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.

An Important Collection of French historical documents has recently become accessible in Nantes.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.

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.

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.