“Sunlight and shadow are the same.” Quoting Emerson’s paradox, the late Ethel Roosevelt Derby opened a photographic laboratory she had established in the basement of the Harvard Semitic Museum in memory of her daughter, who had died young a few months before. That paradox succinctly summarizes the physical basis for photography and epitomizes as well something unique about culture and the human spirit: adversity often brings blessings “in disguise.”

Since 1970, when the last state-of-the-art paper on the “Demography of the Middle East” was published in this Bulletin (Sabagh, 1970), there has been a spectacular expansion of population studies on the Middle East. This is documented by the various bibliographies of these studies published in this period (Balkan, 1972; Loza, 1979a, b; United Nations, ECWA, 1980). Thus, if we consider only the Arab East, the number of articles and books on the population of the region more than doubled between the 1960s and the 1970s (United Nations, ECWA, 1980). During the latter decade, there was an increasing number of detailed descriptions of the demographic characteristics and trends for most countries of the Middle East (Allman & Hill, 1978; Abu Jaber et al., 1980; Bachi, 1977; Baddou, 1974; Bahri, 1974; Behnam & Amani, 1974; Courbages & Fargues, 1974, 1975; Deming, Van Arsdol & Zayani, 1978; Hagopian & Zahlan, 1974; A.G. Hill, 1975, 1980a, b; Ibrahim, 1977; Karadayı et al., 1974; Khalifa, 1975; Kossaifi, 1980; Omran, 1973; Salih, 1976; Samman, 1976; Seklani, 1974; U.N., ECWA, 1978a, b; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1980). Contributing to this growth is the fact that in the 1970s the Cairo Demographic Center and the Population Division of the United Economic Commission for Western Asia became two major, regional centers of demographic research on the Arab world (Tabbarah, Mamish & Gemayel, 1978). Another important factor has been the marked improvement in the volume, variety and quality of demographic data (United Nations, ECWA, 1979b).