Russia’s Muslim Frontiers

A book that is more appealing in conception than execution: the product of a Soviet-era collaboration between excellent Soviet and American analysts, who deal with everything from the record of Soviet and U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East to the political evolution within Afghanistan and Pakistan, but mostly with the former Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union. The collective result, however, falls short of its promise. It contains substantial articles on the revival of Islam in Uzbekistan (by Abdujabar Abduvakhitov), the Kurds and Bakhtiyari of Iran (by Gene Garthwaite), and Islamization in Pakistan (by Richard Kuran). A number of the chapters, however, look too much like the conference papers they originally were. Some are disappointingly brief.