“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).

The Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council was appointed in 1959 to advance humanistic and social science research in and on the Near and Middle East. Over the years, in addition to offering fellowships and grants, it has held workshops and conferences to investigate topics which would allow humanists and social scientists to understand this vital area better. When appropriate, the papers from the conferences have been published as scholarly volumes.

This discussion is concerned with political, non-commercial publications rather than with the trade publications or the government, documents put out by the Ministry of National Guidance and the Iranian embassies in various Western countries. It must also be stated at the outset that such a survey cannot be entirely comprehensive due to the unreliability of information coming out of revolutionary Iran. Who can claim to have complete bibliographic information at a time of unsurpassed printing activities by all sorts of political groups within Iran, as well as the opposition abroad? However, the events surrounding the overthrow of the Shah must have convinced everyone of the importance of knowing about the current situation so as to formulate an informed opinion. It is futile to speculate what relations with Iran would be like if the decision-makers in the West had taken seriously the publications listed in the writer’s bibliography. The Iranian Opposition in Exile (Wiesbaden, 1979). One is flabbergasted to hear from Western Iranists that “by the 1970s opposition within Iran was dwindling to insignificant proportions and an open, organized form was nonexistent” [Iran under the Pahlavis, ed. C. Lencz-kowski (Stanford, 1978), p. 461]. The misinterpretation of the post-Pahlavi era comes from the failure to realize the adverse effect of Chinese and Soviet support for the Shah.

In Iran, in 1953, CIA agent, Kermit Roosevelt, helped plan a coup d’état, which had been plotted and prearranged by British and American interests. According to Roosevelt, the objective, successfully achieved at a cost of only $75,000, was to force Prime Minister Mossadegh out of power and return the Shah, who had fled the country, to his throne. In a recent memoir, Countercoup: The Struggle for Control of Iran (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), Roosevelt details his Iranian escapades: the dinner parties, the political plotting sessions, the unobtrusive contacts with the Persian military, the manipulated mass appeal, and demonstrations. For such a serious matter, Roosevelt is surprisingly candid in his effort to recreate the feel of the times, the dialogue of the participants, the sequence of events, and the ease with which Great Powers, through their agents, could control events. It is a circus atmosphere in which the author himself is at the center of attention and power.