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editors came from "foreign missionary schools," the impact of the West on these journals
goes largely unexamined. There is little comparison with British and American periodicals,
although we are told that editors borrowed from them. The West is largely identified with the
suffrage movement, despite the fact that Western women's journals often focused on the same
issues as did those in Egypt: domestic science, girls' education, health, and "enhanced motherhood." More comparisonnot only with Western journals but also with those of countries
such as Japan which were also trying to combine reforms without "Westernization"would
make Baron's argument stronger. If these journals were unusual, as she suggests, these comparisons would confirm their originality.
Another consideration is the quality of the writing in the journals. The argument that these
journals had an impact might have been more convincing had Baron dealt with the skill of
the journalists in making their points. The ideas are considered collectively, so that there is
not much sense of women's individual arguments or abilities. The periodicals, then, are seen
as historical testimonies to an era but of no particular lasting literary heritage. This may not
reflect the author's final judgment, but the quality of the periodicals is left open to question.
These qualifications aside, Baron has given us a well-documented and very readable book.
The notes are extensive, but there is no bibliography. A bibliography would have been helpful, particularly one that contained a listing of the titles of the periodicals and their dates of
publication to illustrate their range and fragility of publication. This book will be an important
addition to Middle Eastern history collections and to international women's history, for it
documents women's participation in an era generally overlooked. Although the era 1870
1920 is often seen in the West in terms of the suffrage movement, The Women's Awakening in
Egypt reminds us that the international women's movement for educational and domestic reform was far broader. Further, Baron reminds us that Egyptian women took an active role
early in the process of Middle Eastern change.

SCHIRIN H. FATHI, JordanAn Invented Nation? Tribe-State Dynamics and the Formation of
National Identity, Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft des Vorderen Orients (Hamburg:
Deutsches Orient-Institut, 1994). Pp. 296.
REVIEWED BY MICHAEL R. FISCHBACH, Department of History, Randolph-Macon College,

Ashland, Va.
The dramatic events in Jordan within the past ten yearseconomic problems, disengagement from the West Bank, the 1989 riots, democratization, the Gulf War, and peace with
Israelhave prompted Jordanians and outside observers alike to probe into the nature of
Jordanian society, politics, and national identity as the country moves into a new era. JordanAn Invented Nation? Tribe-State Dynamics and the Formation of National Identity
stems from such probing. It examines the sociopolitical roots of Jordan's political structure,
although not always effectively.
The book is the doctoral dissertation Fathi presented to the University of Hamburg. This
in fact constitutes its major weakness: it was not reworked into a monograph. For instance,
it contains the long sections defining terminology and outlining social-science literature on
tribal structures and governance that characterize a dissertation. These should have been
dropped altogether to allow a more specific focus on Jordan. Nor do the chapters always
seem directly connected to one another. Again, a narrower focus on perhaps just one of several main topics the author explores would have led to a stronger work. There also is no index. These are typical and excusable features in a dissertation, but they should be addressed
when producing a monograph.

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A political scientist, Fathi focuses on three main issues in the book: tribes and tribal
structures and how these have changed in Jordan, the relationship between the state and
tribes in Jordan, and the formation of identity in Jordan. To a lesser extent, she also discusses
democratization. The bulk of her discussion deals with the first of these issues. She states
that her goal is to challenge the conventional wisdom that Jordan's tribal population is "the
sole stable backbone of the regime" (p. 9). Fathi also aims to show that it was in fact the
regime that molded the tribes to fit its needs. To accomplish this, she applies elite theory to
examine the state and tribes, and the latter's changing roles over the course of modern Jordanian history.
Unfortunately, Fathi's focus on state and tribe suffers from an imbalance between background and analysis. Long sections on tribal structure and the socioeconomic factors leading
to changes in tribal structure, on the one hand, and on the establishment and consolidation
of the state, on the other, are not tied together well with detailed discussions which would
accomplish precisely what Fathi seeks: namely, to discuss how tribe and state interact in order
to understand the tribes' role in Jordan's political structure. For this reason the work itself
does not quite deliver on its title: is Jordan an "invented" nation, and what role do the state
and the tribes play in this invention?
Fathi's discussion of identity is structured better and therefore plunges quickly into the
heart of the matter. She discusses the question of the degree to which Jordanians have formulated a national identity to augment their tribal identity. In this regard, she not only relies
on her earlier passages on changing tribal structures but injects the all-important question
of the Palestinians and Palestinian identity into her discussion (her dissertation was written
prior to the Israel-PLO accords). It is also in this section that she discusses the regime's
attempts to use democratization as the basis for the emergence of new national identities.
She concludes by asking rhetorically whether the political structure emerging from democratization is not in fact merely a new face on a political structure "deeply rooted in traditionalism" (p. 239).
One problem that frequently presents itself in studies of Jordan, and one which sometimes
emerges in Fathi's lengthy discussion of tribes, is the tendency to use the term "tribes" with
imprecision or to discuss the subject using ideal types. For example, "tribes" and "bedouin"
are not interchangeable terms in the Jordanian context. Even though Fathi draws attention to
this fallacy, she sometimes falls prey to it. In her discussion of the 1921 Kura rebellion, she
mentions that the bedouin are "usually hostile to the concept of centralized authority"
(p. 91). Although the Shurayda family of the Kura district could be called a "tribe" (it was
a kinship unit), it was not a bedouin tribe. The distinction between settled tribes and bedouin
tribes is an important one, especially in the Jordanian context. Fathi should exert greater care
in discussing these distinctions and their impact on Jordanian politics. As for her ideal type,
the tribesman who is hostile to central authority, Fathi elsewhere discusses the degree to
which the bedouin did cooperate with the Ottomans and political authorities in both the
emirate and the kingdom. Clearly, bedouin did deal with centralized authority; how, when,
and why they did so remain important questions which must be approached carefully. As
Fathi herself notes in the case of the (non-bedouin) Shuraydas and in that of the cAdwan
bedouin revolt of 1923, the causes for these uprisings were far more specific than merely
generalized antipathy toward centralized government.
The reliance on ideal types and images creates other problems at times. In discussing the
Jordanian army and the role of tribes in it, Fathi asserts that the "tribal population was less
susceptible to revolutionary thinking than its sedentary counterpart" (p. 133). When did this
quality emerge? Surely the cAdwan rebellion in 1923, which, as Fathi notes, was associated
with specific political demands for reform, indicates a tribal capability to articulate "revolutionary" demands. This may not be the type of radical politics she had in mind, but the

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political quietude attributed to the bedouin needs greater clarification. The important economic bases for bedouin loyalty to the army and the regime, as discussed by scholars such
as Tariq Tell, are vital for understanding this point.
Finally, Fathi could have improved her discussion of national identity by basing it upon
more solid data. Her manuscript relies largely on a small-scale survey carried out in northern
Jordan, press and secondary-source materials, and interviews with intellectuals and politicians.
But these sources cannot always support broad statements such as, "integration into the national concept has taken place on a wide scale and . . . tribal and kinship ties remain strongest
within the social context" (p. 182). Basing their conclusions on election results and exit polls,
among other data, scholars such as Linda Layne and Abla Amawi have interpreted various parliamentary elections since the 1980s as ringing affirmations that family ties are still vitally important on the political level (some of this writing has dealt with the 1993 elections, which
occurred after Fathi's manuscript was written). Fathi might also consider tempering statements
about the alleged impact of education and the media in fostering a "Jordanian national
identity . . . [and] shared national culture" and of the impact of "middle-class values" upon the
rest of society (p. 167) unless she produces harder evidence to support this conclusion.
The issues Fathi explores in JordanAn Invented Nation? are important and worthy of
discussion. Her examination could be improved by greater precision and organization, and
the use of a greater array of sources and data, in order to avoid recourse to the time-honored
and sometimes inaccurate characterizations that she seeks to overthrow.

MICHAEL M. LASKIER, North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century: The Jews of Morocco,
Tunisia and Algeria (New York: New York University Press, 1994). Pp. 414.
REVIEWED BY LAURENCE LOEB, Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City
Although Jews first settled in North Africa more than 2,000 years ago, and the coming of Islam found Jews well ensconced in urban and rural settlements throughout the region, historical studies in English of North African Jewry are very few. Among the most important
are H. Z. Hirschberg's A History of the Jews of North Africa, Daniel Schroeter's Merchants
of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco, 1844-1886, Norman
Stillman's The Jews in Arab Lands: A History and Source Book and The Jews in Arab Lands
in Modern Times, and Michael Laskier's previous study, The Alliance Israelite Universelle
and the Jewish Communities of Morocco: 1862-1962. None of these works examines in detail
the modern history of North African Jewry, and the recent social history of these communities
receives barely a glance. Thus, it was with considerable curiosity and great anticipation that
this reviewer began to read this work.
Laskier's book is a well-written, competent, and altogether interesting study. Aside from
brief discussion of the Spanish Zone of Morocco, the focus is limited to French-influenced
North Africaspecifically, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. Like the author's previous work,
this study is innovative in its use of sourcesnotably its extensive exploration of archival
materials and the judicious use of interviews, oral recordings, and biographical information.
The data are drawn largely from French and Jewish sources. Few indigenous Arab or Berber
sources are noted, and it is unclear whether they do not exist or were unavailable to the author.
Unfortunately, for this reader, the book's scope is considerably narrower than the title
implies. Laskier informs us in the introduction that he will end this "political" history in the
1960s and that he intends to (1) "provide a political textbook on North Africa's Jewish
communities," (2) "present an in-depth analysis of three Third World Jewish communities,
their exposure to modernization, and the relations with Muslims and the European settlers,"

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