Reviews

The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906–1911: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism , Janet Afary, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, xxi + 448 pp., Bibliography, Index.

Surveyors of Persian Art: A Documentary Biography of Arthur Upham Pope & Phyllis Ackerman , Jay Gluck and Noel Siver, eds., Ashiya, Japan: SoPA and Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda, 1996, xxii + 658 pp., illustrations, Bibliography, Index.

Syria and Iran: Rivalry and Cooperation , Hussein J. Agha and Ahmad S. Khalidi, London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1995, xii + 126 pp.

Iran and the Muslim World: Resistance and Revolution , Nikki R. Keddie, New York: New York University Press, 1995, ix + 303 pp.

Études safavides , Jean Calmard, ed., Bibliothèque Iranienne 39, Paris and Téhéran: Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, 1993, xiv + 389 pp., 58 plates.

Women and Fundamentalism: Islam and Christianity , Shahin Gerami, Women's History and Culture, Vol. 9, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996, xiii + 178 pp.

The Persian Revolution , Edward G. Browne, Abbas Amanat, ed., New Edition, Washington: Mage Publishers, 1995, Ixiv + 470 pp., Introduction, correspondence, reviews.

Iran After the Revolution: Crisis of an Islamic State, Saeed Rahnema and Sohrab Behdad, eds., London and New York: I.B. Taurus, 1995, xii + 292 pp., Index.

Mediaeval Isma^cili History and Thought ,Farhad Daftary, ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, xviii + 331 pp.

A Journey to Persia: Jean Chardin's Portrait of a Seventeenth‐Century Empire , R.W. Ferrier, ed., London and New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996, 256 pp., illustrations.

George Ball: Behind the Scenes in U.S. Foreign Policy ,James A. Bill, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Shi^ca Islam: From Religion to Revolution , Heinz Halm, translated by Allison Brown, Princeton, New Jersey: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1997, 176 pp.

Iran and the Former Soviet South , Edmund Herzig, London: Royal Institute for Foreign Affairs, 1995.

Torture and Modernity: Self, Society and State in Modern Iran , Darius M. Rejali, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1994, xviii + 289 pp.     

Potemkin Portals or the Real Revolution? The State of E‐Government in Egypt

Effective and optimized e‐government in Egypt faces daunting challenges that are less technical in nature and more over the issues of institutional resistance and of political will. A review of the state of e‐government in Egypt is presented with analysis focusing on the state of service implementation in 2012. The points of discussion on e‐government covered here include:

• E‐subjugation in the guise of e‐government via information control and cyber‐snooping;
• Institutional resistance to the transformation of routine functions into automated systems;
• Institutional resistance to transparency of government operations;
• Analysis of the state of Egyptian ministry websites on six dimensions of e‐government development;
• Discussion on implementation of Egypt's e‐government master plan;
• Commentary on the revolutionary potential of e‐government augmented by vision, competence, and leadership; and
• Caveats that are important to note in moving the vision of e‐governance from concept to practice.

     

Incentives for the Iranian Chemical Boom: A Strategic Motivation or Applied Needs?

Iran's scientific impact has suffered hard from decades of imposed and self‐elected isolation from Western influences and international collaboration. Lately, however, the world has witnessed a remarkable increase in scientific publications from Iranian scientists in fields like nanotechnology; material science; and, perhaps most pronounced, chemistry. In this article, the factors behind this “publication boom” are discussed and examined together with an analysis of the coherence between the country's long‐term research strategies and short‐term needs in relation to present organic chemical research conducted at various Iranian universities and institutes. Organic chemistry is a keystone in important Iranian industrial sectors like the petroleum and agricultural industries, and also in the growing field of life science and pharmacology. The development of the petroleum industry and further refinement of raw oil into value‐added fine chemicals holds a key position in the reinforcement of the Iranian economy and labor market, thus motivating a governmental investment in chemical science and research. Taking an approach to find a reasonable balance with the impact from Western and Far Eastern scientific communities, Iran's own scientific roots and Islamic ideology could well be the success factor in becoming a worthy player on the international scientific arena.     

Egypt,Islamists, and the Internet: The Case of the Muslim Brotherhood and Its Rhetoric of Dialectics in Ikhwanweb

This essay offers an ideological analysis of the rhetoric of the Islamist Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in its official English‐language Web site, Ikhwanweb, between 2005 and 2010 — years preceding the Egyptian uprising of January 2011. The purpose was to examine the ideology manifest in the rhetoric and uncover the instrumental function the rhetoric served. Analysis brought forth a post‐Islamist ideology manifest through a rhetoric of dialectics. The instrumental function of the Egyptian MB's rhetoric in Ikhwanweb was to alter Western societies' monolithic understanding of Islamism — radical, undemocratic, inflexible. The cyber‐rhetoric was also used as a means to disapprove certain Western agents' support for authoritarian regimes. During Mubarak's rule, Ikhwanweb was used as a communicative medium to demonstrate to the West the Egyptian MB's need to be valued — respected regardless of ideological differences, understood rather than essentialized, stereotyped, and prejudged, and supported as a pragmatic, political entity within Egypt.