Network Resources for the Middle East Scholar

Mailing lists

Mailing lists are normally of two kinds: discussion groups, where you can take part in debates on the topic in question - or ask questions and have them answered - or a one-way flow of information from the owner. In the first case, each user sends his comments or queries to the list address, from where they, automatically or after editorial selection, are distributed to all on the list.

A list of this kind is History of Islam, which is reasonably active (about a dozen messages a week). It was in the beginnning "open to all", but after a deluge of useless discussion about whether the Ahmadiyya are Muslims, it became "edited", i.e. messages not relevant to History (widely defined) are screened out. This has made the list manageable, but debates are still settled both by reference to al-Bukhari and to Albert Hourani. There is a dominance of contributors who wish to discuss Islam as much as the study of it. Click here for a sample of some, perhaps of the more interesting, contributions. To subscribe: Send an e-mail to listserv@ulkyvm.louisville.edu, in the message write only "SUBSCRIBE ISLAM-L your name" (without the quotation marks. This is an automatic subscription service, so do not write anything else, and leave the Subject line blank in this and all similar Subscribe messages).

Another, list of the same kind, is Political Islam, which discusses Islam in the current world (which the former one is not supposed to do). This list, at least in its earlier period, mixed genuine academic debate with the more common slanging-match cum da'wa as is the scourge of the other debate forums discussing Islam. Click here for a sample of some of the discussion just after the list was created. Write to political-islam-request@lists.utah.edu with "Subscribe" in the Subject line. You don't need to write anything in the message.

A third, almost unknown history list is History of the Middle East and North Africa list (MENA-History). However, as it is so anonymous, there is currently also little to be found there. Some scholars will also find interest in the high-quality World History list.

In the field of pure distribution of news and information, the history of one very important list, the MSA-News is very instructive. This was set up by the Muslim Students Association of the US, and for some years produced an extremely interesting mailing list which contained serious news, reports and notices from international newspapers and bulletins translated into English in necessary, bulletins from various Islamic and other Middle Eastern organizations, and reports made directly to the MSA. Its major problem was the volume, subscribing put about 1-200 pages worth of newsmaterial on one's hard disk every day. But the quality made it almost worth it; the news coverage from the MSA news was on the whole comparable to that of Le Monde or the NY Times, and quite often bringing the stories faster. It was, it may be added, also fairly non-partisan, printing bulletins from the FIS and Islamist students groups as well as analyses from netural and hostile sources. (Click here for some samples of the informations distributed by the MSA-list in this period.)

Unfortunately, this was all done with somewhat scanty regard for the copyright of the material distributed. While the MSA claimed "fair usage" for academic purposes, the newspapers and magazines from whom the material had been copied started to protest, and in the early autumn of 1995, the MSA news service came to a sudden stop when their university host closed down their server. After about nine months silence, they have now started up again, this time with only properly authorized material, which has made the volume come down to about 20-30 messages a week, half of what it earlier sent out each day, still very much of interest, but only a vague shadow of former glory.

This shows in a sense both the possibilities and the limitations of electronic media; the technology made possible the creation of a high-quality news service based only on volunteers, but the organizational, legal and economic forces of the outside world will in the end restrict these possibilities to less than what they, from our academic viewpoint, might have been. (To subscribe to the current list, write to listserver@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu with the message body "SUBSCRIBE MSANEWS firstname lastname")

Other services that distribute news information are OMRI-L (daily report, news from Central Asia distributed by Radio Free Europe; listserv@ubvm.vm.cc.buffalo.edu), Somalia News Update antbh@strix.udac.uu.se, Ar-Rassed (a radical Islamic weekly digest, often offensive to non-Muslims, eabdelr@uoft02.utoledo.edu).

Another comprehensive service for Africa is African News and Info. This is also a useful list that includes news from other related lists, and again with daily bulletins. Subscription, listserv@vm.utcc.utoronto.edu (write in message: "SUBSCRIBE AFRICA-N your name").

Islamic Information and News Network has a much smaller volume than MSA-news, and also includes other items than news, mostly such relevant to the Muslim of the west, thus the precise spotting of the hilal moon, some extracts from books by Sayyid Qutb, Sharia'ti, Sayyid Nursi etc. Subscription, listserv@asuvm.inre.asu.edu (write in message: "SUBSCRIBE MUSLIMS" your name).

Islamic World News, twice weekly, a review of news, books, essays, etc. is radical Islamic in outlook. Subscription from imnet2@max.u.washington.edu.

Middle East Librarians List (MELA-net) is the list of the Middle East Librarians Assoc. of the US. A fairly low-volume discussion list on items of interest for librarians and book-hunters, e.g. a place to ask for hard-to-find titles. Click here for a sample. Subscription, listserv@cornell.edu (write in message: "SUBSCRIBE MELANET your name"). There is now also a separate Librarians list for England (and Europe), lis-middle-east, run from mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk. Send a message with "SUBSCRIBE LIS-MIDDLE-EAST yourfirstname yourlastname".

Here I have only mentioned those lists I or my colleagues have tried. In addition, there are in particular a large number of "local" lists, we know about three alone for Algeria, six for Tunisia and a whooping ten different lists for Turkish affairs. Some of these are maintained by embassies or official agencies, others are clearly non- or anti-official. In general, it is worth noting here as in most of the network services, that the majority of people who are both interested in the Middle East and attached to a network, fall in the category of "US-based Muslim undergraduate students", and it shows, but more in some lists than in others. Those interested in these areas might try out the various lists; unsubscribing is as easy as subscribing. For contact details, see the MENA Resource guide.

A list of some interest to people around Bergen is the Sudan-list. This is an amalgamation of the previous Bergen-based Sudanlist, and an automated "listserv" in the US. Write to listserv@emuvm1.cc.edu with SUBSCRIBE SUDAN-L your name to subscribe. Click here for an anniversary overview.

One I have not tested, but which may be of interest, is the Arabic Linguistics and Language Teaching list. Subscribe at mailserv@byu.edu, with the message: "SUBSCRIBE ARABIC-L your name".

Those interested in using Arabic script on their computers, may find information on the two mailing lists devoted to this topic, Itisalat and Reader. They are fairly similar in scope, they cover all computer models (PC/Windows, Mac, Unix), give information about implementations of Arabic and discuss problems in using it. It is a very good place to ask questions about the use of Arabic script, as many of those who created the tools subscribe to the lists. Click here for sample of the contributions. Subscriptions: listserv@listserv.georgetown.edu (write in message: "SUBSCRIBE ITISALAT your_name") and reader-request@leb.net (with "SUBSCRIBE READER your_address" in the message.

Usenet News

As a user, you use a special program (a "news-reader") to contact the local server, where you can subscribe to the groups you are interested in, see what topics are under discussion in that group, and read and reply to items that are of interest. You need only open those messages whose subject line interest you. Since the material is stored on the central computer, rather than in the e-mailbox of your own small hard disk, News is a better way to handle large volumes of information. Unfortunately, most of those lists mentioned earlier are only distributed by e-mail, not by News.

Newsgroups are organised hierarchically. Thus, groups named comp. and a suffix are computer-related, those named rec. are for recreational topics (rec.sports etc.), etc. News is currently more oriented towards computer and hard science topics than the humanities, and there are no groups specifically directed at the academic study of the Middle East. However, the section soc. (social), meant for informal talk of any topic, contains many groups devoted to the culture of one country or region. Among these are soc.culture.arabic, soc.culture.african, soc.culture.berber and soc.culture.jewish, as well as separate groups for Afghanistan, Bangla Desh, Bosnia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Maghreb, Malaysia, Pakistan, Palestine, and Turkey. There are also some groups for "general discussion" on Islamic topics, such as soc.religion.islam and alt.religion.islam (alt. is for "alternative", less regulated groups). Talk.politics.mideast should be self-explanatory; it is normally very lively.

Of the mailing lists, the RFE lists reappears as misc.news.rferl-rfe; and the Islamic Information and News Network as bit.listserv.muslims. These, then, contain the same information as is sent to the e-mail subscribers.

Notice that, the last two perhaps excepted, none of these groups are directed towards academic research. They are really "discussion groups" dominated by US students, and the debate is often heated, e.g. on Israel/Palestine or radical Muslim/Christian divides. However, one will quickly learn which groups to avoid and which topics not to follow. There is enough useful information remaining to warrant the effort. And, certainly, the system awaits the establishment of discussion groups on more scholarly themes; it is mainly a matter of a sufficient amount of scholars in each field taking the medium in use.

There are also some commercial services that carry "real" news over Usenet, mostly from cable services or copied from newspapers. Clarinet is one such. These appear as normally in News, but only if the campus has paid a subscription. I have no experience with these services.

Remote information centres

There are basically four different ways of doing this. The simplest one is to let your PC call up the remote computer and ask for permission to access its resources. If you are given access, either because you are a registered user on the remote computer, or because it allows "guests" or "anonymous" visitors access, your own computer will then mimic the screens ("terminals") that are directly attached to that remote computer.

This is called a 'telnet' contact, and one very useful application of it is to get into university library catalogues at remote sites. There are hundreds of such catalogues available on-line, making them a very valuable bibliographical resource. The drawback with telnet contact is that you are then using the remote catalogue system's way of searching for and displaying information; and it seems all these hundreds of catalogues have different ways of doing things.

The most complete and useful freely accessible catalogue merges the collections on the campuses in California. This catalogue, named Melvyl, carries more than 8 million titles, and is the only one I know where one can also see the diacritics for transliterated Arabic titles. You contact Melvyl by using telnet to mevyl.ucop.edu and then reading and following the information on-screen as it appears. When you have found a title apparently in Arabic transcription, you can add "marc dia" to the display command. This will display the title information in the machine-readable MARC codes, with the codes for diacritics added (thus, Bukhari's Sahih will appear as "al-Bukh<19>ar<19>i, <1C>Sa<1C>h<19>i<1C>h". Not elegant, but the information is there). [If you are using a Macintosh and the Jaghbub transliteration fonts (info here), I have created a tool that translates these diacritics to Jaghbub. Click here to download.] However, it assumes that the original cataloguer put in the diacritics. This is mostly, but not always the case.

Melvyl is not the largest on-line catalogue, that credit probably goes to the American RLIN, which also contains records of Arabic titles in the Arabic script (using special software on the reading computer). However, RLIN is a commercial operation and requires a subscription fee that puts it outside this survey of freely accessible sources. There are other such commercial catalogues available, and if you are at a campus, it may pay to find out if your institution has a common subscription ("site licence") for any such, which you may then access from within the campus.

The most useful specialised library for Middle Eastern books, is probably the SOAS library in London. Use a telnet software to lib.soas.ac.uk, and follow the on-line guides. SOAS will miss some books Melvyl has, and vice versa. A number of German libraries have also come on-line, but so far only a few French ones, to my knowledge.

One specialist documentation centre that would be of interest for us, is the Middle East Centre in Durham ("Melib", telnet to melib.dur.ac.uk). It is, however, a prime example of how not to provide on-line access: The access is complicated, inflexible and the information given by the providers themselves onscreen quite wrong. However, after battling with it, I have been able to get in. Click here for a more detailed file about the process involved. You don't need any special software, you much just be very precise to follow the [corrected] instructions exactly. However, there is another quite useful catalogue of manuscripts in Durham, which uses the more congenial WorldWide Web method, which will turn to next.

The World-Wide Web

A somewhat older cousin of the WWW was known as Gopher, it shared with the Web the ability for the provider to create transversal "links" in a document to another document somewhere else on the net, perhaps on another continent. Unlike the Web, however Gopher could only display text, not pictures, sounds or movies. Some Middle East centres still provide informaton in Gopher format. While you can use specialized Gopher browsers, most readers today will read Gopher documents through a Web browser like Netscape or Mosaic, which can access Gopher servers as well as its own format.

It is almost impossible to survey what exists on the Web concerning any particular subject, because it is so vast and anarchic - any individual can write a text or put some pictures on a computer and add it to a Web-connected machine, thus making it instantly available, without it necessarily being registered anywhere. That is why the "search engines", or robot Web catalogues are so important. These services use automatic "robots" to chart and catalogue the contents Web pages everywhere, allowing you to make a request for any web page where the word "Damascus" occurs. This is often the only way to find out if exactly what you are looking for exists. It is thus therefore recommended that every person who starts out on the Web gets to know these catalogues, such as AltaVista http://altavista.digital.com or Infoseek http://guide.infoseek.com (there are many more).

However, to know what one may search for, here is a survey of types of material that I found most interesting for an academic audience on the Middle East (leaving music, food and business opportunities to one side).

Research centres

Academic resources

We must also include here Islamic resources put out by the Muslim student groups, both the MSA mentioned earlier, and others. They include the full text of the Koran, in several versions, both in Arabic script, sura by sura as a picture, and in translations, some even with parallell transaltions. In addition, we can find a hadith database claiming to have four of the main collections, Bukhari, Muslim, Muwatta and Abu Dawud in translation; I have not checked to see if their claim for completeness is accurate, or how good their translation is, but the texts certainly are extensive, and they are searchable, you can search for a topic and get the hadiths on this.

I have not found many on-line books in Middle East studies, but two or three are out there. In addition, there are newsletters for three or four Middle East departments, and some of the material from the MESA bulletin is available on-line.

Journals

There is undoubtedly also material of Middle East Interest in general sources like Encyclopeadia Britannica or Le Monde diplomatique, most of which are payment-based, as are documentation centres like the Rand institute or the Washington report on the Middle East.

Country-specific pages.

For the addresses of these Web servers, check http://www.hf.uib.no/smi/links.html, which contains further details on each of these categories. You will also there find the addresses of other collections of Middle East Web references (links pages), like the very extensive server at the University of Texas at Austin, the Yahala survey and the Cybermuslim collective. Many of these have a much larger collection of the non-academic material on the Middle East than I have focussed on here.

Receiving software

There are also many places where one can copy ("download") free software relevant to computing in Arabic. One useful one is Reader at ftp://leb.net/pub/reader/, which contains subdirectories for Mac, PC and Unix software. The Mac directory also contains fonts for writing Arabic in transcription, and is linked to our Web "Arabic Mac information centre" at http://www.hf.uib.no/smi/ksv/, which contains many of the same files. Or what about a program that calculates CE dates from AH dates? For Unix users (also for PCs and Macs), ArabTeX is a useful writing tool, available on many sites.

Another large site for Arabic- and Arabic-related software, is AMASS (American-Arab Scientific Society), at ftp://cs.bu.edu/amass/. Other locations have Islamic pictures, poetry and hadith, etc. (e.g. ftp://ftp.mcs.kent.edu).

Contacts to the Middle East

From this summary, one may gather the variety of what may be drawn from the net. The number, as well as the ease of use of the services improve constantly, and what I have listed here is only a selection of the offerings. More complete lists may be found in Masood Cajee's Cybermuslim and Jospeh Roberts' The Middle East-North Africa Internet Resource Guide, both available on-line in Gopher format, from gopher://latif.com:70/11/RESOURCE/CYBER/ and gopher://una.hh.lib.umich.edu and from whom much of the information in this survey is taken. Thanks also to my colleague Albrecht Hofheinz of Berlin/Bergen, who has tested out most of the services mentioned here and whose remarks I have incorporated.

An earlier version of this survey was published in the Newsletter of the European Association for Middle Eastern Studies (EURAMES) Newsletter 4, November 1994; it has been updated with material presented at the 2nd Eurames Conference in Aix-en-Provence, July 1996. This paper is also published in Periodica Islamica, summer of 1996.

Knut S. Vikør
21 July 1996