To what extent international relations in the Middle East can be explained using analytical concepts that are routinely deployed to deal with other parts of the world remains a hotly contested issue. The dangers that go along with insisting that Middle Eastern politics can best be understood using theories that highlight peculiarities of culture and religion are by now well understood and widely acknowledged. Nevertheless, it remains tempting to return to Orientalist pathways and assert that values and ideas that seem to differentiate Easterners from Westerners play a crucial role in shaping Middle Eastern diplomacy, no matter what Edward Said might have argued.

It is this fine line that Lawrence Rubin attempts to walk. On one hand, he states as a matter of fact that “the empirical reality of the Middle East suggests a different dynamic from the conventional approaches [used by international relations scholars] in which states respond to external military threats through external alliance formation.” Yet in the very next sentence, he backs away from this claim: “This is not to say that the Middle East is exceptional or unique but rather that many of the concepts and theories based on a different set of empirical realities may not always apply to other regions” (p. 22). The crucial question is: who decides what “really” characterizes Middle Eastern politics? One might well argue that the truly conventional viewpoint is one that emphasizes ideology and religion, while the more subversive research strategy would look behind these epiphenomena.

As the title of the book suggests, Rubin hypothesizes that dynamics connected to Islam drive interstate conflicts from Morocco to Pakistan. In particular, the activist Islamist leaderships that came to power in Iran in 1979 and in Sudan a decade later posed a severe threat to adjacent authoritarian regimes, most notably those of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The authorities in Cairo and Riyad did their best to parry the threats, either by “rebutting” these countries’ claims to represent the true nature of Islam or by launching deliberate “counterattacks” aimed at “delegitimiz[ing these two states’] policies and ideas as well as those domestic actors [inside Egypt and Saudi Arabia] that may support the policies” adopted by Iran and Sudan (pp. 37–38). These religion-oriented interactions are presented as instances of “the ideational security dilemma” (p. 19).

While the argument is provocative, three objections come to mind. First, to what extent is it useful to assume that Islam, or any religion for that matter, counts as an ideology? Rubin notes that “religion can serve as the source of a rich set of ‘cultural tools’ for collective political behavior by connecting believers’ ancient past with the present and future. Thus, these factors, particularly the potential to communicate and mobilize across borders, make religion a powerful social force and basis for a political ideology” (p. 13). But surely unless one is a thoroughly unreconstructed Marxist, religion is more than this. Readers may well wonder how sophisticated the book's conception of religion might be, when the text continues: “perhaps the most striking feature of religion is its association with ‘irrational’ political behavior and violence. … Religion can act as a ‘force-multiplier’ to strengthen assumptions about ideological actors’ inflexibility, pursuit of values over strategic interests, risk acceptance, and aggressiveness” (p. 13). Would one make such comments in the course of explaining relations among Buddhist countries?

Second, what exactly is the dilemma entailed by the ideational security dilemma? Assuming that the Islamic Republic of Iran did indeed set out to export the revolution (more on this in a moment) in 1979–80, and that Egypt responded by “grant[ing] the shah asylum as an expression of authentic Islamic values, which represented a tolerant and moderate Islam, in contrast to Khomeini's version” (pp. 49–50, italics in the original), what was the mutually undesired outcome? What two incompatible and equally unpalatable options did Cairo face in its dealings with Tehran, or Riyad in its confrontation with Khartum? Alternatively, in what way did Cairo's reaction to Tehran's initiatives leave the Islamic Republic worse off than it had been before the Iranian regime launched its campaign to undermine the legitimacy of surrounding governments? Unless questions like these get addressed explicitly, the notion of the security dilemma loses much of its conceptual punch. Moreover, as Robert Jervis observes with regard to the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, if it is perfectly obvious which actor is threatening the system, there may be no dilemma involved in how others deal with the problem.

Third, did the threat to surrounding states that accompanied the emergence of postrevolutionary Iran and postrevolutionary Sudan derive from the religious character of the new governments or instead from features common to revolutionary regimes? Stephen Walt, Patrick Conge, and others have argued persuasively that leaderships that come to power through the violent overthrow of an existing political order tend to endanger the security of adjacent states, and provoke concerted efforts to block the further expansion of the radical movement. Rubin seems to recognize the problem, and lists Walt's Revolution and War in the bibliography (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996). But he also asserts that Iran and Sudan posed a threat to neighboring states due to the fact that they took steps to “project” their respective ideologies, whereas Turkey's Justice and Development Party “has not projected its ideology” (p. 5). The book therefore misses an important opportunity to disentangle and clarify the impact of these overlapping sources of external threat on the interests of established states and regimes across the Middle East.