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| Volume IX, June 2002, Number 2 |
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| Book Review Excerpts |
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What Went Wrong?, by Bernard Lewis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 192 pages. $23.00, hardcover.
Mustafa Malik
Journalism fellow, German Marshall Fund of the United States
The argument that Islam has caused the many ills of Muslim societies was popularized by such Enlightenment thinkers as Montesquieu, Volney and Voltaire as much as by Christian polemicists through the ages. It has been elevated into truism by colonial-era Orientalists and many contemporary Western scholars, journalists and politicians. Few have argued the thesis more powerfully than Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton.
His latest book, What Went Wrong?, explains how Islam's "mighty civilization has fallen so low," as do several of his previous works, especially The Middle East and Islam and the West. His more than a dozen books and many articles are a treasure for students of Muslim history. His encyclopedic knowledge of Islamic history, power of reasoning and elegant writing have made him the doyen of Islamic historians in the West.
Two other things about his works need mention. One is his intellectual probity. He tells it as he sees it. Second, he sees Islam with a pair of Western eyes. While his integrity as a scholar and writer is notable, his vantage point is Western, with its strengths and limitations for a historian of Islam. I will argue this point below.
Citizenship and the State in the Middle East: Approaches and Applications, by Nils A. Butenschon, Uri Davis and Manuel Hassassian, eds. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000. 449 pages. $24.95, paperback.
Elizabeth Thompson
Author, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon
This volume is at once a theoretical introduction to citizenship as a category of analysis in Middle East politics and an application of citizenship analysis to a specific case, that of Palestine and Israel. It was published with a companion volume entitled Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East, edited by Suad Joseph, as an outcome of conferences held in 1996-97.
The first eight chapters demonstrate theoretical approaches to citizenship. In his introduction, Nils Butenschon defines citizenship as the contractual relationship between the state and inhabitants under its jurisdiction (p. 4). Studying that relationship as it is defined through social, cultural and political structures, he says, "allows us to unveil important aspects of the architecture of power relations between rulers and ruled, and to analyze the logic of those relations" (p. 5). Butenschon then outlines three types of citizenship regimes: "singularism," where one group or tribe dominates the state community, as in Saudi Arabia or Israel; "pluralism," where a multicultural community is governed through the power sharing of mediating elites, as in Lebanon; and "universalism," where individual identity rather than group identity determines each citizen's equal status. He names no Middle Eastern country that fits this category.
Arab Employment in Israel: The Quest for Equal Employment Opportunity, by Benjamin W. Wolkinson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999. xii, 197 pages. $68.00, hardcover.
Bill S. Mikhail
Department of Political Science, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
A book on Arab employment in Israel is worth reading to understand the many facets of Israeli-Palestinian relations. The author is a labor specialist and arbitrator, and professor of labor relations at Michigan State University, who went to Israel in the mid-1980s to study problems of employment opportunities for Israel's Arab population. His conclusions, however, warrant major revisions considering the changing reality between the Israelis and the Palestinians in the post-intifada political situation.
Wolkinson posited the predicament of Arab employment in Israel by contrasting the principles of the Jewish state's guarantee of equality to all of its citizens and the inability of the Arabs to become equal. Arabs tend to lack the education and skills to make them competitive with their Jewish counterparts. This reduces their chance of finding a job within their own community, and feeds the perception that they are treated unfairly in the job market.
Roman Catholics and Shii Muslims: Prayer, Passion, and Politics, by James A. Bill and John Alden Williams. Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 176 pages. $27.50, hardcover.
Robert Brenton Betts
Visiting professor of History, University of Balamand, Tripoli, Lebanon
On reading this remarkable study one immediately asks why no one had thought of such a book before. While research into comparative Christian-Islamic topics is nothing new, a precise comparison of the striking similarities between Roman Catholicism and Shiite Islam is indeed groundbreaking work. As someone who has been involved in such research for the past 40 years, I was gratified to see many of my own informal observations and occasional scholarly musings confirmed in this exemplary work by two professors from my own undergraduate alma mater, the College of William and Mary.
At first glance it may appear strange to associate two deeply contrasting movements: the Roman Catholic Church, which, with one-billion members worldwide, includes well over half the world's Christians, and the mainly sectarian Shii Muslim communities, which total barely a tenth of that number (and only 10 percent of the world's Muslims). Most of them are geographically concentrated in the relatively small area of Iran, Iraq and the Arabian Gulf with isolated pockets of faithful in Lebanon, Turkey and the Indian sub-continent. In their study of Shii Islam, the authors restrict themselves to the Twelver (Ithnashari) sub-sect to which the great majority of Shia belong, though passing reference is made to the Zaydi and Ismaili sub-sects, where their views come into conflict with "mainstream" Twelver Shiism, especially as it is politically embodied in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
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