The office of MESA president is mainly honorific; the associated duties are normally not particularly onerous. The very capable staff of the secretariat does most of the hard work involved in running this organization. None of you could have known at the time of the MESA elections in the summer and early fall of 2000 that you would be giving me the opportunity to serve as your president in the post-September 11, 2001 era, when public interest in the Middle East, demands on those with expertise in the region, and incongruously, attacks on MESA, university-based programs in Middle East Studies, and more than a few individual MESA members have reached unprecedented levels. Serving as your president in this period has been a more exciting ride than it would have been at almost any other time I can imagine; I thank you all for making it possible. I would also like to acknowledge my wife Miriam, who also received a fuller plate than she could have imagined as a result of my serving as MESA president. Her support has always been indispensable in everything I have done.

This article examines European perceptions and misperceptions, distortions, exaggerations and misunderstandings of western Indian Ocean societies in the 19th century. For this work I have combined research on European sources, both published and manuscript, and mostly from the British archives, with field research that I have carried out in southwest Asia, Arabia, and east Africa. The fact that most European observers of Indian Ocean societies in the 19th century carried the baggage of British and French colonial policy, and that they tended to lack deep knowledge of the region as well as empathy for the people, combined to produce a certain historical, political and cultural approach to local realities, which, in some cases, is still unmodified today. Through my own field research I have met with local tribal elites in Makran, Baluchistan and Oman, and with leaders of the major Swahili families of Zanzibar. I have shared tea and stories with old women. These contacts provide an invaluable insight into local interpretations of regional history, through the historical memory preserved in rituals and tales. This research also makes possible a new understanding of the significance of places, and the historical events associated with them.

Long regarded as a landmark historian, sociologist and philosopher, Ibn Khaldun has entered Islamic tradition as a giant figure of learning. His Muqaddimah marked the earliest attempt by any historian to build a framework to explain the political and social structure of civilization. While much has been written about his views on history and society, very little recognition has been granted to his writings on the Arabic language. Ibn Khaldun dedicated the last third of his Muqaddimah to the study of language, yet this portion of his work has been barely examined by scholars. This is all the more unfortunate since an examination of his work reveals a remarkable depth of knowledge and learning. A study of Ibn Khaldun's views on language exposes a “cutting-edge” approach, one that is in line with the most current thought on contemporary second language acquisition. Rather than promoting language learning through grammar, Ibn Khaldun projected a vision embraced by linguists today. Advocating learning language through conversation, Ibn Khaldun was one of the earliest supporters of communicative language learning.

In the summer of 2001 I was granted access to the registers (sijills) of the Ottoman Muslim court (al-mahkama al-sharciyya) of Beirut. These records, housed in the offices of a functioning court - the court attached to Imam cAli's mosque on Tariq al-Jadida in Beirut, occupy two bookshelves, tightly squeezed behind hundreds of volumes of the court's current files - the vast majority of which nowadays pertain to family law. The closet-sized room also doubles as the office of Mr. cAli Al-Dacuq whose occupation it was (and I assume, still is) to file and locate documents for an endless stream of worried people. Despite the dust, noise, and torrid heat, I managed, largely thanks to Mr. Dacuq's dogged optimism and good cheer, to conduct my own research and to document the holdings of the Archive.

Nearly two decades of war in Lebanon crippled possibilities for historical research during a period when scholarship underwent significant theoretical and methodological developments. The last several years, however, have seen a renewed vigor to preserve, catalog, and promote all types of sources that could possibly shed light on the rich history of the country and of the Middle East in general. Sources and resources in Lebanon are largely decentralized, rendering the country something of a logistical labyrinth that can cost scholars considerable expenditures of time and energy. This article is a modest attempt to facilitate research in Beirut. Although mostly geared towards historians, we hope that this article may prove useful to scholars from other fields as well. It is slightly slanted towards the British and American academies, particularly since the Francophone world has been so much more embedded in the intellectual and scholarly atmosphere of the country.

This article analyzes two important genres of Arab music that are heard in Syria in the course of the performance of the wasla, or suite of songs: the muwashshahât and the popular songs known as al-qudûd al-halabiyya. Many consider the muwashshahât (sing, muwashshah) to be the epitome of Arab music. Poetically, melodically, and vocally, the muwashshahât constitute a veritable treasure-house of Arabic culture and civilization. The qudûd (sing, qadd) are sung in both standard and colloquial Arabic, but because of their simpler melodic rhythmic structure are generally considered to be simplified versions of muwashshahât; therefore in this article I treat them as a sub-set of the muwashshahât.

Solomon Isaakovich Bayevsky was born in 1923 in Mogilev, Belarus, to Isaac Zelikovich Bayevsky, an engraver, and Mera Solomonovna Bayevsky, nee Pevzner, a librarian. His father passed away in 1933, and in 1935 he moved with his mother to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), where he received his schooling. While a student at an elementary school he joined a history study group in the Hermitage museum. Studies in the museum stimulated his interests in Persian artifacts, art and culture.