Is The Cold War finally coming to an end, as some would have us believe? And if so, what does this mean for the Middle East? These are questions that will be with us for some time. They do not lend themselves to clear answers, but they nonetheless demand our attention.

For students of the contemporary Middle East, these questions pose special analytical problems—how can one best assess the relationship between the area that we study and the broader currents of international politics? Middle East specialists are rightly skeptical of efforts to analyze their region of study from a “globalist” perspective. Most of us have little patience with theorizing that fails to take into account that which is distinctive in the cultures, politics, and societies of the Middle East. We have even less use for crude empiricism which tries to reduce the complexities of the Middle East to quantifiable events or entries in simplistic classification schemes.

While the literature on folklore and traditional culture of the Middle East is quite extensive overall, relatively little has appeared on the Arabian Gulf. Unfortunately, this region has undergone rapid socioeconomic change stimulated by the impact of oil wealth. Much of the traditional way of life in the Gulf, as in the case of pearl diving, has disappeared except in the memories of the older generation. In late 1983 an institution was formed as an initiative of the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) to document and preserve the folklore of the region. This is the Arab Gulf States Folklore Centre (Markaz al-Turāth al-Sha‘bī li-Duwal al-Khalīj al-Arabīya), located in Doha, Qatar. The center is housed in a complex of five buildings with facilities in support of research projects, documentation, and archives, and a library on the folklore of the region. Several major conferences and a number of small workshops have been sponsored here on issues related to the collection of folklore in the Gulf. The center publishes books in Arabic and English, as well as a quarterly journal, Al-Ma’thūrāt al-Sha‘bīya (MS). This article provides an introduction to the AGSFC as the primary resource for research on the folklore of the Arabian Gulf.

An Important Collection of French historical documents has recently become accessible in Nantes. While it was known that large collections of French Foreign Office records—many still untouched since they were “repatriated”—were kept in a former army storehouse in Nantes, the Ministère des Relations Extérieurs opened a proper reading room there in the summer of 1987. The archives are located at 19, rue de Casterneau (tel. 40.49.73.29) and are open to the public from Wednesday to Friday between 9.00 A.M. and 6.30 P.M.. With rising interest by researchers the opening days may be increased, but even now a “deroguement” may be granted to work in the reading room during the first days of the week as well. The archives are professionally managed by Mr. Pascal Even (Conservateur et Responsable), Mrs. Elisabeth Caude (Conservateur), and Mrs. Béatrice Thoby (Documentalist). Rules and procedures for admission and on the availability of documents are the same as those applying at the reading room of the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, with the exception that more than three pieces a day can be produced. Xerox copies and microfilms can also be ordered under the rules which are in force in Paris.

To Date, Jordan remains a country largely studied from without. A number of excellent monographs treating diverse aspects of the politics, economy, demography, and history of Jordan have come out in recent years, drawing primarily on the wealth of resources preserved in European, American, and, most recently, Israeli archives. The sources used strongly influence the selection of topics treated. Thus, one resulting bias is that Jordan is seldom studied in its own right; rather, scholars have concentrated on its history under British mandatory rule, or as a player in the Arab-Israeli drama. Consequently, the dynamics of Jordanian structures—social, economic, and political—are either cursorily reviewed or presented as apprehended by travelers, political officers, or intelligence agents. In view of the relative ease of conducting research in Jordan, and the availability of diverse primary sources, the study of Jordan from within is to be encouraged. Towards this end, the following is intended to serve as an introduction to conducting research in Jordan, and as a survey of primary sources and research centers of value to the study of Jordan and the Middle East in general.

The Protectorate archives deal with the period before and after 1881 and include a wide range of materials, among which are telegraphic communications between Paris and Tunis and correspondence from the French consular agencies and vice-consulates in the Tunisian countryside. By 1872 there were, officially, nine such posts: Bizerte, Gabès, Jerba, La Goulette, Mehdia, Monastir, Sfax, Sousse, and Kef. However, cartons for the pre-Protectorate period contain correspondence from French agents in other places (e.g., Beja, Djerid) as well.

Students of Middle Eastern, North African, and Balkan history of the period extending roughly from the middle of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of World War I ought to know about the vital developments that have occurred since 1985 in the Turkish Archives or Başbakanlik Arşivleri (prime minister’s archives). These materials were to be moved to the central archive building in Ankara, but the ultimate decision was made to keep the Ottoman documents in Istanbul and to use the large Ankara archive building for preserving the material accumulated during the Republic.

An international conference was convened by the Turkish government in 1985 to discuss the situation of the Ottoman archives. The meeting was opened by Prime Minister Turgut Ozal, who promised on behalf of the government to do whatever was necessary to expedite the classification of the existing material and facilitate its use. After the conference, Professor Halil Inalcik and I were invited to Ankara to discusss with Mr. Hasan Celal Güzel—then prime minister’s aide, currently minister of culture—the measures necessary to train archivists. Later, in the summer of 1986, I participated in several working sessions presided over by Mr. Güzel to discuss various technical questions, such as the administrative framework of the archives, the training of personnel both at home and abroad, and so on. In a recent visit to the archives (November 1988), I was able to assess on the spot the work carried out since 1986 under the supervision of Professor Ismet Miroglu, the current director general of the archives.

My Purpose in this brief presentation is to offer a summary of developments in the field of Middle Eastern and Islamic bibliographic studies. Examples (and they are only examples of what is a widespread recognition of the importance of bibliography in the scholarly enterprise) are drawn from various fields of activity, from the immense Library of Congress to the efforts of a lone bibliographer at her PC in Denver. I have also tried to give an international flavor with an example of the important work being done in Istanbul. I have appended the names and addresses of the bibliographic projects to which I refer in this presentation.

The jewel in the crown, so to speak, of the bibliographic effort of the Library of Congress is the Near East National Union List, a catalogue of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish language books and serials in libraries in the United States and Canada.

Immigration research poses special problems, but survey researchers studying immigrant groups rarely write about the problems they encounter in the design and conduct of their surveys (Hurh and Kim 1984). Three areas of particular importance are: (1) securing the approval of community leaders or persons of influence; (2) identifying adequate frames for relatively small immigrant populations, from which random samples can be selected; and (3) conducting the fieldwork, including recruiting and training interviewers fluent in immigrant languages.

The main objective of this paper is to describe various stages of our recently completed survey of Iranians in Los Angeles (see Figure 1). We pay particular attention to the problems we have faced in carrying out this study, and how resolving some of them reshaped our original research design.