This has been a difficult year for people who study the Middle East – as it has been for people who live there. Memorable mostly for its dilemmas and disappointments, it has not been the kind of year on which one would ordinarily dwell. Yet there are important lessons in this year, lessons about the relationship between scholarship and policy, about the responsibilities imposed by an academic life in a time of deeply divisive debate and conflict, and about why what we do is profoundly important, not just to the small community of our professional peers but for the health of our society and of our world. It is to those questions – and the lessons I believe we must draw from the experience of this year – that I want to devote our attention this evening.

Word began to trickle out of Baghdad in mid-April 2003 that the Iraqi National Library and Archives and the library of the Ministry of Holy Endowments and Religious Affairs (al-Awqaf) had been burned and looted during the paroxysm of aggravated mayhem that followed the collapse of the Baathist regime. Soon, it became clear that in addition to the damage to those libraries, universities, research centers and private institutions had also been harmed or destroyed, and that additional elements of Iraq's rich cultural heritage in the form of historic buildings, musical archives and contemporary art were at risk. These were moments of deep and profound sadness that ultimately gave way to conversations about ways to work to assess, rebuild and restore what had been lost.

In March 2004, I sat in the refurbished office of Ms. Juwan Mahmoud, the Chief Librarian of the Iraqi Academy of Sciences (in Arabic, al-majma' al-ilmi) in the Al-Waziriyya section of Baghdad. The Iraqi Academy had been looted of its first-rate collection of manuscripts in Arabic, Farsi, Turkish and other languages immediately after the war. When I had first met Juwan, it was in the ruins of the library. I remember the rooms piled high with trashed documents and manuscripts haphazardly strewn around the place, and rows upon rows of gutted library shelves. I had gone to Baghdad in June 2003 with three colleagues – Jens Hanssen, Edouard Méténier and Keith Watenpaugh – to investigate the burning and pillaging of university and research libraries. One member of the group, Jens Hanssen, made a short documentary of the wrecked library premises, in which Juwan played a starring role. In the spirit of an Iraqi passionara, she forcefully called upon the conscience of the world to restore the Iraqi Academy's collections immediately.

The building of a library is a fundamental gesture of hope, if not in the perfectibility of humankind, at least in its mission to affirm and make accessible the legacy of scholars, researchers and creative minds of the past and present and the capacity of that legacy to guide and inspire the future, and thus to advance the prospects of all individuals and society as a whole. No serious education – particularly higher education – is possible without adequate libraries. Those who do not have such access for whatever reason are condemned to the most limited purchase on the possibilities the world has to offer. This essay addresses the fate of Bosnian libraries, efforts to ameliorate their condition, successes and failures in that regard, and reflections upon the state of similar institutions in Iraq and current efforts to address their plight, following a few thoughts concerning libraries and politics.

The tradition of Middle Eastern studies in Finland is long but rather thin. The chair for Oriental Languages (mainly Hebrew and Aramaic) was established at Turku University in 1640, changing its name (Linguarum Orientalium Professio) several times over the years before becoming Semitic Languages. After the great fire destroyed almost the whole city of Turku, the university was relocated to Helsinki in 1828. In the mid-19th century, the chair was held by G.A. Wallin (d. 1852), an explorer of the Arabian Peninsula (and a visitor to the holy city of Mecca) and one of the first scholars, worldwide, to study Arabic dialects. In the latter part of the 19th century, Assyriology became the most flourishing field of Middle Eastern Studies in Finland, several great Assyriologists, such as Knut Tallqvist (d. 1949), holding the chair of Oriental Languages. Though concentrating on Assyriology, Assyriologists also kept alive Arabic philological studies, which gained additional weight in the 1960s when the Assyriologist and Comparative Semitist Jussi Aro (d. 1983) was appointed as professor. He retrained himself as a dialectologist, working with Lebanese dialects. It was only in 1980 that a chair for Arabic Language was established and another dialectologist, Heikki Palva, was appointed to it in 1982. After the retirement of Professor Palva in 1998, the chair was renamed Arabic and Islamic Studies. The chair, at the Institute for Asian and African Studies (IAAS, University of Helsinki), has been held by the present writer, Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, since 2000.

This paper is technical in nature. It provides detailed instructions for enabling Arabic reading and writing capabilities in most Microsoft Windows versions, the major word-processing applications, and the major Internet web browsers. This paper also discusses useful, time-tested hints and resources for using Arabic with Windows including enabling the Arabic Proofing Tools, enabling the On Screen Arabic Keyboard, typing right-to-left, typing Hindi numerals, defining Arabic romanization keyboards, and finding Arabic fonts, English/Arabic keyboards, Arabic QWERTY keyboards, and Arabic keytop labels. This paper has been adapted from a manuscript the author is currently writing on resources for Arabic language study in America and on the Internet.