Editor's Shelf pictures the books as they appear on the shelf. It's more of an inventory of recent arrivals than any serious assesment of the book.

The New Politics of Gender Equality by Judith Squires, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, ISBN 978-0230007703, 256 pages $34.95

Political interventions in pursuit of gender equality are currently high on the political agenda, but the transformative potential of women's policy agencies, gender quotas and gender mainstreaming is frequently compromised by the demands of neo-liberal governance on the one hand and essentialist assertions of group identity on the other. This book explores the potential of these strategies arguing that they need to be framed by considerations of democratic justice rather than technocratic utility and complex diversity rather than sexual difference.

Allies for Armageddon : The Rise of Christian Zionism, Victoria Clark, Yale University Press, Cloth ISBN: 9780300116984, $28.002007 344 pp.

Guided by a literal reading of the prophetic sections of the Bible, Christian Zionists are convinced that the world is hurtling toward a final Battle of Armageddon. They believe that war in the Middle East is God’s will for the region. In this timely book, Victoria Clark first explores the 400-year history of this powerful political ideology, laying to rest the idea that Christian Zionism is a passing craze or the province of a lunatic fringe. Then Clark surveys the contemporary Christian Zionist scene in Israel and in the United States, where the influence of the religious fundamentalists has never been greater.

Islamic Imperialism : A History, Efraim Karsh, Yale University, 2007 304 pp. Paper ISBN: 9780300122633, $17.00

From the first Arab-Islamic Empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the last great Muslim empire, the story of the Middle East has been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less important, of imperialist dreams. So argues Efraim Karsh in this highly provocative book. Rejecting the conventional Western interpretation of Middle Eastern history as an offshoot of global power politics, Karsh contends that the region’s experience is the culmination of long-existing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior, and that foremost among these is Islam’s millenarian imperial tradition.
The author explores the history of Islam’s imperialism and the persistence of the Ottoman imperialist dream that outlasted World War I to haunt Islamic and Middle Eastern politics to the present day.

Women, Power and Politics by Anne Stevens, Palgrave Macmillan 2007, ISBN 978-0230507814, $33.95, 288 pages

This book is a major new introduction to women's political involvement and role in the liberal democratic world drawing examples from a wide range of countries to illustrate key common features and divergences. Anne Stevens not only assesses the extent of women's participation and representation in government, and in parliaments but also in grass roots politics. The central focus throughout is on the issue of whether and how gender makes a difference.

The Sectarian Milieu: Content And Composition of Islamic Salvation History,  John Wansbrough , Gerald Hawting (Foreword),  Prometheus Books, 2006 ISBN 1591023785, 200 pages $32

In The Sectarian Milieu Wansbrough "analyses early Islamic historiography –or rather the interpretive myths underlying this historiography—as a late manifestation of Old Testament ‘salvation history.’" Continuing themes that he treated in a previous work, Quranic Studies, Wansbrough argues that the traditional biographies of Muhammad (Arabic sira and maghazi) are best understood, not as historical documents that attest to "what really happened," but as literary texts written more than one hundred years after the facts and heavily influenced by Jewish, and to a lesser extent Christian, interconfessional polemics. Thus, Islamic "history" is almost completely a later literary reconstruction, which evolved out of an environment of competing Judeo-Christian sects.