John Waterbury

Louer takes a close look inside Shiite international networks and the efforts to control them, a struggle that pits the official clergy against a group that Louer calls the effendi: lay leaders without religious credentials who nonetheless exercise influence in Shiite communities (Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is a good example).

Dawisha is an experienced and prolific historian of the contemporary Arab world. It is puzzling, therefore, that his insights do not come through clearly in this chronicle of the recent Arab uprisings and their aftermath.

This book is deeply pessimistic about the future of the Saudi kingdom. A coming generational shift in the monarchy—from a son of the dynasty’s founder to one of his grandsons—might lay bare the structural fissures of Saudi society.

Frisch usefully brings international relations theory to bear on the question of Israel’s policies toward its Arab citizens. He concludes that compared with minorities in other ethnonational conflicts, the Israeli Arabs do relatively well. But that will be scant comfort to members of that community.

Taken together, these four books do not allow readers a full view of the Syrian elephant, but they come close. Starr, a journalist who lived in Damascus for five years, records his encounters with ordinary Syrians and with the state’s intelligence apparatus. Lesch, an American historian, enjoyed unusual access to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and other regime stalwarts. Haddad, a Syrian academic, analyzes the business allies of Syria’s Baathist regime. Ajami is a more distant observer than the others, but his stage setting and political sketches are superb.

The book’s title issues a stark indictment; the text methodically and dispassionately sustains it. The fact that a Turkish historian with access to the Ottoman archives has written this book is of immeasurable significance.

Surveying U.S. Middle East policy since the era of Franklin Roosevelt, Gerges sees a constant tussle between “regionalists,” who are highly sensitive to the peculiarities of the Middle East, and “globalists,” whose approach to the region has stressed the unquestioning backing of Israel, first as a Cold War ally and later as a partner in the “war on terror.” The globalists have generally prevailed, never more so than during the George W. Bush years.

From 1997 until 2005, Mousavian was Iran’s lead negotiator in talks between the Islamic Republic and the international community over Iran’s nuclear program. He has produced an analysis of the situation free of hyperbole or bombast that contrasts the bargaining strategies of Iran’s pragmatists, of whom Mousavian is a proponent, and its hard-liner “principlists,” represented by Ahmadinejad. Mousavian is a staunch defender of Iran’s basic goal of mastering the nuclear fuel cycle, and his book leaves the reader with the strong impression that the West is not dealing with a set of messianic lunatics in Tehran.

This is an important book not only for its rich empirical exploration of the Muslim Brotherhood but also for Brown's insights into semiauthoritarian regimes, which allow opposition groups just enough room to organize and compete but not enough to win elections or form governments.

Lewis portrays himself as a historian self-consciously looking over his shoulder at the three facets of his persona -- Jewish, British, and Western -- and trying to correct for any bias they might produce. But he seems not to have noticed that as his profile as a public intellectual grew, his ability to correct sometimes faltered.