in showing that historians of multiethnic states must attend to the voices and archives of all subjects. With exemplary expertise, Suciyan demonstrates how consideration of archival documents composed by provincial subjects alters readers' understanding of the behavior of the Ottoman government and of Armenian elites. She demonstrates that the acclaimed reforms of the Tanzimat were in fact exercises in centralization of the state's authority, which enabled more thorough repression and abuse in the provinces. A deeply innovative contribution to the study of the Ottomans and a challenge to the way historical research is conducted on all multiethnic empires.Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

This exceptionally well-integrated collection of essays about the October 1973 War (also referred to as the Yom Kippur or Ramadan War) and its consequences offers an excellent overview of Arab-Israeli politics prior to October 7, 2023, 50 years later. William B. Quandt (emer., politics, Univ. of Virginia), who served on Henry Kissinger's National Security Council staff in 1973, argues in the introduction that the war could have been avoided had Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir been less intransigent and if Kissinger had taken Egyptian President Anwar Sadat more seriously in earlier discussions of a major diplomatic initiative. As it was, the conduct of the war led to the breakdown of detente with the Soviet Union and a nuclear alert because Kissinger had given the Israelis too much slack in obeying the ceasefire negotiated by the superpowers. Several contributing authors question Kissinger's credibility, and Quandt still wonders what really lay behind Sadat's refusal of an earlier ceasefire proposal, given his distrust of the Syrian ally and his control of Egypt's professionalized military. An earlier ending might have preempted any use of the Arab oil weapon. The ensuing peace process unfortunately excluded the Palestinians, also extensively analyzed in the present volume. A must-read!Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty; professionals.