Middle Eastern Studies

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Apr 24, 2006 - The answer to the quandary of how to put right what has gone so ..... revolutionary period in Iran is a veritable tour de force. He believes that the.
Middle Eastern Studies

ISSN: 0026-3206 (Print) 1743-7881 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fmes20

Book reviews To cite this article: (2006) Book reviews, Middle Eastern Studies, 42:2, 335-349, DOI: 10.1080/00263200500433774 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00263200500433774

Published online: 24 Apr 2006.

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Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2, 335 – 349, March 2006

Book Reviews

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From the Syrian Land to the States of Syria and Lebanon Thomas Philipp and Christoph Schumann (eds) Wu¨rzburg, Orient-Institut der DMG Beirut, Ergon Verlag, 2004, Pp.vi þ 366, index, ISBN 3 89913 353 6 The articles in this volume are the result of the third conference on Bilad al-Sham held in Erlangen Germany. The first and second conferences and their subsequent publications focused on the modern historical experience and the administrative, economic and physical integration and fragmentation of the region. The present volume explores the change of identities and loyalties and the emergence of modern political ideologies in Bilad al-Sham, with special emphasis on the states of Syria and Lebanon. The articles examine these developments in the historical context of changing regional and global power relations and the emergence of new social classes and demonstrate the complexity and fluidity of local, religious, national and political identities and affiliations. As was the case in the two previous books, this volume is based on the premise that the area, bordered by the Taurus Mountains in the north, the Syrian desert in the east, Aqaba and the Sinai Peninsula in the south and the Mediterranean Sea in the west, comprised a geographical entity distinct from the neighbouring regions of Anatolia, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula and Egypt. Such a premise is not new; it had already emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially among Christian intellectuals in Beirut. The idea was adopted at the turn of the century by French colonial groups that used the term ‘‘La Syrie inte´grale’’ – Geographical Syria – to justify their demand for French control over that region. Indeed, some attempted to give a political meaning to the geographical concept (King Faisal and his Arab government in Damascus, and much later, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad), or an ideological meaning (Anton Sa’adeh and his Partie Populaire Syrienne). The imposition of new political borders by Britain and France after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the partition of the region into four states – Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine and Jordan – and the emergence of Arab nationalism as the dominant ideology challenged any notion of Greater Syria as a distinct cultural or social and economic entity. Indeed, it can be argued that certain areas within Geographical Syria had close economic and social ties with their neighbouring regions, whether northern Syria and Aleppo with Anatolia or the Bedouin tribes in the Syrian desert with Mesopotamia and the northern Arabian Peninsula. Nevertheless, the hypothesis on which this volume is based – that many of the developments and trends, the results of which can be seen today, were rooted in the early modern period, when territorial borders had not yet been imposed – is useful, as it allows a general overview of cultural, social and economic changes that took place in the region as a whole. ISSN 0026-3206 Print/1743-7881 Online/06/020335-15 ª 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/00263200500433774

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336 Book Reviews Another theme demonstrated convincingly in many of the articles in the volume is that the Ottoman Empire remained the essential political framework as long as it lasted. Many political, cultural, social and economic developments that originated in the Ottoman Empire would indeed continue in the mandated states. The articles are written by young as well as by well-established scholars and reflect a wide range of subjects and approaches. In such a collection there is always the danger of a lack of coherence. To a certain extent, the division of the 21 articles into five groups, each with a common theme, has overcome such a pitfall. The first group of articles (Thomas Philipp, Fruma Zachs, Stefan Weber, Jens Hanssen, Eugene Rogan) explores the legacy of the Ottoman Empire by demonstrating its relevancy despite the extensive political, social and economic changes that took place. Philipp and Zachs show that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries strong local formations and identities developed without questioning the authority of the central government. Toward the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the power of the imperial centres once again became strongly felt in a variety of aspects. Weber and Hanssen argue this case with the example of urban planning and architecture in Damascus and Beirut. Rogan demonstrates that students in the new secular schools, though aware of their different ethnic, regional and religious origins, joined in a common identity as Ottoman citizens which remained dominant until the end of the First World War. The second group (Stefan Winter, Itzchak Weismann, James Gelvin) examines religion and the change of culture, focusing on the role of religion in the transformation and reinterpretation of identities. Winter analyses the pragmatic way in which the Ottomans dealt with Islamic sects such as the Alawites. The importance of religion as a means for political change is emphasized by Weismann and Gelvin, who argue that the various religious movements not only reflected the political trends of social reforms, state formation and national identity, but actively promoted them within the general public. The third group (Stefan Wild, Najwa al-Qattan, Birgit Schaebler, Abdallah Hanna) studies society and state building. The construction of society and state and the relation between both depended on more than large, overarching ideologies and world-views. Wild traces the acceptance and even the legitimacy of the border between Syria and Lebanon, once perceived as a colonial artifact. AlQattan uses the example of a decisive event, the First World War, which touched all layers of society and its collective commemoration, helping to create a common national identity, while Hanna discusses diminishing traditional attachments and identities. The fourth group (Ussama Makdisi, Maurus Reinkowski, Carol Hakim) deals with the special case of Lebanon in the aftermath of the Egyptian occupation and the end of the Imarah, when the Ottomans were faced for the first time with the task of administrating Mount Lebanon directly. Makdisi and Reinkowski point out various ambivalent strategies, from a powerful urge to suppress unrest and establish control to the perceived necessity of conceding regional autonomy. The ways of dealing with the experience of communal violence differed radically between the local population and central government. According to Hakim, the Ottoman Empire remained the decisive political frame of reference for the Lebanese political elite right up until the beginning of the First World War.

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Book Reviews 337 The fifth group of articles (Fred Lawson, Nadine Me´ouchy, Michael Provence, Dalal Arsuzi-Elamir, Khairia Kasmieh, Christoph Schumann) discusses the resistance to France and the emergence of radical nationalism in Syria. Lawson, Me´ouchy and Provence show that it took several years before religious, local and ethnic traditions and identities were integrated into one national independence movement. With the rise of a distinct class of intellectuals during the 1930s, resistance was radicalized and led to the formulation of comprehensive nationalist ideologies. Kasmieh, Elamir and Schumann argue that the League of National Action, the Ba’ath Party and the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party were the carriers of these ideologies. In such a short review, one cannot do justice to all the articles. I chose to concentrate on a few articles to demonstrate the wide range of topics explored. Philipp’s article, which deals with Bilad al-Sham during the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, serves as an introduction to the whole collection. Its first part examines the phenomenon of sub-regions – ‘‘locally integrated regions’’ – within Greater Syria, while the second part is a literary semantic analysis of the changing terminology used by chroniclers and historians for the region in that period. In both parts, Philipp contends that despite the diversity of its sub-regions, some of which enjoyed local autonomy, Bilad al-Sham was firmly embedded in the general frame of reference of the legitimacy of the Ottoman Empire. The 1831 Egyptian occupation and later the centralization policy of the Ottomans during the Tanzimat helped to integrate the regions into one distinct entity, termed ‘‘Bilad alSham’’ or ‘‘Suriyya,’’ by creating, for the first time, a strong central administration. As far as it goes, one might accept this argument, but Philipp goes one step further, to claim that the region ‘‘came to be recognized as a cultural, political entity in its own right.’’ Such an argument ignores the deep religious and sectarian divisions, especially between the Muslims and Christians in the aftermath of the massacres of thousands of Christians in Mount Lebanon and Damascus in 1860. Furthermore, the rapid growth of European economic activity on the coast increased the tension between the coastal area and the hinterland, as demonstrated in the case of Beirut and Damascus. Rogan is less concerned with establishing that Bilad al-Sham was a unique entity, and maintains that until the outbreak of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire continued to serve as a major source of identity for most of the population in the region. He does this through an examination of the relationship between education and ideology, focusing on the prestigious Ottoman state high school in Damascus, Maktab Anbar, from which many Arab Nationalists graduated. He looks at the memoirs of two of its graduates – Fakhri al-Barudi and Salih al-Tall – and refutes the claims made later by Arab Nationalists of a rupture between Arabs and Turks. He argues persuasively that in fact the school served as powerful tool in a forging a common Ottoman identity for Arabs and Turks alike in the last decades of the Hamidian era. Qattan explores the way in which collective memory is forged and subsequently shapes national identity. In this thought-provoking article she uses the memories of the First World War among the local populations of Syria and Lebanon to argue her case. Her sources are the cultural products, whether theatre, cinema or literature. She takes the Ottoman Turkish term ‘‘Safarbarlik’’, which originally referred to wartime mobilization, and shows how it was transformed in the Syrian collective memory to be associated with famine, death and misery. That interpretation was to be appropriated by the Arab Nationalists (in fact, also by the Lebanese Nationalists),

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338 Book Reviews who integrated it into their own discourse. One hopes that more such research will be conducted in this field. Hakim examines the changes in identity perception among the secular Maronite elites but, in contrast to Qattan, ignores the role of the traumatic experiences of the Christian population in Mount Lebanon during the First World War in reinforcing their claim for an independent Greater Lebanon separated from Syria. She presents the competing identities among the Maronite elites in the late Ottoman period – Ottomanism, Syrianism, Arabism and Lebanonism – as a reflection of changes within the Ottoman Empire and the region as a whole. She rightly stresses the role played by Lebanese immigrants in Egypt and France in the emergence of Lebanese nationalism. Hakim’s main argument, however, is that the demand of the Maronite elites to establish an independent Greater Lebanon crystallized only a few months before its actual establishment in September 1920. She does not sufficiently distinguish between the process whereby a distinct Lebanese identity was formed, which culminated in the demand for a Greater Lebanon, and the special regional and international circumstances that arose from 1918 to 1920 – the Anglo-French rivalry and the French confrontation with Faisal’s Arab government in Damascus – that enabled the Maronites to realize their national aspirations. Moreover, she ignores the pivotal role played by the Maronite church, especially by Patriarch Hawayik, in the establishment of Greater Lebanon. Both Me´ouchy and Provence examine rural resistance in the Syrian countryside to the French mandate. While Me´ouchy gives a general overview of this phenomenon from 1918 to 1926, Provence focuses on the uprising around Damascus during the Great Syrian Revolt in 1925–26. Me´ouchy, justifiably, sees this armed rural resistance to the French as a reaction of the people in the Syrian countryside to the rapid changes in their social and economic life and to the threat to their cultural values as a result of French control rather than the outcome of spreading nationalist feeling. She notes the special relations between Shahabandar’s Hizb al-Sha’ab and the Druzes, but more emphasis should have been laid on the way in which the urban nationalist elites, especially in Damascus, exploited the social, economic and religious tensions to mobilize the rural communities against the French. Provence’s article complements that of Me´ouchy by providing details of the people behind the names of the rebels and their leaders. In their introduction, the co-editors set as one of their goals the presentation of the considerable progress made in the last 15 years in historical research of the region. This volume does indeed meet this challenge and makes an important contribution to the scholarship on Bilad al-Sham. Meir Zamir Culture, Civilization and Humanity Tarek Heggy London, Frank Cass, 2003, Pp.391, index, ISBN 0 7146 8434 1 (paper) Tarek Heggy, the well-known Egyptian senior executive, business manager, prolific writer and intellectual, has compiled a wide selection from his many books and essays in this English language collection of translations from the Arabic original,

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Book Reviews 339 offering a most enlightening introduction to the current Arab intellectual debate. This is a debate of a disheartened and dispirited intellectual class that has far more questions and doubts than solutions to the Arab predicament. Neither the Arab predicament nor the crisis of the intellectuals is anything new. Fouad Ajami wrote about the first more than a quarter of a century ago and Anwar Abd al-Malik about the second almost half a century ago. The origins of this particular debate go back even further, to the early 19th century. So what is new? What is new is the depth of despair. It would appear that all the solutions have been tried, from multi-party democratic experiments to totalitarian oppression, from liberalism and capitalism to authoritarianism and socialism, from secular nationalism to Islamic fundamentalism. The answer to the quandary of how to put right what has gone so woefully wrong has yet to be found. Everything has been tried over the last two centuries. All the same, as the latest Arab Human Development Reports have revealed, there is not much light at the end of the tunnel. Some of the essays in Tarek Heggy’s book were originally written twenty years ago. But they could just as well have been written yesterday. Very little, if anything has changed for the better, particularly since much of the rest of the world has surged ahead at a breathtaking pace in this age of high technology, leaving the Arabs stranded even further behind. Though Heggy relates to the Arabs in general, in practice he refers almost entirely to the Egyptian case, which he, of course, knows intimately. The book is thus divided into four Egypto-centric parts: 1) Essays on the Values of Progress; 2) Essays on Egypt’s Cultural Dilemma; 3) Essays on Contemporary Egyptian Problems: and 4) Essays on the Imperative Fall of Socialism: A Critique of Marxism. Most of the book is composed of short essays, but there are two major essays, both in terms of length and comprehensiveness which adequately sum up the general thrust of Heggy’s ideas and his scathing critique of what he calls the defects of ‘the Arab mindset.’ The first major essay is on ‘The Most Important Values of Progress’. Heggy argues very convincingly that unless Third World societies internalize the values of progress, such as respect for time, a strong work ethic, education geared to promoting creativity and critical minds, rather than the idle transmission of knowledge by rote, encouraging people to strive for excellence and to develop a culture of quality, they will never escape their relative backwardness. Such values, however, would not become the accepted norm in these societies unless they developed liberal democratic forms of government that would genuinely promote pluralism and freedom of thought and expression, and a liberal free market economy. Without all of these there was no chance for the creative values of progress to develop and flourish. The second major essay ‘What is to be Done?’ was originally written in 1986. First and foremost, Egypt had to enhance freedoms and consolidate democracy, reduce its economic and political dependence, and also streamline its bloated and ruinous bureaucracy. But Heggy has no prescription for how exactly these lofty ideals should actually be implemented. Indeed, none of them has been realized despite the twenty years that have elapsed since this essay was originally written. Heggy is a latter day exemplar of the ultimate secular Westernizer and Egyptian territorial nationalist, (the two naturally go hand in hand), following in the footsteps of Egypt’s greatest intellectuals of the modern era, such as Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid or Taha Husayn. For Heggy, Islamic fundamentalism is an anathema, though,

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340 Book Reviews strangely enough, he generally avoids actually saying so. He makes occasional explicit or implicit critical references to religion and to fundamentalism, but he refrains from any constructed frontal assault on the fundamentalists in the name of the secularism in which he himself obviously believes. He criticizes the ‘irresponsible use by some’ of the ‘distasteful expression’ referring to the ‘cultural invasion’ of the West, which, he says, coincided with the emergence of a ‘regressive trend’ and equally ‘regressive ideas which were totally incompatible with the age and which rejected the notion that human civilization is an amalgam of many different civilizations and cultures.’ As for the men of religion, ‘no society should allow its affairs to be run by clerics who are, by their nature and regardless of the religion to which they belong, opposed to progress.’ The collection includes a brief article (less than four pages) on ‘Religious Extremism in Egypt’, where Heggy deplores sectarian violence between Muslims and Copts and urges religious figures to contain the problem rather than fan the flames of extremism, as many of them do. Elsewhere he appeals for ‘national peace and harmony’ between Muslims and Copts since only these would promise any hope of salvation from ‘the abhorrent storm of fundamentalism that has raged for so long’ in the Middle East. The above is a selection of negative, for the most part rather oblique, references to the Islamic fundamentalist trend. But these are few and far between in the book’s over 350 pages. The entire fourth section of the book, 100 pages long, is devoted to an anachronistic critique of Marxism. One of its key pieces is on ‘The Revealing Light of Democracy and the Darkness of the Single Opinion,’ which is a deservedly devastating attack on the Nasserist regime and its Marxist and pseudo-Marxist inspiration. This essay, indeed this entire section, should have been redirected at the totalitarianism of the fundamentalists. It is they who profess no less of a ‘darkness of the single opinion,’ and who are at present an immeasurably more vibrant and relevant threat to Heggy’s worldview than the inanimate corpses of Nasserism and Marxism. Heggy repeatedly draws inspiration from countries in South East Asia and Latin America, which have made impressive achievements in the incorporation of the values of progress that he so eloquently extols. But on the question of whether their success, where the Arabs have failed, has anything to do with religion Heggy remains silent. His circumspection on this score is in itself a disheartening reflection of the Arab predicament, both intellectual and political. Asher Susser Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism Timur Kuran Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2004, Pp.194, index, ISBN 0 691 11510 9 With oil prices hitting $70/barrel and Gulf economies flush with liquidity, loans compliant with Islamic principles are one of the biggest growth areas in international investment banking in the last few years. Contrary to expectations, it is not in Saudi Arabia, the biggest Gulf economy, or Iran, the Islamic republic, or Turkey, the Muslim world’s largest economy, where one can find the banks with the largest volume of Islam compliant transactions, but the US Citibank. Citigroup is reported

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Book Reviews 341 to have made some $6bn of transactions structured and marketed in conformance with Islamic laws in the past ten years. Western banks have been rushing to develop products with Islamic credentials in a bid for a share of the lucrative Gulf financial markets, flush with oil earnings. The French bank, BNP Paribas, was named the Best Islamic Finance House in 2004. The US stock market index services, Dow Jones, has produced several indices tracking ‘Islamic stocks’ (those not involved in producing or offering alcohol, pork products, gambling etc) with six Islamic experts on its advisory board to judge companies according to Islamic principles. Given these developments, Timur Kuran’s aptly titled and serious study addressing the questions of ‘what is Islamic economics?’ comes at the right time. His approach is first to consider Islamic economics in the wider context of how all religions approach economic issues. In his earlier article ‘Fundamentalisms and the Economy’ in the collection of essays edited by M. E. Marty and S. Appleby, Fundamentalisms and the State, Vol.3 of the Fundamentalism Project, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1993, Kuran notes that all religions have a ‘common aspiration to ground economic prescriptions in normative religious sources’ (p.290) and in this way present a moral critique of secular economics that see market forces as primary determinants of economic activity. This stance originates in the belief that the ills of modern civilization are rooted in moral degeneration, greed, excessive consumption, and a lack of regard for social justice. There is the example of the Buddhist monks who aim to ‘liberate the individual from the shackles of materialism’ (p.291); Protestant Christian economics see competition as a prime culprit in this moral degeneration; an egalitarian streak is found in all religious scriptures on economic matters, with Christian liberation theology taking this to its farthest extent and in Islam there is the tradition of alms-giving, or zakat, that bids every individual to give one-fortieth of his income to the poor. The second point he makes is that these fundamentalist critiques of secular economics take different forms depending on the social and political circumstances. In the USA, Christian fundamentalists are mostly pro-market and anti-state, mainly because the state has been in the hands of secular forces; in India, Hindu economics tends to be protectionist in its outlook, resisting the liberalization of the Indian economy to defend the interests of the mostly Hindu middle-class shopkeepers, professionals and civil servants; in Turkey, the Islamic movement is pro-market and broadly in favour of EU membership as a tactical stance to weaken the hold of the secular army and elite. But what is common about all these fundamentalist economics, whether Islamic, Christian, Hindu or Buddhist is twofold. One is ‘their commitment to the idea of unchanging fundamentals on which a just economy (my italics) must rest, not simply their insistence on giving religion a role in economics. (p.293). The second is their insistence on the inseparability of economics from other realms of human activity. Contrary to neoclassical economics, they see economics as being developed in the context of social, moral and political concerns and ‘most important to be subordinate to religious principles’ (p.299). This broad approach is useful because it helps demystify Islamic economics. Given the political obsession with Islamic fundamentalism today, so many writings on Islam tend to separate Islam as if it came from outer space, a unique set of beliefs foreign to all other religions. For example, there is nothing particularly Islamic about favouring profit–loss sharing over interest in finance, this practice predates Islam back to the

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342 Book Reviews seventh century and today it is the basis on which venture capitalists operate. However, perhaps what is unique about Islamic economics is that it has been developed and attempted to be put into practice more than the other fundamentalist economics. In Chapter 4, The Genesis of Islamic economics, in Islam & Mammon, Kuran traces the historical conditions in which Islamic economics emerged. Contrary to those who would argue that Islamic economics has existed since the beginning of Islam, the author argues convincingly that this is a twentieth century phenomenon. He places the origin of Islamic economics in the partition of India and the search by Muslim leaders for a distinct state of their own. Sayyi Abul-ala Mawdudi (1903– 79), the founder of the Jamaat-I Islami party first coined the word ‘Islamic economics’ in his voluminous writings that sought to define a broad Islamic orthopraxy. His aim, like Christian fundamentalists in the USA who came later, was to try to reverse the push of religion from the public space into the private domains – a movement that he saw as reducing the influence of Islam on Muslims. Essentially his was a response to rapid modernisation that came in the twentieth Century. While some Muslim countries like Ataturk’s Turkey or Reza Shah’s Iran chose to privatize Islam and adopt secular modernism, others such as Pakistan’s elite, today’s Malaysia, chose a Muslim modernism that pursued Westernization without recognizing that there was a conflict between Islam and Westernisation. Other societies, mainly in the Gulf, chose conservative modernism, mostly rejecting Westernization and resisting cultural and institutional change. Mawdudi, whom Kuran classifies as a reformist Islamist, sought a religious revival that promotes modernization without Westernization. What is Weternization? In a book that was banned under Pahlavi rule, the Iranian critic Jalal Al-e Ahmad talked of Westoxification as widespread social alienation due to contacts with the West; Turkey’s new Islamists critique the consumer culture and individualism as breeding disappointment and social alienation. Other contributors to Islamic economics were the Egyptian, Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), and Iraqi Mohammad Baqir Sadr, a Shia leader whose son currently leads a radical Shia movement in Iraq. However, the panIslamist movement that peaked in the 1950s did not develop these ideas much, being more interested in political aims. The second watershed in Islamic economics came with the Gulf oil boom in the 1970s when the Gulf ruling families flush with petro-dollars were moved to strengthen their political authority and legitimacy by promoting Islamic causes and Islamic banking. The first Islamic bank offering a range of services was set up in Dubai in 1975. Although around 50 countries now have Islamic banks, their growth was not rapid. By the mid-1980s, only 38 per cent of Iranian bank assets were deemed Sharia compliant and took the form of murabaha and musharaka, the two versions of profit–loss sharing; in Pakistan this was only 14 per cent. The author delves at length into whether interest per se is un-Islamic, and seems to think the debate is unresolved. What the Qur’an does ban unambiguously is the pre-Islamic Arabian institution of riba, where the debt would double each time a borrower defaulted, pushing defaulters into enslavement. The author also argues that although the modern Islamic banks are touted as Islamic creations, they have more in common with modern commercial banks: ‘medieval Islamic civilization produced no organizations that could pool thousands of people’s funds, administer them collectively, and survive the death of their

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Book Reviews 343 managers’ p.13. He gives the example of the first forerunner of Islamic banking, the Mit Ghamr Savings Bank, established in Egypt in 1963. This bank was modelled after West Germany’s local savings banks, paying no interest on deposits and charging none on loans but based its earnings on profit–loss sharing. In the 1960s, although Mit Ghamr was given a religious identity as a public relations exercise to attract pious Egyptian farmers savings, there was no attempt to disguise that it was modelled on the West German banks. Today Islamic clerics who vet Islamic banks make no such connections. Yet, the dividends paid to the Islamic bank’s depositors, are ‘no more Islamic than an ordinary bond fund in Korea or Switzerland’ (p.17). It is no wonder that ‘Western’ international banks have so little problem in offering Islamic banking services! Hence while there is nothing very Islamic about Islamic banking, the second important feature of Islamic economics, zakat, suffers from problems of implementation and effectiveness in achieving any real redistribution. Zakat, Islam’s answer to income redistribution, was a voluntary affair when the Muslim community lived in Mecca in the early years of the emergence of Islam in the seventh century. But it became a state-enforced and administered feature when the community moved to Medina and began to expand rapidly. However only two decades after prophet Mohammad’s death, the zakat system had collapsed, beset by leadership rivalries in the Muslim community. In modern times, Kuran surveys two major attempts to put this into practice at a federal level in Pakistan and Malaysia. In Pakistan, Kuran quotes a critical report by the Zakat Administration reviewing the performance of the funds that never amounted to much in the first place, that concludes the state administered zakat system has had little impact on inequality and that ‘people are losing faith not only in the system but also in the belief that Islam offers a better economic order’ (p.24). In addition to problems with administration, zakat suffered from widespread evasion. Kuran cites ‘a 1978 survey of middle-class Muslims in Karachi showed that while almost all had heard of zakat, fewer than a quarter made regular payments themselves’ (p.23). As for the system in Malaysia which mainly operates in the agricultural sector but which has come to be seen as just another tax; it also is widely resented because of the impression that the funds are not properly directed and are frittered away by corruption. Given these problematic issues of the two most well defined features of Islamic economics, Kuran asks if it has a future. He goes on to argue that despite the ‘myth that reforms undertaken in the name of Islam represent radical departures from established economic practice is unlikely to be sustained much longer . . . , they can be recognized as ineffective without causing the abandonment of basic objectives such as the elimination of interest. ‘People do not modify their ideologies at the first sign of conflict with reality’ (p.35). He then goes on to draw a scenario – that we are currently seeing in Iran, that sees Islamic governments obsessively continuing to try to create the perfect Islamic order and ‘in this vain search for the Islamic utopia, the political establishment would become increasingly repressive . . . Meanwhile the discipline of Islamic economics could feed on itself for decades, mistaking . . . cosmetics for genuine reform. The twenty-first century could thus become for Islam what the twentieth century was for socialism: a period of infinite hope and promise, followed by disappointment, repression, disillusionment and despair.’ p.36. The alternative Kuran concludes is for Islamic economics to turn into a genuine

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344 Book Reviews innovative force. He sees the political and economic liberalization of the Islamic world transforming Islamic economics from a doctrinaire to an innovative outlook, seeking to correct the problems thrown up by rapid economic change and globalization. He invites Islamic economists to accept that Islamic banking and zakat as seen so far have had no transformational impact, and to look again and redefine interest to allow Islamic banks to become bona fide venture capital institutions and the mechanics of zakat to turn it into a social security system. This way the ‘practitioners of Islamic economics serve as hidden agents of secularization, arbiters between the doctrine’s goals and the secular practices it still condemns. Finally, in chapter Six, Churn tackles the difficult issue of Islam and economic development, reviewing the arguments that draw a link between the relative economic underdevelopment of the Moslem countries and Islam. Here his analysis is weaker. Although he rejects the basic premise, Churn is no development economist, his sociological approach gives too much credence to Islam as a cause of underdevelopment. He lists among factors such as political structure, communalism inherent in Islam, and the weakness of public discourse in Islamic societies, Islam itself as causes of underdevelopment. The most important of these is the ‘closure of the gates of ijtihad ’ and the lack of openness to scientific development after the thirteenth century in the Islamic world. Today, modernizing Islamic thinkers are challenging this closure to innovation. But, as a secular economist, while not ignoring all these factors, a general explanation for as diverse development trajectories as Malaysia, Turkey, Iran or the Gulf economies seems misplaced. Regarding the Gulf, and other oil economies, like Indonesia, the economics of the extraction of oil and the political, social structure this imposes on societies must surely be the paramount determinant in any analysis. Turkey’s development trajectory has much more in common with Latin American countries than the Gulf. Malaysia’s development model is very much ‘made in Asia’. But this would widen the topic too far. In so far as Timur Kuran has defined his objective in these essays, his observations remain illuminating and fascinating making up a highly recommended book. Mina Toksoz The Martyrs of Karbala: Shi‘i Symbols & Rituals in Modern Iran Kamran Scot Aghaie Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2004, Pp.200, index, 37 illustrations, one map, $60 (cloth), $24.95 (paper), ISBN 0 295 98455 4 On Tuesday, 7 October 2003, a photograph from Iraq appeared on the front page of The New York Times. It wasn’t the usual war photo of a gruesome mangle of steel and body parts, nevertheless, it sent shivers down the spine of the viewer. Against the background of endless and stony wasteland appeared a silhouette of a chador-clad woman. The only possession that she carried was a walking stick – no bags, provisions, nothing – though she may have been at least a hundred miles from home and had a long way ahead of her. She was a Shi‘i pilgrim on the way to Karbala, the tomb shrine of Imam Hussein, the beloved grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Ian Fisher, the correspondent for The New York Times, wrote in connection with this photo, ‘The fall of Saddam Hussein has undammed a flood of Shi‘ite Muslims

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Book Reviews 345 across Iran’s rough border here into Iraq, driven not by the desire to fight Americans, but by a religious devotion that United States soldiers here are finding hard to contain or even comprehend.’ Indeed, to the non-Shi‘i (person) it is almost impossible to understand the compelling devotion created by Imam Hussein’s passion and death, a driving force which has been sustained in its intensity for 13 centuries. The suffering on the pilgrimage path allows the pilgrim to identify with the suffering of Hussein, the ‘Prince of Martyrs’ through a mental and emotional connection to the events of Karbala that negates the factors of time and space. Therefore, what took place 1300 years ago takes place right now wherever a Shi‘i mortifies himself or herself. The tragic death of Hussein is viewed by the Shiites as the greatest suffering in human history, transcending history to become meta-history. A template of suffering has been forged by his passion and death. Down through the centuries that distance us from the massacre at Karbala (the 10th of Muharram, 680 C.E.), this paradigm has given birth to a multitude of rituals performed wherever the Shi‘is live; especially in those places where they feel oppressed, discriminated against, and abused. In the last 30 years, many of the rites that commemorate Hussein were used to encourage mass mobilization for the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1978–79), and then were skilfully manipulated during the bloody, eight-year-long war (1980–88) that Iran fought against Saddam’s Iraqi aggression. During the mourning month of Muharram in 2003, the American media gave extensive coverage to a Hussein ritual in the form of a huge procession (some estimates say one million strong) of Iraqi Shi‘is marching to Karbala. This procession was a bid on the part of the Shi‘is of Iraq for recognition. Historically, the Shi‘is of Iraq have been politically, economically, and, even, religiously, repressed by the government in Baghdad. Now, under the American-led occupation, the Shi‘is hope to redress this situation, particularly because they represent some 60 per cent of the Iraqi population. They hope that their desires for representation in all areas of society in the new Iraq will be realized. It is a happy coincidence that the book entitled, The Martyrs of Karbala: Shi‘i Symbols & Rituals in Modern Iran, by Kamran Scot Aghaie has been published. Although it is primarily devoted to Iran, it answers many questions concerning the Karbala paradigm in Shi‘i daily life regardless of geographical location. I do not suggest that every G.I. stationed in Iraq should read Aghaie’s book, but this text could be an eye-opener for planners at various US government agencies, including the Pentagon, State Department, the Intelligence community, and the White House. To understand the Shi‘i modus operandi, one must have a familiarity with the symbols and rituals appertaining to this branch of Islam. During the last 200 years of Western scholarship on Asia and Africa, which is now dubbed, ‘Orientalism’, very little has been written on Shi‘ism. The scholarship on Shi‘i Islam was, in a way, proportional to the size of the Shi‘i community: some 15 per cent of the Islamic world, (although when active, it looks and sounds as if at least 30 per cent). It is only since Ayatollah Khomeini staged his Shi‘i Muslim revolution in the late 1970s, that in-depth research on Shi‘i Islam has been undertaken. The Martyrs of Karbala is a very important addition to this scholarship. And although his emphasis is on modern Iran, Aghaie elegantly outlines the development of the Shi‘i rites from the time of the death of the Prophet Muhammad until the present day. He pays particular attention

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346 Book Reviews to the growth of Shi‘ism from the period in the sixteenth century when the Safavid kings declared Twelver Shi‘ism to be the state religion. To convert a nation is not an easy task and the ruling Safavid dynasty shrewdly placed popular Shi‘i rituals at the forefront of the conversion process. In consequence, Iran became a powerhouse of popular Shi‘i beliefs and observances. Aghaie’s historic outline progresses through the Qajars and Pahlovi’s to the Islamic Republic. Within the historical framework, Aghaie focuses his discussion on the complexity of rituals as performed. He conveys to the reader the creative process of the rites as well as the aesthetics of the objects of popular veneration and the community spirit that produces both. As he writes, ‘. . . these rituals served to strengthen the bonds of loyalty between the state and its subjects, thus ensuring the Qajar elites a certain degree of religious and political legitimacy’ (p.16). He reminds us that, ‘Muharram rituals were among the largest and most heavily attended public events at all levels of society.’ (p.31) Aghaie is as comfortable with the artistic or performative interpretation of symbols and rituals as he is with their political connotations. He comments, ‘The inconsistency of Mohammad Reza Shah’s use of Shi‘i symbols and rituals to legitimize his rule undermined his credibility as a ruler’ (p.61), and eventually resulted in a crisis of legitimacy. Statements like these are the result of thorough research and analysis. Aghaie’s interpretation of symbols and rites during the revolutionary period in Iran is a veritable tour de force. He believes that the Muharram rituals were among the most effective means by which religious opposition groups mobilized the masses against the state. This leads Aghaie to an examination of the ‘new Karbala narrative’. One of the most interesting narratives discussed is an analysis of Dr Ali Shariati’s introduction of Marxist ideas of universal class struggle and anti-imperialist rhetoric into the Karbala epic. Aghaie’s work is rich, analytical, bold, and challenging. Apart from a few articles published sporadically, there is no other work devoted to Shi‘i rituals and symbols. This is the first book to thoroughly examine this subject matter. Aghaie’s work is original and of great importance for those working in such disciplines as Middle Eastern studies, religious studies, anthropology, sociology, the performing arts, and political science, and it is written in clear and readable English. Peter Chelkowski Strategy and Politics in the Middle East, 1954–1960: Defending the Northern Tier Michael J. Cohen London, New York, Frank Cass, 2005, Pp.xiii þ 272, bibliography, index, £65, ISBN 0 714 65630 5 As the author informs us at the start of this superb study the period between 1954 and 1960 was ‘cataclysmic’ and ‘tumultuous’ (p.1) for both British and American political and strategic involvement in the Middle East. Indeed, these few short years saw the British evacuation of its Egyptian base; the Anglo–French–Israeli invasion of Egypt (the Suez War), the establishment of the Baghdad Pact and the pronouncement of the Eisenhower Doctrine, all of which directly contributed to the end of Britain’s pre-eminent position in the region and heralded a new reality where the USA was now the key Western player in the Middle East.

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Book Reviews 347 Of course, all of this has previously been the focus of numerous academic, and even popular, works and many of the issues addressed here will be well known to students of Great Power involvement in the region. However, despite the familiarity of the subject matter, Michael J. Cohen has written an authoritative, illuminating and highly informative book. Drawing on his great skill as both a diplomatic and military historian, as well as his deep familiarity with the primary sources (especially those in the British archives) the author builds an intricate picture of British and American relations with each other, as well as their main regional foe, Nasser’s Egypt, and allies such as Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Jordan. The problems, and challenges, that both the USA and Britain faced in trying to organize pro-Western forces in the region is seen most clearly in the author’s lucid examination of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. The British, all too aware of their waning influence, were reluctant to let their regional partners know just how incapable they were of meeting their military commitments. This caused significant tension with US officials who believed that Britain was trying to use American power and money to maintain its historic preeminence and, in the process, was damaging the interests of the anti-Soviet alliance. In particular, the USA was angered by British unwillingness to acknowledge that Turkey had now taken over its long-time role as the leading pro-Western military power in the region. As one senior US official put it, the British wanted a ‘50–50 arrangement’, which really amounted to ‘a British general and a Turkish army with the USA signing the cheque’. (p.116) For their part, the British viewed the USA as a ‘naı¨ ve newcomer’ (p.107), dedicated to its humiliation out of some deluded belief that this would win over the Arab world. Whilst the local partners – Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Pakistan – saw both the Baghdad Pact and any bilateral ties with either the USA or Britain, not primarily in terms of containing the Soviet threat, but as a way of furthering their own national interests and advancing their position vis-a`-vis local rivals – India in the case of Pakistan, Greece in the case of Turkey and Israel and Egypt in the case of Iraq. One of the book’s major strengths is that it is not a standard narrative history, but rather deals with well-known matters only as they throw light on allied strategic planning. Another of the book’s strengths is its use of illuminating and at times, highly entertaining documentary evidence. This is seen clearly in the discussion on both the Baghdad Pact and the Suez affair. In the case of the latter the focus is not on the actual crisis or the war but rather on the military and strategic consequences of the crisis for British and US efforts to build up the anti-Soviet alliance in the region. In these terms, and highlighting as it did, Britain’s military weakness, its loss of influence in the Arab world and the real tensions in the Anglo-American partnership, there appears to be have been something almost inevitable about the Suez intervention, a sort of British grand exit from the region, or as Harold Macmillan, eschewing sentimentality put it, Suez was the ‘last gasp of a declining Power’ (p.155). Cohen has no time for the arguments of those scholars who claim that the primary British objective in the Middle East in these years was to sustain its prestige and status. He terms this a ‘travesty’ that fails to take into account Britain’s ‘very real economic, political and strategic interests in the region . . . [all of which] amounted to far more than the pathetic effort of a spent colonial power to sustain the vestiges and appearances of power in the Middle East’ (p.129).

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348 Book Reviews Likewise, his excellent examination of the Israel factor in allied strategic considerations is both original and illuminating and puts paid to the widely held view that the West established Israel to act as a strategic surrogate or puppet in the region. Indeed, the British viewed ties to Israel purely in terms of how they impacted on the relationship with the Arab world at a time of increasing dependence on Middle Eastern oil. And for much of this period the predominant British concern regarding Israel was whether or not it would have the military capabilities necessary to go to war against the Jewish state if the latter became embroiled in a conflict with Jordan (with whom Britain had a mutual defence treaty). Moreover, for senior members of the British Foreign Office dealing with the Middle East, as well as many of their political masters, Israel was responsible for all of Britain’s problems in the region. In particular, the appalling Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh, head of the Foreign Office’s Middle East desk for much of the period under discussion, felt no need when dealing with Israel (as Cohen eloquently puts it) to ‘clothe his personal prejudices in euphemisms’ (p.63). The US administration never considered a possible scenario whereby it would have to take up arms against Israel, but like the British, the Eisenhower administration viewed Israel as a ‘spoiling element in Arab Middle East’ (p.218). Most notably, the US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s decision to veto US entry into the Baghdad Pact was largely due to his fear that if, under the pact, the US signed a security guarantee with Iraq, it would face pressure to do the same with Israel, which would severely damage US interests in the Arab world. This excellent study reminds us of the complexities that both Britain and the USA faced in the region in this early period in the Cold War, and it does so with great eloquence, skill and empathy. Rory Miller Syria and the Doctrine of Arab Neutralism: From Independence to Dependence Rami Ginat Brighton, Sussex Academic Press, 2005. Pp.xix þ 310, index, 13 illustrations, £55 (cloth) ISBN 1 84519 008 4 Rami Ginat’s accessible and instructive study, Syria and the Doctrine of Arab Neutralism, addresses the emergence of modern Syria from French colonial rule. It charts the new Arab state’s reliance on the doctrine of ‘neutralism’ in the formation of its foreign policy. This development takes place within the confines of the nonaligned movement of third world states. Although the main focus of this work is post-war Syria, it deals peripherally with the east-west struggle for hegemony in the Middle East during the first decades of the Cold War and the development of the doctrine of neutralism through the prism of the non-aligned movement. As such, it is extremely insightful in providing a broad comparative picture of the Arab state system, intra Arab politics in the early Cold War years and the attitudes of the US and the Soviet Union towards the Arab world as a region during this period. Through taking an internationalist perspective of post-independence Syria until the rise of Hafez al-Asad, Rami Ginat sheds much light on the development of Syrian foreign policy until the 1960s and the determination of third world Arab and Asian states to pursue a neutral course between the Cold War super powers vying for

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Book Reviews 349 influence in what became the non-aligned world. Ginat’s wide-ranging book provides an illuminating evaluation of the formation of the doctrine of ‘neutralism’ and ‘Arab neutralism’ from the perspective of the emerging non-aligned movement and the newly independent Arab states. Drawing extensively from archival sources in the US, UK, former USSR, Poland and Israel, Ginat charts the development of Arab neutralism from the independence movement in Syria providing a fresh examination of the formulation of the concept of Arab neutralism, how it emerges, detailing the challenges and pressures that saw it evolve. In doing so Rami Ginat’s research provides a rounded understanding of the genesis of anti-US sentiment in the Middle East as ‘Arab hopes and expectations that the US, as the new leader of the Western camp, would support their struggle to achieve liberation and full independence gradually changed to bitterness and disappointment’ in the post war years. Ginat argues convincingly that the ideology of Arab non-alignment emerged out of the Second World War’s independence struggle in Syria rather than after Nasser’s rise to power in Egypt. He argues that by the end of 1951 the Syrian government was actually practicing a form of ‘antiwestern neutralism’, which had in fact by then become institutionalized. The root cause of this policy, Ginat argues, originates from the shifting view the emerging Arab states took of US policy towards the Arab world based on its support for the new Israeli state and its policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict in general. Furthermore, regarding America’s ambiguous stance towards British colonialism in Egypt and the pressure Arab countries experienced from Washington to take part in the establishment of a Middle East Command as a frontline defence against the Soviet Union in their struggle for influence. The scope of this analysis, however, goes far beyond the ideological constructs of Arab neutralism in Syria. Rami Ginat charts the consolidation of the non-aligned Belgrade–Cairo–New Delhi axis and Nasser’s rise to international prominence alongside Yugoslav and Indian leaders Tito and Nehru. What is most illuminating about this book is Ginat’s explanation of how Syria managed to maintain its independence from the Soviet Union, despite the inherent weakness of its coup prone governments in the mid 1950s, under the influence of Ba’th party leaders Michel ‘Aflaq and Salah al-Din Bitar. The internal struggle between Ba’thists and Syrian communists of course resulted in the formation of the United Arab Republic in 1958. Ginat’s study adds credence to the argument that Syria’s union with Egypt had less to do with the ideological pan-Arab desires of the Syrian or Egyptian regimes and more to do with keeping Syria out of the hands of the Syrian Communist Party and consequently preventing it becoming merely a Soviet satellite state. The real value of this work is in the international and comparative perspective the author brings to the subject through the use of such diverse and rich sources. The analysis illustrates the various Syrian, Arab, Third World and Cold War dynamics that both curtailed and shaped Syrian politics between the Second World War and the early 1960s. As such it provides an excellent ideological framework for scholars and postgraduates wishing to broaden their understanding of the Arab state system in the early Cold War period and the stabilization of a Syrian foreign policy that was largely masked by the instability of its frequently changing governments during this period. Michael Kerr