Near East 

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Welcome to the Near East Section research guide.  At the University of Washington, the Near East Section covers the Arab speaking countries:  Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, the Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya. It also covers Iran, Turkey and the Central Asian countries:  Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.  As well as the modern period, the Section covers languages and civilization of the Ancient Near East.  To a lesser extent, the Section covers the Sudan, Somalia, Chad, and Mauritania.  The Section collects resources in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Tajik, Turkmen, Uighur, Kurdish, and the ancient languages:  Akkadian, Assyrian, Sumerian, ancient Egyptian, Coptic and Syriac.  The Section holds primary responsibility for Islam as a religion and as practiced in the afore-mentioned countries.  Islam as practiced in other countries is covered in the subject guide for those regions.

For materials published in the Middle East, generally the range of reference materials is much more limited than what exists for U.S. and European materials.  Education in the Middle East was traditionally based on memorization.  Arabic script did not lend itself to use on printing presses.  For example, for vernacular languages, products such as periodical indexes were not begun until late in the 20th century and still cover a relatively small portion of what has been published.

The existence of databases in languages of the Middle East is also limited.  In the U.S. and Europe, databases could be developed because publishers had used electronic texts to drive printing presses for some time.  Such texts were not as available in the Middle East, and scanning and OCR of texts in Arabic script is extremely time consuming and not very accurate.  The databases that do exist can be a bit challenging to use.

If you are having trouble locating resources, please contact Mary St. Germain for help.  There are options--it may just take a little more effort to get started.