Urban civilization began in the Middle East and today this area is one of the most urbanized regions in the Third World. Yet, scholarly research in Middle Eastern urban affairs has lagged behind both the growth of urban studies for other areas of the world and the interest in other aspects of Middle Eastern society. The city is a viable focus for research and such fields as urban geography, urban sociology, urban anthropology and urban history have been increasing in importance in their respective disciplines. This interest is only beginning in Middle Eastern studies, although substantial recent progress has been made as this review will show.

Thank you, Professor Bodman. I should like to add my thanks also to Professor Adele Ferdows and her Committee, to the University of Louisville, for their thoughtful local arrangements, and to Professor Bodman and his Program Committee for their good work.

From time to time in recent years, the complaint has been voiced that “women’s studies” have gone far enough: panels on women at professional meetings are de rigeur. though the subject matter is becoming somewhat tedious; articles and books on women are proliferating, though they seem to be increasingly repetitive; and furthermore, it is argued, there is nothing intrinsically interesting or problematic about women per se. As for investigators whose interest focus on women in the Middle East, they have been called opportunistic, capitalizing on the feminist movement in the United States, and have been accused of imposing feminist concerns and sensibilities on Middle Eastern societies.

This paper contains information and observations on the problems and difficulties which university libraries and research centers encounter in trying to collect Persian materials. Hopefully, it can provide necessary information, description of basic tools useful to collections outside Iran, and also precise techniques to follow to build a decent and useful Iranian studies collection.

Women are a single element in any society under discussion. The recent focus on Middle Eastern women as women, their roles, positions and general behavior, has been an attempt, we believe, to point out that previous western studies of the Middle East have neglected this important element. Indeed, many of the scholarly books and monographs to appear in recent years seem to have been conceived and written as though the female half of the Middle Eastern world did not exist, or if it did, was simply a minor factor with little or no bearing on the processes of the society, and thus not worthy of more than passing consideration. The reasons for this neglect have been discussed before and by now should be obvious. They need not be repeated here.

Having succeeded in obtaining the visa (which may take anywhere up to three months) and once arrived in Baghdad, the foreign scholar is pleasantly struck by the cordiality and general hospitality of the Iraqis, who seem to be eager to help the visitor and exchange ideas and information with him.

There seems to be no established procedure to obtain research permits in Iraq. The best approach is for the scholar to write a formal letter stating his credentials and research subject and to submit it to the Ministry of Information. They, in turn, will approve it and issue a letter of introduction to concerned personnel and institutions. In the case of research outside the urban centers, appropriate agencies are notified as well as the security police. In my case, I was referred to the Ministry of Agriculture which issued me a letter that allowed me to work in the villages.

A confluence of three sorts of factors has made the past eightteen months a particularly appropriate period for the Ford Foundation to reconsider the magnitude and character of its support for research and training in the United States on the Middle East and Africa. The first of these is that dramatic developments during the past two years involving the Middle East and Africa have heightened public awareness of the critical impact events in these regions will have on the world. The second factor is that the Foundation’s program of general support to meet the core operating costs of African studies centers and Middle East studies centers has drawn to a close. Third, faced with the prospect of drastically reduced budgetary resources, the Foundation staff has had to confront the question of which of its activities should survive or be reshaped in the face of competing claims on scarcer resources. Transcending these three factors and less directly tied to the exigencies of the time is the conviction on the part of the Foundation that there is creative and important work to be done in this sphere and that the Foundation’s staff needs to think hard about past activities and future possibilities so that valuable opportunities do not pass us by.

The published literature—books, articles and monographs—in the French language on the Near East and North Africa is well-known and of remarkable value to the scholar and traveler interested in the Islamic world. Less accessible and, of course, less well-known, particularly in anglophone countries, are the often unpublished doctoral dissertations submitted to French universities. It has thus seemed useful to prepare a short bibliography covering some of the more recently completed thesis. The list is not exhaustive, even within the social sciences and humanities, and some of the citations are incomplete although, hopefully, not too often inaccurate. The dissertations covered are the Doctorat d’état, roughly equivalent to the Ph.D., the Doctorat d’université, and the Doctorat de specialité (3ème cycle). The legal and other requirements for the degrees are available in considerable detail in the Journal officiel de la République Française, May 2, 1974, pp. 4668–4672.