Robert H. Eisenman: Islamic law in Palestine and Israel: a history of the survival of tanzimat and sharī'a in the British mandate and the Jewish state. (Social, Economic and Political Studies of the Middle East, Vol. XXVI.) xiv, 291 pp. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978. Guilders 96.

1979 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 591-591
Author(s):  
David Pearl
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Jewish State ◽  
British Mandate ◽  
Political Studies ◽  
History Of

AYKUT KANSU, The Revolution of 1908 in Turkey, Social, Economic, and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997). Pp. 350. $110.00 cloth.

2000 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 168-171
Author(s):  
Keith Watenpaugh
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Political Narrative ◽  
Political Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second Constitutional Period ◽  
The Revolution

At its heart, Aykut Kansu's The Revolution of 1908 in Turkey is a thoughtful attempt to revise the way Turkish and Western historians have portrayed the events that ushered in the Ottoman Second Constitutional Period. Consisting of both a provocative historiographical essay and a detailed political narrative of the years 1906–8, the book reads the dominant accounts of the last years of the empire against the grain and makes a fresh contribution to the often staid discussions of this fundamentally important moment in the history of the Eastern Mediterranean. Although his arguments are compelling, evidentiary and rhetorical problems inherent in the work undermine its overall value; less persuasive, though still worthwhile, is his attempt to mitigate the historical significance of the statist reforms of the Kemalist period. In Kansu's revision, the events of 1908 constituted the last great bourgeois revolution of the “long nineteenth century.” It succeeded in wresting power from the grip of Turkey's ancien régime—bureaucrats of the Sublime Porte and the sultan—and placed it, temporarily, in the hands of the “citizens.”

Sami Zubaida, Law and Power in the Islamic World. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004, 248 pp., $55, £35, ISBN 1-86064-865-7.

2004 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 856-858
Author(s):  
Eric Kaufmann
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Social History ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
History Of

Sami Zubaida's Law and Power in the Islamic World is a fascinating politico-social history of the relations between Islamic law and the procession of political masters who have ruled the Middle East since the Prophet's death. One message is clear: the notion of an omnipotent shariءa, passed from caliph to caliph for fourteen centuries, is a myth held by both Islamist radicals and their Western critics.

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