Book Review: Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East

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Elizabeth F. Thompson , Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press , 2013). Pp. 432. $39.95 cloth.

Oppositional Thought and Movements for Justice

Elizabeth F. Thompson's Justice Interrupted, an exploration of constitutionalism in the modern Middle East, is a bold, synthetic work on political struggles throughout the region over the past few centuries, seen through the eyes of a widely disparate group of political leaders, activists, and intellectuals. The book has aspects that are unexpected for a history of constitutionalism in the Middle East.

First, the focus is extremely broad. That is true in a historical sense, since it begins in the premodern Ottoman period and goes through the Egyptian revolution of 2011. And it is true in a geographical sense, covering the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, and Israel. Of course, historians have written works with broad focus before, but the diversity of eras and areas forces a project like this to rely heavily (though not exclusively) on secondary sources and the interpretations of others. Only a skilled and sure-footed scholar can find his or her way through past work and produce an original...