A Letter from the Editors

Abstract

This issue of Bustan represents our continued effort to use the process of scholarly review to deliver a wide range of new ideas to our readers. While the journal is based at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University in Israel, twelve of our seventeen contributors come from outside of Israel. As we strive to create an international forum for Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, we are engaged in reviewing works of scholarship that represent a broad selection of the exciting new research in our fields.The books reviewed in this issue deal with martyrdom, sectarianism, Islamism, and contemporary revolution. But that's not all; this issue also includes reviews that address a new biography of Mahmoud Darwish; the establishment of a scholarly class in the Ottoman Empire; Jewish life in modern Morocco; urban development and history in Kuwait; the complexity of Arab Jewish identity in Mandatory Palestine; and a revised interpretation of reform in the Ottoman Empire.This issue also includes three long-form review essays that raise important questions and offer original ideas on issues of general interest to scholars and practitioners alike: Lawrence Rosen's essay on youth and Islamism in Morocco examines whether the current generation of youth is relating to religion and politics in different ways than their parents and grandparents.David Cook, in reviewing Meir Hatina's book on martyrdom, provocatively suggests that the world is experiencing “violence overload,” and may be “tuning out” the ever-increasing volume of terrorist attacks.Asher Susser provides a unique survey of the state of the field in modern Middle East Studies. He briefly describes the influence of social sciences on the field and then explains how scholars might benefit from focusing on providing a richer understanding of the “Otherness” of the “Other” throughout the region. Our geographic coverage in this issue extends from Morocco to Sudan and from Iran to Lebanon, and the contributors span the globe from Singapore to California—offering a diverse range of analytical approaches and perspectives. For example, in discussing Farah Al Nakib's urban history of Kuwait, Laavanya Kathiravelu of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore offers several observations about how scholars can use urban spaces to study a broad range of social, political, and cultural aspects of the Middle East in comparative perspective.We hope you enjoy reading these pieces as much as we did. They represent just a small part of the dynamic new work being done in our fields.