The following is not by way of apology, I just want to set the record straight. Diaries offer a view from somewhere - a perspective that is usually skewed, partial and incomplete. They are subjective reflections on a particularly situated experience. So let me begin from the beginning:

I moved to Palestine early in September 2000. Two weeks later, the Intifada broke out. I had come to Palestine after finishing my PhD in the U.S. and working as a corporate lawyer in London. I had gone there with some vague urge “to be useful” - and if I thought being useful in Palestine meant saying farewell to middle-class life, I was soon proven wrong. For over a year I was teaching at Birzeit University and working as a legal adviser with the PLO Negotiations Support Unit. My interactions were mostly with middle-class Palestinians, sometimes the post-Oslo elite, often foreigners, seldom with the poor living in refugee camps. I lived in Al-Tireh, an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Ramallah. I had access to a car with yellow license-plates. Yellow was a very important color there. It meant I could drive my car anywhere I wanted, to Jerusalem and beyond - unlike most Palestinians, who had green license plates and, hence, could not drive outside the cantons created by the Oslo Accords. I had a foreign passport, which meant I could leave the Occupied Territories whenever I wanted to through Tel Aviv airport – again, unlike most Palestinians, who could not use the airport without first applying for a security permit.

Thank you, Terry [Harry S. Martin III] for this kind introduction. I'm glad to be here to meet you all. I'm very fond of law librarians, perhaps because of Terry, who has given us such unstinting support for a program and for a body of literature that might otherwise be considered exotic or unnecessary. I don't think we've ever asked for anything from this Library that it has not tried its very best to give us. In our program we are aware that probably the most essential thing we can do—building for the long-term—is to strengthen the Library in our field. I have to admit, in my modest moments, that people most often come here to study with us, to join our program, not for us, but for the Library. Occasionally people let it slip.

My assignment has an added degree of difficulty in that I follow Frank Vogel's presentation on Islamic law, which captured your intellectual interest, and precede Lesley Wilkins’ talk on building a library collection, which will interest you professionally. I have chosen to offer a talk on the achievements made in non-Muslim — here primarily European and American — scholarship on Islamic law, scholarship in the making, as it were, hoping that it will segue easily from the one talk to the other. I will not be describing the Islamic Legal Studies Program and what we do, but if you have any questions about the research program we run, I will be happy to answer them afterwards.

After hearing the presentations about Islamic law by Professor Vogel and recent scholarship in the field by Peri Bearman, I hope you are convinced that the Law of the Islamic World is a subject of great breadth and complexity. What I would like to do now is describe how the Harvard Law School Library attempts to support teaching and research in this field. My talk will deal with the scope of collection development, acquisition strategies, processing standards, reference demands, and user education. I will also touch briefly on problematic areas and our hopes for future developments. Among the materials distributed after lunch, there is an eight-page handout, which, I hope, will highlight key points as my talk proceeds. At the end, there may still be adequate time for a few questions and discussion before we return to the Caspersen Room for the reception.