This volume is the third in a series that provides brief abstracts of scholarship originating in Muslim majority countries, published in various languages, and their translation into Arabic, English and Turkish. In this volume, the themes are cities and urbanism in the Islamic world, from North Africa to Indonesia. The scholarship included in the volume was originally published in Farsi, Turkish, Arabic, Russian, Urdu, Bahasa Indonesian and Bosnian. The works were published between 1875 and 2011. Abstracts within the volume appear in alphabetical order of the original title. The indices at the end of each section (English, Turkish and Arabic) are helpful finding aids as they list authors, figures and cities mentioned.

The selection of works to be summarized is harder to trace as the volume covers a very wide range of cities and regions: hence, the number of books on any region is forcibly limited. At the same time, the large-scale efforts of the editor, the scholars who completed the abstracts, and the translators who handled the transition between multiple languages, are to be praised. The work will be most useful for two main purposes: first, it provides scholars with abstracts of books that might be rare or difficult to find outside major research libraries, or outside the country of publication. Second, the volume can provide an overview of references in languages outside a scholar's specialization, in order to gain first insights into the existing literature. From both points of view, it might have been useful to translate the abstracts into Farsi, in addition to Arabic, English and Turkish. The volume cannot of course replace detailed research, but by presenting major works on a wide range of regions, it does provide a useful set of references.

Even though presenting a critical study is not necessarily the aim of the volume, a longer introduction would have been desirable. In its present form, the introduction points to various important issues – cities conquered by Muslim armies early on, such as Madaʾin; the foundation of Baghdad by the ʿAbbāsids; the importance of urban centres in the Middle East. However, the observations remain both too general for the specialist, and offer little detail for anyone unfamiliar with, yet interested in the question of cities in the Islamic world. It would have been especially useful to address the complex and problematic issue of “Islamic” cities, with its long and difficult historiography, and the attendant assumptions in the literature that need to be questioned. By including also present-day problems of urbanism and demographics, the introduction brings up a second set of issues that could have been discussed in more detail. It is understandable, however, that such detailed analysis of the existing literature is not the aim of the volume. Overall, the introduction serves mainly to mention a few important issues such as the global South, the Arab Spring, periodization of history within the Middle East, and colonial and national historiographies. In the discussion of specific locations – such as Istanbul, Karachi, and Jakarta – enough detail is provided to make the non-specialist curious, and the specialist regret that a longer discussion was not possible. Here, a selected bibliography of the most recent literature would have been useful, especially since the abstracts do not include works published outside predominantly Muslim countries. Important too are the sections on thematic issues such as social justice, urban planning, ethnic tensions and wars – questions that cannot be divorced from each other, or from the topic at large. The section on heritage and preservation, towards the end of the introduction, points to the importance of research that aims to conserve existing structures within ever-growing urban centres. This is one of the stronger parts of the introduction, as it offers useful references to recent scholarly and journalistic publications.

In the final section, the following passage is perhaps the clearest statement as to the goal of the volume: “The present volume has gathered together over two hundred abstracts of publications published in Muslim majority countries with a view to supporting such debates” (p. 11). As presented here, the volume offers access to, in part, not widely read publications, and opens up points of view for discussion that might not be well represented otherwise.