Islamic Middle East Research Articles

Politics, Society and the Decline of Islam in Cyprus: From the Ottoman Era to the Twenty-First Century

The definition of Turkish nationhood after the founding of the Republic has been evaluated and labelled very differently by various scholars. The classical view paralleled the official representation of Republican policies in describing Turkish nationhood as being based on a civic and territorial understanding of nationality. More recent and much more critical scholarship, which enjoys a near-hegemonic position in the study of Turkish nationalism today, claims that the official definition of Turkish nationhood has a clearly identifiable mono-ethnic orientation, manifest in a series of policies and institutions. This article argues that the definition of Turkish nationhood as manifest in state policies is neither territorial nor mono-ethnic, but rather ironically for the adamantly secular Turkish republic, the definition of Turkish nationhood is mono-religious and anti-ethnic, in striking continuity with the Islamic millet under the Ottoman Empire. The reason critical scholars perceive Turkish nationhood as mono-ethnic might stem from the dichotomous view of nationalisms as civic versus ethnic, a dichotomy that has recently been repudiated by some of its erstwhile proponents. Supremacy of the religious over ethnic categories in Turkey, as a historical legacy of the Ottoman millet system, might be applicable to most post-Ottoman states in the Islamic Middle East and North Africa, in contrast to the interplay of ethnicity and religion in Western Europe. This view of Turkish nationhood is confirmed by a dozen interviews that the author conducted with members of the political and intellectual elite of different ideological orientations in Turkey. It is then demonstrated how the new efforts at reformulating modern Turkish identity with reference to Ottoman and Islamic conceptions lead to new inclusion–exclusion dynamics with the Kurds and the Alevis, suggesting that a truly inclusive reformulation has to follow secular and territorial principles.

The roots of provenance: glass, plants and isotopes in the Islamic Middle East

AbstractGlass – one of the most prestigious materials of the early Islamic empire – was traded not only as vessels and bangles but as raw glass blocks. One of its raw materials, plant-ash, was also traded. This means that tracking the production of this precious commodity is especially challenging. The authors show that while chemical composition can relate to vessel type, it is a combination of chemical compositions with strontium and neodymium isotope ratios that is most likely to lead to (a geological) provenance for its manufacture. The materials used by the glassmakers were local sand and plant ashes. Reported here is the first application of the method to the glass made at the primary glass making centre of al-Raqqa, Syria in an environmental context.

From families to formal contracts: An approach to development

This paper develops a theory in which individuals can use one of two types of human/social capital to enforce contracts: “Local capital” relies on families and other personal networks; “market capital” relies on impersonal market institutions such as auditors and courts. Local capital is efficient when most trading is local, but only market capital can support trading between strangers that allows extensive division of labor and industrialization. We show that economies with a low cost of accumulating local capital (say, because people live close together) are richer than economies with a high cost of accumulation when long distance trade is difficult, but are slower to transition to impersonal market exchange (industrialize) when long distance trade becomes feasible. The model provides one way to understand why the wealthiest economies in 1600 AD, China, India, and the Islamic Middle East, industrialized more slowly than the West. We report an array of historical evidence documenting the pre-industrial importance of family and kinship networks in China, India, and the Islamic world compared to Europe, and the modernization problems linked to local capital.

As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East. By Ehud R. Toledano (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007) 273 pp. $50.00 cloth $24.00 paper

<i>As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East</i>. By Ehud R. Toledano (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007) 273 pp. $50.00 cloth $24.00 paper

As if silent and absent: bonds of enslavement in the Islamic Middle East

This groundbreaking book reconceptualizes slavery through the voices of enslaved persons themselves, voices that have remained silent in the narratives of conventional history. Focusing in particular on the Islamic Middle East from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, Ehud R. Toledano examines how bonded persons experienced enslavement in Ottoman societies. He draws on court records and a variety of other unexamined primary sources to uncover important new information about the Africans and Circassians who were forcibly removed from their own societies and transplanted to Middle East cultures that were alien to them. Toledano also considers the experiences of these enslaved people within the context of the global history of slavery. The book looks at the bonds of slavery from an original perspective, moving away from the traditional master/slave domination paradigm toward the point of view of the enslaved and their responses to their plight. With keen and original insights, Toledano suggests new ways of thinking about enslavement.

As if Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East Ehud R. Toledano

<i>As if Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East</i> Ehud R. Toledano

Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (1735-67) (review)

Reviewed by: Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (1735-67) Alessa Johns and Clarence E. Walker Megan Vaughan , Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (1735–67). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 341. $23.95. Creating the Creole Island is an important contribution to the study of slavery. The book is erudite, comparative, interdisciplinary, and it raises important questions about the creation of Creoles in slave societies. Like William St. Clair's The Door of No Return: The History of Cape Coast Castle and the Atlantic Slave Trade, Afua Cooper's The Hanging of Angelique, Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton's Slavery & South Asian History, Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker's Many Middle Passages, and Ehud R.Toledano's As If Silent and Absent: Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East, Vaughan's study of Mauritius examines a slave society outside of the Caribbean and North and South America. These areas have been for over forty years the center of slavery studies. This scholarship has revealed a great deal about the profitability of slavery, the work that slaves performed, master-slave relations, and slave culture. Vaughan's book will enable scholars of slavery to see how the institution developed on an island that was not as important as either Cuba or Haiti. Mauritius is an island in the Indian Ocean and was explored, colonized, and populated by many different groups of people. At various moments in its history, Mauritius was scoured by the Dutch and Portuguese, but from the early eighteenth century until 1810 the island was a French possession. Then it was conquered by Great Britain. The island's population comprised Europeans and slaves brought from Africa and India. Because Mauritius was uninhabited, its population consisted, as Vaughan says, "of no one thing or people but of many more or less foreign, more or less naturalized" (2). Noting that the term Creole is "slippery," Vaughan writes that Mauritius "without natives has always been the product of multiple influences, multiple sources, which to differing degrees merge, take root, and 'naturalize' on new . . . soil" (2). In brief, there were no Native Americans or Zulus to contend [End Page 431] with or displace on Mauritius. The eighteenth-century history of the colony was characterized by both instability and poverty. The island was also ravaged by hurricanes and swarms of rats. Initially Frenchmen did not want to come to Mauritius because economic prospects were not good. The white population of the colony was unstable and did not reproduce itself. "The latter was a function," according to Vaughan, "both of high mortality rates and the island's role as a strategic base rather than as a site of colonial production" (265). The whites also lived in fear of the slave population. From the very beginnings of settlement, the Europeans did have to confront the fact that some of the people imported as slaves ran away to the mountains and became Maroons. These former slaves harassed the settled communities for food, women, and other supplies. Marronage was never the problem on Mauritius that it came to be in either Jamaica or Brazil. Nonetheless, the French colonists were always worried about slave conspiracies. The major contribution to the field of slavery studies in Vaughan's book is its discussion of what I call the variegated slave and free black population of Mauritius. Slaves on Mauritius, who came from India and Africa, were all defined as black under the French and later the English. But whether slave or free, they created "distinct identities for themselves" (266). These differences consisted of dress, hair styles, and the retention/creation of some linguistic forms, which suggest, as other studies of creolite have, that the slaves were never completely socialized by their masters. Vaughan does not suggest that slavery was a benign institution on Mauritius. But she does indicate that there were places based on religious and ethnic distinctions that the slaves and free people created for themselves. This process was facilitated in part by the colonial administrators of the island. Students of American Negro slavery, like me, will be surprised to learn that on Mauritius free people of...

From Departing Editor

From Departing Editor Bruce Boehrer Since this issue of JEMCS marks the end of my service to the journal, my co-editors have kindly allowed me to compose a final introductory column in propria persona. The five essays appearing in JEMCS 8.1 represent three recurring areas of interest for the journal’s contributors and its parent Group: the history of cross-cultural exchange, the articulation of gender, and the growth of the modern scientific imaginary. Carmen Nocentelli’s “The Erotics of Mercantile Imperialism” and Lucas Marchante-Aragón’s “The King, the Nation, and the Moor” represent the first of these general topics, which they approach from different geographical angles. Nocentelli explores the dynamics of early European trade and diplomacy primarily in East Asia, whereas Marchante-Aragón engages Europe’s long and troubled history with the Islamic Middle East and North Africa. In both cases, what emerges is a complicated legacy of interdependence, such that the European self seeks to distinguish itself from racial and cultural others that nonetheless reemerge as objects of desire and fascination in the discourse of European supremacy. In examining the notion of cross-cultural desire, both Nocentelli and Marchante-Aragón nudge their work in the direction of gender studies. Two other essays in this issue of JEMCS address questions of gender more squarely. In “‘Rich Like a Lady’: Cross-Class Dressing in the Brothels and Theaters of Early Modern London,” Cristine Varholy seizes upon a common preoccupation of recent scholarship on the early modern English theater—cross-dressing. But she studies this subject from the standpoint of class rather than gender, in the process shedding light upon a whole vocabulary of theatrical and non-theatrical desire keyed to expressions of social privilege. For her part, Amy Greenstadt reads Aemilia Lanyer’s “Description of Cooke-ham” as an allegory [End Page 1] of femme-femme desire, relayed across the boundaries of rank and imprinted upon the landscape of the Countess of Cumberland’s country residence. Finally, in “Ben Jonson’s Alchemist and Early Modern Laboratory Space,” John Shanahan presents Jonson’s great comedy as a literary anticipation of the experimental method, as this was envisioned by Bacon and developed by the Royal Society. For Shanahan, The Alchemist proceeds by the limitation and manipulation of variables, particularly time and space, thus creating an artificial space for the production of truths that may then be taken as representative of the broader world beyond the theater itself. In this respect, we may see Jonsonian neoclassicism as implicated in the development of early modern proto-scientific theory and procedures. These fine articles comprise the current issue of JEMCS. But since this issue marks the end of my service on the JEMCS editorial board, it is perhaps also appropriate to offer a brief appraisal of the journal’s development over the past eight-and-a-half years. My earliest involvement with JEMCS—and with The Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies—came with my appearance at the Group’s 1999 meeting in Coral Gables, Florida. At that year’s business meeting, GEMCS agreed to pursue the possibility of establishing an affiliated journal, and so, after gaining some early financial assistance from the Florida State University Department of English, the JEMCS editorial board (then consisting of Laura J. Rosenthal, Daniel Vitkus, Helen Burke, and me) sent out our first call for papers and advertisement for the new journal in February 2000. Over the next twelve months we read submissions, assembled a preliminary backlog, and prepared the first issue of the journal, which appeared in late spring 2001. For three-and-a-half years thereafter, JEMCS developed as a semi-annual self-published project housed primarily within the FSU English Department. By late 2004, however, some members of the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies had begun calling for the journal to affiliate itself with a university press, in order to enhance its visibility and distribution network. In response to these calls, the journal signed an initial publishing contract with Indiana University Press, with the result that JEMCS started appearing in a redesigned format in Fall/Winter 2004, under the umbrella of the IUP Journals Division. Last year, JEMCS renewed...

RENEE WORRINGER, editor. The Islamic Middle East and Japan: Perceptions, Aspirations, and the Birth of Intra-Asian Modernity. Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener. 2007. Pp. 163. Cloth $68.95, paper $24.95

RENEE WORRINGER, editor. The Islamic Middle East and Japan: Perceptions, Aspirations, and the Birth of Intra-Asian Modernity. Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener. 2007. Pp. 163. Cloth $68.95, paper $24.95

The Islamic Middle East and Japan: Perceptions, Aspirations, and the Birth of Intra-Asian Modernity

Book Review| August 01 2007 The Islamic Middle East and Japan: Perceptions, Aspirations, and the Birth of Intra-Asian Modernity The Islamic Middle East and Japan: Perceptions, Aspirations, and the Birth of Intra-Asian Modernity Reneé Worringer, ed. Princeton, NJ: Marcus Wiener, 2007 163 pp., $68.95 (cloth), $24.95 (paper) Trent Maxey Trent Maxey Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2007) 27 (2): 485–486. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-2007-022 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Trent Maxey; The Islamic Middle East and Japan: Perceptions, Aspirations, and the Birth of Intra-Asian Modernity. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 1 August 2007; 27 (2): 485–486. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-2007-022 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsComparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Some Historical Roots of the Ethos of Science

This comparative and historical examination of the ethos of science finds significant examples of the Mertonian ethos in university discussions from the 12th through the 14th century. The institutionalization of naturalistic inquiry based on Aristotelian modes of argument and demonstration was unique to Western Europe and did not occur in China or the Islamic Middle East. Nevertheless, Merton's writings on the ethos show no indication of his relying upon the rich historical evidence of Europe when formulating his famous conception.

Reincarnation, Sect Unity, and Identity among the Druze

A belief in reincarnation is atypical within Islam, although exceptions exist with a few small sects. This essay analyzes the role that reincarnation plays in maintaining a sense of unity and identity among the Druze, an Islamic sect residing primarily in the Levantine Middle East. It also describes the necessary conditions for reincarnation according to Druze doctrine and as evidenced in reincarnation stories. Reincarnation is of great social significance for the Druze, regarding family and village relations, and the Druze community at large. There is, however, some resistance within the community to a belief in reincarnation. This resistance is due in part to image management in the political context of Syria, and also because a belief in reincarnation is a stigma for a group in the Islamic Middle East. It also works against Druze efforts to present itself to the world as modern. (Islam, Druze identity, reincarnation) ********** A belief in reincarnation is atypical for Islam. There are, however, some Islamic sects that believe in reincarnation, including the Druze and Alawi who are most numerous in Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. These minority groups hold a tenuous position among Muslims, in some measure due to their belief in reincarnation, and are often considered by their mainstream Sunni or Shi'a co-religionists as heterodox or even heretical. Druze and Alawi differ in several particulars regarding how they describe the workings of reincarnation, but this essay focuses only on the Druze. The Druze believe that reincarnation occurs among all humans at all places and times, and that some remember previous lives but the majority do not. There is, however, no blanket agreement among Druze regarding reincarnation. There are many who are skeptics about the phenomenon and dismiss it outright. At the same time there are many others who circulate stories and maintain a curiosity and openness about the phenomenon. On both ends of the spectrum there is a guardedness associated with talk about reincarnation because of sensitivity to outside perceptions. A complicating factor is that the Druze sect is esoteric and secretive about most aspects of its religious tenets. As such it is difficult to ascertain much regarding how reincarnation fits into Druze doctrine. This essay, however, is less concerned with Druze reincarnation as religious doctrine and practice, and more as a social phenomenon that enhances sect unity and identity despite the fact that reincarnation is not uniformly accepted among Druze. The genre of concern here is reincarnation stories that may have roots in religious doctrine but exist and proliferate in everyday informal talk. Fieldwork for this research took place in two locales in southern Syria, Jeremana, and Suwayda. Jeremana is a densely populated urban neighborhood in southern Damascus with a large Druze population; Suwayda is a rural provincial capitol about one hundred kilometers south of Damascus and the villages in this province are almost exclusively Druze. Research consisted of participant observation, living among informants, and interviews. Reincarnation was not a major focus of research at first, but the topic arose frequently and it became clear that reincarnation was tied to notions of Druze identity. Reincarnation stories were recorded on audio tape. The relationship between reincarnation and sect unity and identity is illustrated with examples from three stories--those of Abu Qasim, Areal, and Saeed (1)--collected during fieldwork in Damascus and Suwayda, Syria. (2) The first story is of Abu Qasim, whose older brother Marwan died in a fanning accident when Abu Qasim was a boy. Several years later, an adolescent named Shafiq approached Abu Qasim's family claiming to be Marwan reincarnated. The second story is about Amal, a woman living in Damascus who, at the age of eighteen, lost her mother at home in an electrocution accident. Approximately five years later a girl named Lamis, who lived in a distant village, was thought to possibly be Amal's reincarnated mother. …

Freedom and Justice in the Modern Middle East

FOR MUSLIMS as for others, history is important, but they approach it with a special concern and awareness. The career of the Prophet Muhammad, the creation and expansion of the Islamic community and state, and the formulation and elaboration of the holy law of Islam are events history, known from historical memory or record and narrated and debated by historians since early times. In the Islamic Middle East, one may still find passionate arguments, even bitter feuds, about events that occurred centuries or sometimes millennia ago-about what happened, its significance, and its current relevance. This historical awareness has acquired new dimensions the modern period, as Muslims-particularly those the Middle East-have suffered new experiences that have transformed their vision of them selves and the world and reshaped the language which they discuss it. In 1798, the French Revolution arrived Egypt the form of a small expeditionary force commanded by a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte. The force invaded, conquered, and ruled Egypt without difficulty for several years. General Bonaparte proudly announced that he had come in the name of the French Republic, founded on the principles of liberty and equality. This was, of course,

Why the Islamic Middle East Did not Generate an Indigenous Corporate Law

Classical Islamic law recognizes only natural persons; it does not grant standing to corporations. This article explores why Islamic law did not develop a concept akin to the corporation, or borrow one from another legal system. It also identifies processes that delayed the diffusion of the corporation to the Middle East even as its role in the global economy expanded. Community building was central to Islam's mission, so early Muslim jurists had no use for a concept liable to facilitate factionalism. Services with large setup costs and expected to last indefinitely were supplied through the waqf, an unincorporated trust. The waqf thus absorbed resources that might otherwise have stimulated an incorporation movement. Partly because the waqf spawned constituencies committed to preserving its key features, until modern times private merchants and producers who stood to profit from corporate powers were unable to muster the collective action necessary to reform the legal system. For their part, Muslim rulers took no initiatives of their own to supply the corporate form of organization, because they saw no commercial or financial organizations worth developing for the sake of boosting tax revenue.

From Families to Formal Contracts: An Approach to Development

This paper develops a theory in which individuals can use one of two types of human/social to enforce contracts: capital relies on families and other personal networks; capital relies on impersonal market institutions such as auditors and courts. Local is efficient when most trading is local, but only market can support trading between strangers that allows extensive division of labor and industrialization. We show that economies with a low cost of accumulating local (say, because people live close together) are richer than economies with a high cost of accumulation when long distance trade is difficult, but are slower to transition to impersonal market exchange (industrialize) when long distance trade becomes feasible. The model provides one way to understand why the wealthiest economies in 1600 AD, China, India, and the Islamic Middle East, failed to industrialize as quickly as the West. We report an array of historical evidence documenting the pre-industrial importance of family and kinship networks in China, India, and the Islamic world compared to Europe, and the modernization problems linked to local capital.

GLASS IN EARLY ISLAMIC SOCIETY- TOWARD A GREATER UNDERSTANDING

Our knowledge of glass production in the Mediaeval Islamic Middle East has been augmented by recent archaeological excavations in the region, although we still await the publication of a number of reports, describing in detail the significant vessels and furnace finds. This article suggests that investigation of the early and mediaeval literary sources from the Arab world could also lead us to a greater appreciation of how glass was valued and appreciated in those times, and of what qualities were deemed more aesthetically important by the purchases and collector. Yet these very qualities were for some reason set aside by the fourteenth century, when highly decorated enamelled and gilded work on poor quality glass had become the fashion at the Mamluk court.

Court Contracts and Agreements among Parties in the Islamic Middle East ( A Comparative Perspective on Asia: Ownership and Contracts)

Court Contracts and Agreements among Parties in the Islamic Middle East ( A Comparative Perspective on Asia: Ownership and Contracts)

Orientalist Poetics: The Islamic Middle East in Nineteenth-Century English and French Poetry (review)

Emily A. Haddad's study of the influence of orientalism on European poetics is a timely reminder of the long-standing tendency of the West to stereotype the Islamic Middle East. In this case, the stereotypes are seen to have what may be an unexpected effect: In Orientalist Poetics:The Islamic Middle East in Nineteenth-Century English and French Poetry, Haddad argues that orientalism was essential to English and French poetic developments through the nineteenth century. Perceived by European orientalists as entirely nonrepresentational, Islamic art was a stimulus to consideration of alternatives to a mimetic poetics. Furthermore, since it was inaccessible to empirical verification, the Orient as a subject was a site for destabilization of the convention of mimesis. Most significantly, the Islamic Middle East was seen by nineteenth-century European poets as "ontologically unnatural" (2002, 9) in environment, morality, and spirituality, thus serving as an ideal subject for poetry whose makers were exploring the role of nature as poetry's one best subject and its point of origin. In short, as model and source, the Orient and orientalism provided the opportunity for poetic experimentation which culminated in a revolutionary aesthetics: "Nineteenth-century poetics' evolution [End Page 180] towards a stance of art for art's sake owes both its origin and its progression in large part to . . . the Orient's supposedly inherent artfulness . . ." (10).

Review: Orientalist Poetics: The Islamic Middle East in Nineteenth-Century English and French Poetry

1Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies Orientalist Poetics: The Islamic Middle East in Nineteenth‐Century English and French Poetry Emily Haddad Aldershot Ashgate 2002 viii + 220 Hardback£40.00

Guide to the Year's Work: General Materials

Certainly one of largest, and probably most important, recent works on Victorian is A Companion to Victorian edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison, a compilation of thirty-one substantial essays by established scholars on a wide variety of forms and issues. The Companion is an embarrassment of riches for a reviewer since many of essays call out for extended individual attention, but I will focus my attention here on structure and achievement of volume as a whole. Considering both difficulties of articulating a fixed canon of Victorian poets and limitations of looking at poets in isolation, editors have chosen wisely to eschew usual practice of commissioning essays on individual poets, and have instead commissioned essays on wide ranging but more or less discrete topics: genres (from epic to nonsense), traditions (classical and medieval), schools (Tractarian, Spasmodic, and Pre-Raphaelite), market for poetry, and intersections of with elements of Victorian culture (imperialism, nationalisms, religion, science, gender, and sexuality). Obviously parceling out essays to a variety of scholars might lead to artificial boundaries among diverse but connected topics, but editors have trusted various authors to negotiate debatable borders of their topics, with result essays fruitfully overlap, providing coherence and continuity without redundancy. Conspicuously missing from list of topics are poetry by women, Queer Poetry, and and Ideology, but, again, editors have wisely chosen to leave treatment of such concerns to emerge from manner of treatment of topics. As editors point out, absence of a chapter on women poets suggests that work of women poets no longer needs special defence (p. ix). As a result of editorial procedures and consistently high level of authorial contributions, Companion provides myriad critical perspectives and contextualizations of a very wide range of poets and poems, and constitutes an invaluable resource for students of period. Without making invidious distinctions or odious comparisons, and without providing analysis and commentary various chapters deserve, it seems fair to point out some of highlights of volume. Herbert Tucker's discussion of epic calls attention not only to usual suspects, but also to a surprising number of fascinating, though justly neglected, contenders, and Matthew Rowlinson, in his chapter on lyric, offers a compelling argument about how the genre of lyric is in Victorian for first time fully implicated in production of print text as a commodity (p. 60). The volume also contains authoritative yet suggestive essays on Tractarian by Stephen Prickett, on Spasmodic by Cronin, on poetic marketplace by Lee Erickson, on and religion by W. David Shaw, and on and science by Alan Rauch. Surprisingly, Companion rewards careful reading from cover to cover, though it will surely be more valued as a reference text for bringing readers up to date on current thinking about particular topics. A somewhat more specialized topic, not undertaken by Companion, is explored in Orientalist Poetics: The Islamic Middle East in Nineteenth-Century English and French Poetry by Emily Haddad, who offers an ambitiously revisionist view of literary history of nineteenth century as she attempts to show orientalism's centrality to evolution of and poetics in France and Britain (p. 2). More specifically, Haddad argues nineteenth-century aestheticism constitutes Islamic Orient in particular as a fundamentally site (p. 3), an other to European conceptions of nature as object of mimetic representation. Examining both French and English of Romantic and Victorian periods, Haddad traces an engagement with Islamic orient from romanticism of Southey, Shelley, Byron, Hemans, and even Wordsworth in England and Hugo and Musset in France through an increasing emphasis on it as a source and object of aesthetic experimentation with amimetic poetics in Theophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Alfred Tennyson, and, more dubiously, Matthew Arnold, and finally to a culmination of orientalist poetics as aestheticism or art for art's sake in Oscar Wilde's theory and practice. …