Resources

Reprinted from the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Summer  2001 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards).
Copyright 2001 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America

`Anistuuna: Egyptian Colloquial, by Nahid ‘Awni. 141 pages, appendices, glossary. Cairo: Dar gharib li’l-tiba‘a, 1999. (Paper) ISBN 977-19-7930-2

This colorful textbook opens with four introductory stages meant to provide various starting points depending on how much background knowledge the student has. What follows are two units of five lessons each, the fifth lesson of each unit being a review chapter. Each lesson centers around a dialogue that a student of Arabic in Egypt might find him or herself in: meeting new people, taking an Arabic class, buying groceries, taking a taxi, and so forth. The dialogues are followed by the presentation of grammatical structures and a variety of drills and exercises. The book ends with several appendices: “List of Verbs,” “Different kinds of pronouns,” and “Possessive pronouns.” There is also a glossary and a final section entitled “Survival Arabic.”

While the structure of the book is sound enough, its communicative methodology current, the graphics colorfully pleasant, and its use of the Arabic alphabet welcome, it is so rife with inconsistencies, misspellings, and typographical errors that I would be hesitant to recommend it in its current form. Just a few examples: many new words go unglossed; there is an exercise on negation (p. 22 of “Preliminary stages”) before negation is introduced; in the dialogue of unit one the word Amriki is used but in the following questions Amrikani is given instead (p. 2); some of the units contain a few popular expressions which the student is instructed to memorize even though their meanings are not given. I also found the grammar rules to be problematic. For example: “When da comes right before the noun then it is realized as a formal subject and the following noun is realized as the predicate thus a sentence is composed. But if da comes right after the noun then it is realized as a demonstrative pronoun which functions as an adjective thus a phrase is composed” (p. 39). True, but this rule could have been better worded and made easier to understand by the inclusion of some examples.

`Anistuuna is accompanied by an audiotape. It is axiomatic that pronunciation in such materials be extremely accurate. It soon becomes apparent, however, that many of the beginning-student characters in the book are played by actual beginning or intermediate students of Arabic! The book also includes a set of pre-made flashcards of the verbs presented in the book. While these are a nice bonus, they too are not without mistakes. For example, the card for ‘to get up’ in English has yita’akhkhar (‘to be late’) on the Arabic side.

Toward the end of the book there is a section entitled “Survival Arabic.” The first word listed is “Artichoke,” an item not normally considered necessary for survival. Further reading reveals that this appendix is actually a useful—albeit mislabeled—list of foodstuffs. This quality seems to be representative of the book as a whole: if you can get past the mistakes and inconsistencies there is a lot of useful information to be had. Cleansed of its infelicities, the book could prove to be a useful part of a beginning Egyptian colloquial Arabic course for students with no or little background in Modern Standard Arabic.

Christopher Stone
Emory University


The Noble Qur’an: A New Rendering of its Meaning in English, translated by Abdallhaqq Bewley and Aisha Bewley. 651 pages, glossary. Norwich, UK: Bookwork, 1999. ISBN 1-874216-36-3

Reading the Bewleys’ English rendering of the Qur’an, one feature stands out in particular and it concerns the book’s structure: the suras are clearly delineated and each verse is rendered in short, stanza-like constructs, which evokes the poetry and rhythm of the original text. In this respect, the translation does great service to the character of the Arabic source. There is, however, a drawback to the structure, in that, visually and conceptually one loses the sense of unity in the text, which one gets from the original. In a way, the editing of atomized verses makes the translation and the presence of the translators quite noticeable, something which the translators in fact set out to avoid.

I found the translation of the Qur’anic text to be simple and as close as could be expected to the original Arabic. One finds numerous problems in reflecting morphological patterns in translation that carry particular semantic components, but that is to be anticipated, and for the most part, this does not appear to have damaged the original text beyond recognition. The translations of the Fatiha, Baqara, and Yusuf, for example, were a pleasure to read in their English rendering.

Nonetheless, the reader will notice immediately that not all terms are translated or even marked, for example “kafir” on p. 183 (9:91), “dunya” and “akhira” (2:215), “deen” (passim), as well as certain names of Suras. While I completely agree with the translators’ tendency to leave these terms in their Arabic form, the lack of some bracketed translation or annotation at the very least, somewhat obstructs the comprehension of the text. Moreover, it obscures the meaning of the terms as the translators themselves understand them, which is a crucial factor in dealing with a translated text. It is really quite impossible for a translator to be invisible. The more basic difficulty is, of course, a question of utility, since beginners or lay people will find this translation hard to use. For an advanced student the lack of indications of alternative readings that would have changed the translation of the text considerably, is somewhat disappointing. We are, in some measure, warned of this in the introduction when we are told that the translation is based on the Nafi` reading, and this at least gives the advanced student and scholar an idea of the translators’ starting point.

Another problem is the translators’ transliteration method: One hardly finds any indication of long vowels (that is, a,i, u; the use of ‘ee’ for i is confusing), and there is no indication of emphatic consonants, for example, all sura titles in the table of contents.

These shortcomings make it difficult, on the one hand, to use the Bewley translation as an effective tool for inexperienced students, and on the other, it is not a particularly useful tool for the advanced Qur’anic studies or Arabic language scholar. The translation, however, does its job of offering one interpretation of the sacred text in English, and taken as a reference aid, it does a fairly good job.

Dr. Rebecca B. Molloy
Independent Scholar


New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, edited by Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson. (Indiana Series in Middle East Studies) 213 pages, bibliography, index. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999. $19.95 (Paper) ISBN 0-253-21329-0

The advent of the Internet age has invited much futurist theorizing about technological driven change in global cultural and economic relations. New Media in the Muslim World is the first collective effort to consider the meanings and implications of increasingly networked communications for the Muslim world. Through a series of articles, the authors collectively illustrate in concrete and innovative ways how a “multiplication of voices in public discussion of religious and political belief...may become one of the major factors leading to a more civil society throughout the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world” (p. 38). The text’s ability to demonstrate in concrete and innovative ways how Muslim media discourses help to shape social practices in comparative perspective is its most important contribution.

The first three articles provide a general theoretical framework for more specific case studies. Eickelman and Anderson suggest that “a new sense of public” is being constructed through an array of new media (p. 1), while Richard Agustus Norton reminds us that although state authority is challenged by the proliferation of new media forms and communities, its retreat from the political process is slow. Nevertheless, the transformation of information flows in Muslim societies from vertical top-down fashion to more horizontal forms of exchange is not to be discounted (p. 21). It is a foundation upon which civil society will take root, and will slowly eat away at authoritarianism (p. 27). Eickelman suggests that access to new technologies “has multiplied the channels through which ideas and information can be circulated and has enlarged the scope of what can be said and to whom” (p. 29).

These more general notions of new media-driven change are then examined in terms of specific texts and contexts. Anderson considers the role of the Internet in providing “wider circulation [of] views that previously circulated only in narrower circles” (p. 43), with specific reference to interpretations of Islam. John Bowen illustrates that the state can use technological innovations in print and electronic communications “to try to create authoritative forms of public discourse that validate their own activities in Islamic terms” (p. 80). Expanding Bowen and Anderson’s views, Maimuna Huq illustrates how print culture in the form of Islamic novels in Bangladesh “signify a shifting attitude toward Islam,” and “reveal a new Muslim public sphere, primarily urban, which increasingly challenges the religious authority of traditional experts” (p. 133). Gregory Starrett examines the construction of Muslim consciousness among African-American Muslims via the exchange of new media texts and intellectual commodities, while Walter Armbrust analyzes class, gender, and religious contestations in leisure consumption, specifically the practice of going to the beach. Jenny White reveals how the telephone and new television stations help to foster national identity, mobilization, and trust among the working class, semi-literate populations of Turkey. Hakan Yavuz examines how international radio and satellite television stations enable Turkish minorities like the Alevis and Kurds to foster their local collective identity by creating media texts abroad and importing them to local audiences electronically, beyond state control.

Although a more generic chapter at the end would help the coherence of the volume, New Media in the Muslim World will appeal to a wide audience including undergraduates, Middle Eastern Studies specialists, scholars and students of media and communications, policymakers working in issues of media and democratization in the developing world, and the informed lay reader. 

Deborah L. Wheeler
University of Washington


The Oxford History of Islam, edited by John L. Esposito. 749 pages, chronology, bibliography, index. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999. $49.95 (Cloth) ISBN 0-19-510799-3

Esposito’s recent effort in mobilizing and forging a group of fifteen scholars has produced this well illustrated volume. Esposito is one of the leading Western scholars of Islam. The Oxford History of Islam demonstrates his remarkable expertise on the subject and his commitment to make the world of Islam easily accessible to all.

The book is divided into fifteen splendidly and vividly illustrated chapters along with a useful reference section that includes chronology, select bibliography, and lists of contributors and image sources. In addition to chapters on the historical, political, legal, scientific, artistic, and philosophical developments of Islam, it includes chapters on Muslim-Christian relations, Islam in the Middle East, South, Southeast, and Central Asia, China, and Africa. The last three chapters explore the contemporary history of Islam.

The first six chapters of this volume address the basic developments of Islam, including the era of the Prophet Muhammad and his successors, Islamic contributions in science and the arts, and current Islamic legal and religious thought. Analysis by authoritative scholars, such as Fred M. Donner, Vincent J. Cornell, Ahmad Dallal, and Majid Fakhry, illuminate the most recent research efforts. The following five chapters are focused on the expansion of Islam throughout the world. They underline both the difficulty and the ease with which Islam was able to deal with various cultures and different religious entities. Among these chapters is Ira M. Lapidus’ discussion on Islam in the Middle East. This is a well-illustrated narrative of the rise and decline of the Safavid and Ottoman Empires and their impact on the fundamental structures of the modern Middle East.

The remaining four chapters of this volume represent a mosaic of changes and developments in and around the Muslim World, particularly the emergence of Islamic modernist movements and the challenges facing them, the European imperial legacy, and Muslim responses to changes in the second half of the twentieth century. Included in these chapters is John O. Voll’s analysis on the origins of Islamic revivalist, activist, and reform movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Voll explains the role of such movements in the renewal of Islamic faith and society vis-à-vis challenges in the modern world. In another chapter, S. V. R. Nasr discusses how the legacy of European colonialism was a factor in the diversity and the unity of different attempts with state formation in the Muslim world.

While this volume is a valuable addition to an increasing number of works on the world of Islam, it lacks a chapter on the roles and activities of Muslim women. The recent explosion of studies on women in Islam should have been attractive enough for consideration in this volume and it would have contributed to its balance. Overall, given its historical and geographical depth, this book will be of use to a large community of scholarly and general readers.

Ahmed H. Ibrahim
Southwest Missouri State University


Biographical Dictionary of Modern Egypt, by Arthur Goldschmidt, Jr. 297 pages, index. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000. $65.00 (Cloth) ISBN 1-55587-229-8

A biographical dictionary of a modern country has to be more than a national roll call of the great and good. In the introduction to his Biographical Dictionary of Modern Egypt, Goldschmidt is clearly conscious of at least part of this when he states his main criterion for inclusion: is “person X needed to give a representative picture of modern Egypt’s history?” (p. ix). It follows that non-Egyptians should–and do–constitute an important element in the dictionary’s coverage. He goes on to assert that it is not enough to include the usual generals, diplomats, and politicians, which many of the older national biographies specialized in; also deserving attention, he observes, are the founders of department stores, theatrical troupes, and the like. It might be added that significance gained through notoriety or villainy should also merit inclusion. Be that as it may, Goldschmidt, with his relatively broad remit, has written four hundred or so entries on prominent men and women connected with the history of Egypt since the late eighteenth century. Each account is headed with life-dates (though death is not a prerequisite for inclusion) and an occupational statement, while the bottom of the entries has useful bibliographical sections detailing mainly published source materials in Arabic and European languages. The al-Ahram newspaper archives are also extensively drawn upon.

Concision is obviously a requirement for a one-man effort of three hundred pages. The longer entries–for example, Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir–are no longer than 1,300 words (excluding the reference sections). A more typical length is between 300 and 800 words. Although the style is mainly functional (the grammar of biographical dictionaries requires career details to be given, major publications to be noted, and so forth), Goldschmidt nevertheless manages to provide astute assessments of individual lives. Visual representations of the subjects are not included, maybe because of prohibitive costs. Given this, it is a pity that the entries make no attempt to describe physical characteristics, even when appearance was intrinsically linked to the repute of the person–for example, King Faruq in his later years. Of course, no review of a biographical dictionary would be complete without the reviewer pointing out at least one supposedly glaring omission. My own candidate for this would be, perhaps perversely, Jefferson Caffery, the American ambassador to Cairo at the time of the military coup in 1952. His embassy was crucial to Nasir’s consolidation of power. He was certainly as important in Egypt’s national life as some of the British imperialists who are included. These venial criticisms aside, Goldschmidt’s biographical dictionary will stand as an excellent reference tool for students of recent Egyptian history.

Michael T. Thornhill
Oxford University

Biblical Hebrew: An Analytical Introduction, by Winifred P. Lehmann, Esther Raizen, and Helen-Jo Jakosz Hewitt. 387 pages, bibliography, index. San Antonio, TX: Wings Press, 1999. $35.00 (Paper) ISBN 0-930324-37-4

This ‘analytical introduction’ is yet another elementary textbook for the language of the Hebrew Bible. It is inductively organized and presents various well-known texts in their full biblical dress and in transcription, with grammatical commentary and vocabulary. Many elementary language texts present themselves as suitable for self-instruction; so does this volume, and like most of the others, this claim is dubious. The distinctive feature of the book is the presentation of the texts in Hebrew script and a fairly technical transcription; thus users “need” not “learn the Hebrew characters” (p. xiv). The few well-motivated language learners who are really unable to grasp the Hebrew script and pointing are likely to have trouble with the transcription used here. It is a linguistically sophisticated system that well represents Hebrew script; I cannot persuade myself that it is easier to learn than the Hebrew.

The conceptual drawbacks of the book (the inductive organization, the script gimmick) are joined by various problems in execution, most notably a uselessly bulky glossary of over one hundred pages. In it, for example, every graphic word introduced by a prefixed article or preposition in the book gets a separate glossary entry. This and similar practices yield a result closer to a linguist’s dream of maximal explicitness than a language learner’s need for maximal utility.

There are many introductory Biblical Hebrew texts. In the English-speaking world alone, half a dozen have appeared in the last three years or will appear soon. I cannot see that this book will make a strong showing or deserves to do so. The first author is a distinguished historical linguist of Indo-European, especially Germanic, whose second festschrift appeared last year. Raizen is a student of (Modern) Hebrew language and literature, and Jakosz Hewitt is a language-learning expert. The book cannot detract from Lehmann’s considerable reputation, but sadly it will not add to it.

M. O’Connor
Catholic University of America


Historical Dictionary of the Persian Gulf War 1990-1991, by Clayton R. Newell. (Historical Dictionaries of War, Revolution, and Civil Unrest Vol. 9) 363 pages, bibliography, maps. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 1998. $65.00 (Cloth) ISBN 1-8108-3511-8

Newell has sought to compile a desk reference-type compendium of facts about the Persian Gulf War and establish a record of what went on in it. In the first endeavor he succeeds. It is worthwhile having a guide to the types of weapons used, the battlefield dispositions, and the UN resolutions that pertain to the conflict.

It is the other aspect of the work that gives trouble. The author reproduces a lot of distortions that ought never to have found their way into the record in the first place, let alone be repeated in a book of this sort. For example, the author says that, during the Iran-Iraq War, the Iraqi Kurds supported Iran. This is not true. Only two relatively small rebel groups did so; the mass of Iraqi Kurds were on the side of Baghdad, organized into militias called ‘fursan.’

Under another entry (“Glaspie, April”), the author claims that the transcript of her famous interview with Saddam, which the Iraqis subsequently released, is “incomplete.” There is no way of knowing this, unless one has access to classified documents. This reviewer believes that the transcript is complete, based on the fact that the Iraqis, over the years, more than once resorted to the tactic of releasing taped interviews, and their version was usually reliable.

Under an entry for “Reagan, Ronald,” the claim is made that the former US President “ignored” Iraq. From 1984 on, Washington supported Iraq by, among other things, lobbying its allies not to arm Iran. Reagan also lifted the ban on France’s export of French Super Etandard fighters to Iraq, which triggered the tanker war. And, of course, the Iran Contra affair, which was hardly ignoring the Iraqis.

Most puzzling is an entry for “Allen, Charles E.,” which says the CIA was the first to detect Iraq’s build-up prior to the invasion, and sound the alarm. This is nonsense. The CIA rejected the notion Iraq was set to invade, and only forty-eight hours before the event did it reverse itself.

There are several historical inaccuracies: Iraq was not a protectorate of the British, it was a mandated territory; Iraq did not first buy weapons from the Russians in the 1970s, Qasim made such purchases as far back as the early 1960s; and Saddam did not give the order for the Iraqis to gas the Kurds at Halabjah–Iraqi commanders throughout the war could, on their own authority, use such weapons whenever the situation was dire.

The Gulf War was probably the most propagandized event in modern history. Eventually, scholars will put the record straight. In the meantime, this book, because it accepts as fact so many interpretations that are questionable, needs to be handled with care.

Stephen Pelletiere
US Army War College



Azmat al-mustalah al-carabi fi al-qarn al-tasia cašar: Muqaddima tarixiyyah cammah (La Crise de la Terminologie Arabe au XIXe Siècle: Introduction Historique Générale), by Mohammed Sawaie. 159 pages, introduction in French and English, bibliography, index. Damascus: Institut Français de Damas, and Beirut: Dar al-Gharb al-Islami, 1999. (Paper) ISBN 2-90135-51-8

This book (in Arabic) looks at the history of lexical development in Arabic. It concentrates not only on the period of the nahd’a or Arab renaissance in the nineteenth century, but also touches on the other two seminal periods in the development of Arabic: the early Islamic period and the Age of Translation during the Abbasid age. It is a useful presentation of a wide variety of facts dealing with the recurrent problem of coining new ‘terminology’ in Arabic throughout the ages, and is well presented and very well annotated.

Azmat al-mustalah al-carabi fi al-qarn al-tasia cašar: Muqaddima tarixiyyah cammah is divided into six chapters, each of which deals with a separate epoch (chapters one through four) or with an individual from the nineteenth century period (chapters five and six). The first two chapters deal with time periods prior to the nineteenth century, in which Arabic was faced with the problems arising from the assimilation of foreign words and ideas. The first chapter gives background information on the early Islamic period, during and immediately following the Islamic conquests and spread of Arabic. Using a variety of sources, Sawaie gives a brief, but thorough, and quite useful summary of the pre-Islamic and early Islamic linguistic situation. The second chapter deals with the Abbasid age and the effects that the translation movements left on the Arabic language, again bringing together a variety of sources in discussing, among other things, the periodization of translation movements and the difficulties translators faced both with knowledge of source languages and topics (Greek, Persian, Sanskrit, philosophy, and the natural sciences) and with the target language (Arabic and its initial shortcomings and how they were overcome). The third chapter briefly sketches the background of the cultural and intellectual climate in Arab lands before the French invasion, and serves mainly as an introduction to the fourth chapter, which is the heart of the book. This chapter deals with the nineteenth century Arab cultural and linguistic renaissance, and the author synthesizes a great deal of useful and important information on the topic from a wide variety of sources. The fifth chapter deals with Ah’mad Faris al-šidyaq (1804?-87), a journalist and lexicographer (among other things) who played an important role in the lexical development of Arabic in the nineteenth century, while the sixth chapter treats the contributions of Rifac Rafic al-T­aht,awi (1801/2-73) to this development as well. There is much that is interesting and useful in these chapters which could also form the basis for more detailed work on these individuals and this epoch in the future.

The book is successful in presenting a large amount of information on the topic of lexical innovation in Arabic at various points in time, and is to be recommended for anyone interested in the issue of lexical innovation, language development, and the nineteenth century Arab renaissance. It is less successful, however, in synthesizing all of the facts it presents into a coherent whole. Also, the work sometimes deals with issues in a non-chronological order when a more chronological order would have aided the development of the general theme and helped to clarify the relationship between the various epochs. These problems, however, do not seriously detract from the value of the work, which will, it is hoped, provide the basis as well as the impetus for more studies on this topic in these historical periods.

John Eisele
College of William and Mary



Political Encyclopedia of the Middle East, edited by Avraham Sela. 815 pages, maps, tables. New York, NY: Continuum Publishing Company, 1999. $125.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0-8264-1053-7

This is a useful reference work, despite major flaws. Its 560 articles cover the political―and, to a lesser extent, economic and social—history of the twentieth century Middle East, including entries on most major political, and some military and religious, leaders. There are substantive articles on Arab nationalism, Islamic radicalism, oil, women, military forces, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. About 40 percent of the encyclopedia is about the conflict.

A major problem is that this compendium is not new, despite the publisher’s and editor’s claim. Many of the major articles were written for the Political Dictionary of the Middle East in the 20th Century, edited by Yaacov Shimoni and Evytar Levine, published in 1972 and reprinted with a supplement in 1974. It was updated and republished in 1987 in two volumes: Political Dictionary of the State of Israel, by Susan Hattis Rolef, and Political Dictionary of the Arab World, by Shimoni. Rolef acknowledged using several historical entries. Shimoni also acknowledged ‘drawing on’ the entries of the earlier editions.

This edition incorporates many of the major articles from the 1987 Shimoni volume and a few from Rolef, yet there is no indication of this borrowing anywhere. Moreover, many of the entries (Lebanon, Morocco, and Egypt, for example) are credited to a new set of authors, even though in many cases the new ‘authors’ did little except update articles from the earlier editions. There is no acknowledgment of the contributors to those editions. This practice is unfair to the original authors, to say nothing of its scholarly propriety.

Since the main portion of many of the major historical articles were originally written for the earlier editions, the bulk of this work has not digested the massive amount of recent scholarly studies, based on newly opened archives and new research. This is particularly apparent in entries on the Arab-Israeli conflict, where entries, with few exceptions, do not benefit from the work of revisionist Israeli historians. Alexander Bligh acknowledges the “tacit agreement” between King Abdullah and the Jewish Agency to divide Palestine in 1946-47 (p. 430). Aziz Haidar, the lone Israeli Palestinian scholar, discusses inequality and discrimination against Israeli-Arab citizens.

But generally the old history predominates. The article on refugees states that “recent studies” based on Israeli archives show that there was “no official policy or instruction” to expel the Palestinians and that most “fled their homes on their own initiative” (p. 634). The entries on both Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir largely ignore their roles in events during the 1944-48 period, slighting new evidence of their involvement in some of the major violent incidents of that time. Barry Rubin’s twelve-page article on Terrorism has six useful pages on Palestinian terrorism but only a single sentence and a half on Jewish terrorism. This kind of sanitization of history is unbecoming in a scholarly reference work.

Still, this encyclopedia is a user-friendly guide to important data. A more balanced, though shorter, one-volume reference work is Dilip Hiro’s Dictionary of the Middle East (1996).

Philip Mattar
Institute for Palestine Studies

Introduction to Syriac: An Elementary Grammar with Readings from Syriac Literature, by Wheeler M. Thackston. 228 pages, index, appendices. Bethesda, MD: IBEX Publishers, 2000. $30.00 (Paper) ISBN 0-936347-98-8

The first pages of Introduction to Syriac give a brief introduction to this literary language of non-Greek, eastern Christianity. Syriac, which belongs to the Levantine group of West Semitic languages, and is related to all other forms of Aramaic, became an important intermediary between Greek and Arabic learning. The second introductory part, “Preliminary Matters,” concerns the sounds of Syriac (consonants, vowels, Begadkepat, and Schwa), syllabification, stress, orthography (Estrangela, Nestorian, Jacobite), numerals, and a comparative chart of Semitic consonants. A preliminary reading exercise for spirantization of Begadkepat consonants concludes the introduction. The core of the book presents the grammar of Syriac in twenty lessons (with exercises in reading and writing), and three appendices. It concludes with a brief list of Syriac grammars, dictionaries, and concordances. A chrestomathy of twelve genres of Syriac writing, a vocabulary that lists words both in Estrangela (the basic script of the book) and in transcription, and an index complete the book.

Several features of the book are noteworthy. The use of transliterated Syriac throughout the book, including the Syriac-English vocabulary and the three appendices to the grammar (verbal inflections, the states of the noun, and verbs with enclitic objects) tends to confuse rather than simplify recognition and pronunciation of the forms. Estrangela is indeed an elegant script, but the modern type-face used in this book seems inferior to the beauty of the type-face that Brockelmann used for his chrestomathy in his Syrische Grammatik. Modern linguistic terms are used to identify aspects of the grammar, for example, prothesis, proclitics, enclitics, substantisized and abstracted particles, geminate verbs, postpositive particles, and others. These terms require some getting used to, as in the sentence, “Prepositions with noun complements are often anticipated by a redundant preposition with a pronominal enclitic complement agreeing with the noun complement of the following, ‘real’ prepositional phrase” (p. 21, par. 4.4). Or, “The infinitives of all sound G-form verbs are made on the pattern meCCaC” (p. 72, par. 13.4). The designation II-Alap, for what have long been known as ’ayin-aleph’ verbs, or III-weak verbs, instead of ‘weak lamad verbs,’ does not seem to be an improvement.

The book would benefit from further proof-reading. For example, on page 224, “Preliminary exercise (p. xxv)” should read “p. xxvi;” the final sentence on p. ix should read “Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac consonants”; p. ix, line 11 should read “xii-xiv;” on p. xi, column 2 read “farther forward in the throat,” instead of “father forward;” on p. 6 Syriac Vocabulary 1, NOUNS, linea occultans is missing on mditta. The section on syllabification (p. xiv) ends with examples that do not seem to relate to “words that begin with a vowel.” One can certainly learn Syriac with the help of Introduction to Syriac, but I think the going may be slow.

John H. Marks
Princeton University