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A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period , by Jamil M Abun-Nasr. 3rd ed. xvi + 455 pages, glossary, maps, bibliography, index. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York 1987. $59.50/$24.95.

For those who teach courses on North African history, Jamil Abun-Nasr's A History of the Maghrib (2nd edition, 1975) has been like an old family car: one continues to use it, not because it is enjoyable but because it is the only vehicle in the garage. Although this new model with a new name retains many features of the old, it has undergone extensive structural modifications, and several important features have been added. This review will be confined to comparing the 1987 book with the 1975 edition. As the 1987 title suggests, the author has deleted the chapters on Carthage and Rome. He has then expanded, rewritten, and recast the first third of the book, which treats the period from the Arab conquest to the late eighteenth century. In this section, every change constitutes an improvement. There is a new emphasis on social, economic, and intellectual developments, on the role and personalities of the major cities, on the complex process of Islamicization, and on the institution of the jund. In addition, the author has included more material on the Fatimids, the Berber dynasties, Spain, and the early Ottoman period. As valuable as this expanded content is, it is perhaps the revised presentation that so distinguishes this book from its predecessor. The author has tightened up his prose, added introductions and conclusions to chapters and subsections, and generally paid far more attention to providing an overview than was the case previously. Despite these improvements, certain familiar drawbacks remain. AbunNasr continues to present precolonial Maghribi history as a detailed study of dynastic succession. The jumble of names and parenthetical information that often confuses students has been reduced, but not eliminated. Nevertheless, the chapters on the precolonial Maghrib represent a distinct improvement on the 1975 edition. And one important attribute remains: Abun-Nasr includes Libya in his definition of the Maghrib. The chapters covering the nineteenth century to independence appear in much the same form as they did in 1975. To be sure, there are some new paragraphs on the Constantine of Ahmad Bey, on Abd al-Krim, and on Islam in interwar Algeria. However, the rigorous rewriting and recasting that went into the precolonial chapters is not as evident for the modern period. If one was dissatisfied with this section in the original, one is likely to remain so. What is new is a twenty-one page epilogue on the Maghrib after independence; this section has a strong beginning but ends up being