Since the inception of the “computer age,” much talk has been heard about applying this relatively new technology for manipulating information to the medieval manuscript fragments from the Cairo Geniza. The uses of the Geniza, particularly its documentary sources, for Middle Eastern history will be well known to many readers of this Bulletin. The thousands of letters, court records, marriage contracts, lists, and other documentary treasures, preserved for centuries in a large discard chamber in what is today the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, and written in Hebrew or Judæo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew letters), with a small number in Arabic language and script, constitute an unmediated source for the reconstruction of what the late Professor S. D. Goitein called the “Mediterranean Society” of Jews, Muslims, and Christians of the high Middle Ages.

When I told some of my colleagues and students that I wanted to address the question of democratization in Middle East politics at the annual meeting, I was not surprised at their reactions, which were mainly incredulous. If ever a topic were passé, surely it was this one. Not only was the experience of parliamentary democracy brief and unhappy, it also had ended by the middle 1950s. Furthermore, the liberal modernization paradigm that had underpinned earlier forecasts of democracy was itself largely discarded. In addition, my friends argued, how could I try to make a case for democratization when my own writing on Arab politics portrayed fragmented, disoriented societies and unstructured, insecure political environments in which the race between societal demands and state capabilities—no matter which side was “ahead”—could hardly be conducive to democracy. Skeptical colleagues from Egypt and other Arab countries also raised the troublesome question of academic and ideological ethnocentrism: should one even ask about prospects for democratization?

The wave of the study of women which led directly into the formation of the new discipline called women’s studies started in the 1960s in the Middle East and the United States concurrently. A generation earlier, foreshadowing the creation of the new field, Zahiyya Dughan, a Lebanese delegate to the Arab Women’s Conference in Cairo in 1944, called upon Arab universities to accord the intellectual and literary heritage of Arab women a place in the curriculum by creating chairs for the study of women’s writings. By now, at the end of the 1980s, women’s studies as a distinct field has found legitimacy in the academy. In the United States there are women’s studies programs in all major colleges and universities—more than sixty graduate programs offer M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s—and fifty major research centers, most of which are attached to universities. The National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) and the Middle East Studies Association equally claim some three thousand members. However, the study of women remains marginal within Middle East studies, while women’s studies still remain largely centered on the West.

Why are there relatively few American academicians applying for overseas grants? This was the underlying question at a meeting in April, 1988, where members of the CIES (Council for the International Exchange of Scholars of the Fulbright Commission), the U.S. Information Agency, and the Board of Foreign Scholars, the body which oversees all American government-sponsored activities, met. As background material, CIES presented data accumulated from surveying a sample of individuals who had requested information for Fulbright programs but had not applied. (Twenty-six of the sample were interested in the Middle East programs.) Information of a non-quantitative nature was drawn from the reports of recent Fulbrighters and was also included.

American Academic Exchange with the Middle East through the Fulbright Program is nearly as old as the U.S. government fellowship program itself. Yet even now, after nearly four decades of exchange, there remain many obstacles to academic exchange with the Middle East. For example, during the past three years there has been a declining interest on the part of American scholars in Middle East Fulbright sojourns. This lack of interest is found not only among scholars in disciplines unrelated to the Middle East but among Middle East specialists as well. American scholars seem to look more toward the rest of the world than the Middle East when considering a Fulbright experience.

Much has been happening in Middle Eastern microfilming and fiching for preservation. This report will highlight some of the recent developments. I have divided this discussion by source of micropublishing and micropreservation, and will conclude with some considerations for the future.