The Internet and Middle East Studies

When I set out togather information on a topic in my speciality, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, I usually begin by turning to al Hayat, one of the region's most credible newspapers. The task of locating articles which include specific key terms was once troublesome and time-consuming. Now I simply place CD-ROM of al Hayat in my wife's Power Macintosh and input some keywords. In moments, a list of articles, sometimes numbering in the hundoreds, is retrieved, from which I can form more concrete ideas or obtain some hints about the themes I have in my mind. The CD-ROM offers me instant access to a huge amount of raw materials on the current affairs in the Middle East, even though I live in a country far away from the region like Japan; It also saes time and labor¹⁾.
If you read Middle Eastern newspapers in cyberspace, you can follow daily events in the Middle East. Many of the leading Middle Eastern newspapers have now opened their homepages in cyberspace. We can read al Hayat, Asharq al-Awsat, al-Watan, al-Ay??am and al-Ittihad via the Internet on the very day the hard copies are published. There is with a few exceptions, no time lag. In this context, only problem left to solve is the language barrier. The language problem involves not simply the languages spoken in the region, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian or Turkish, but the language developed by different computers.
Digital information has revolutionized method of area study which concentrate on current affairs. The Internet has also revolutionized digital information. Therefore, we might say that our methods of studying regional affairs have undergone two revolutions due to computerization and global infromation networking.
The above-mentioned transformations are not unique to Middle East studies, of course. This paper is an attempt to describe in detail the state of the Internet in the Middle East and its application to Middle Eastern studies.

In most of the Middle Eastern countries, governments control the communication and information media. They do not want any information to flow into their countries without censorship. Both print and broadcast media are controlled by governments or heavily censored. Press freedom has never been guaranteed in the Middle East. Even in Israel, a most Westernized country in the region, there is military censorship which has power to shut down offending newspapers and television stations; anyone who breaches the censorship law could face up to five years in prison. In some countries, news media can only play a role in transmitting official statements to the public. They are not allowed to criticize governments' policies nor criticize the behavior of royal families and high-ranking officials. Governmental censorship has raised profound doubts about the reliability of local news media in the Middle East. Some surveys suggest that television viewers in the Gulf countries prefer international networks to local televisions²⁾.
People realize that local media can not be trusted in delivering facts on important issues to them in comparison with foreign media. Long and tedious speeches by kings and presidents as reported in local newspapers and televisions may bore people stiff, but they have no choice but to endure the tedium. Satellite televisions were first percieved as an entertaining alternative; now they are also seen as more credible information sources able to reveal the facts which governments wish to conceal. CNN's impact at the time of the Gulf Crisis and Gulf War played a decisive role in changing their attitude towards local media. During or after the Gulf War, CNN had been broadcasting a striking commercial film every day, showing President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was proudly confessing that he was always watching CNN.
Political leadership in the Middle East knows that the satellite TVs have been playing an important role in the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Leaders in the Middle East who don't like their people to have information and want to restrict the inflow of information into their countries, either by force or by more moderate means.
Saudi Arabia and Iran placed a total ban on satellite dishes under the pretext that the new media could expose thier countries to the decadent, corrupt and immoral cultures of the West with their pornography and violence. Resorting to such bans could, however, "never be more than a sop to the conservatives as it proved impossible to enforce."³⁾
Iran officially banned ownership and production of satellite dishes in 1995. However, little sustained effort has been made to enforce the law, though newspapers have reported about the seizure of dishes by the authorities. Well-off Iranians can camouflage their dishes and view foreign satellite programs like the BBC and CNN. As for the average Iranian viewers, domestically produced programs "have failed to diminish their appetites for foreign stations."⁴⁾
Qatar created its own way to censor electric waves in the air. It offers households a cable hook-up, which supplies international satellite programs received by the state antenna. It means all the programs are censored by the government before reaching subscribers.
Other countries have taken different approaches. Egypt, for instance, has been beaming competitive programs to the people from the air and setting up their own satellite channels. Of the Arab countries, only Egypt could implement such an ambitious project, because it has a glorious heritage of producing a vast number of Arabic entertainment films.⁵⁾ Still, it will be very tough going even for Egypt, the cultural center of the whole Arab world, to compete with rich, powerful and high-tech armed Hollywood or Atlanta.
These various measures taken by governments in the region have been to some extent successful in containing complains by citizens about the shortage of information and satisfying their thirst for entertainment. Satellite TV program guides covering the region are sold in everywhere in the Middle Eastern capitals. But information starvation remains a fact of life in the Middle East.

The Internet appeared in the Middle East at the very moment when the various governments were gearing up to cope with the satellite issues, creating a new headache for those who want to restrain the flow of information to their countries. The have been forced to adopt diffenrent approach in dealing with this world wide computer network, because of its interactive characteristics.
According to a survey, more than 186 countries can be reached by e-mail. However, 98% of all the computer hosts on the Net are located in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia. The rest of the world is nothing but "tiny islands in cyberspace."⁶⁾ Nevertheless, the majority of the Middle Eastern countries have already joined the Internet. The most recent member of the Internet is at this point Oman, which established its connection on January 19, 1997. Only few exceptions like Iraq, Syria and Libya are left out of the game.

The Internet in the region is growing rapidly. For example, the number of Internet subscribers in the United Arab Emirates rose to approximately 10,000 in 1996 from around 2,500 in 1995. Israel is no doubt one of the most leading Internet countries not only in the Middle East but also in the whole world, providing technologies and software even to the United States or Japan.
Egypt and Jordan are on the heels of Israel. The growth rate of Internet usage in Egypt is said to be one of the fastest in the world. Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates in the East and Morocco and Tunisia in the West are also rapidly expanded.
Saudi Arabia has made full access available only to academic and governmental institutions and hospitals. Ordinary people can enjoy only limited services like e-mail, usually through BBS-based private or semi-governmental computer communications companies. Internet connections in universities are currently under construction.
However, Saudi Arabia, as a leader of the GCC countries, has signaled its commitment to build effective cyber communication tools in academic fields, a symbol of which is GULFNET established in 1985, which links academic and research institutes in the Gulf States, especially Saudi Arabia. It was linked to BITNET by connecting King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) to George Washington University in the United States in 1987. But, the fate of GULFNET is not clear, as most of its sites are switching from BITNET to the Internet. It is said that Saudi Arabia is currently working in moving e-mail traffic from BITNET connection to the Internet for all GULFNET nodes.
Like Saudi Arabia, Iran also allows Internet access only to academic institutions, it is said to have been the second country in the Middle East to link up to the Internet after Israel.⁷⁾ The Internet is available in almost all universities in Iran. But, the Iranian Internet links to the University of Vienna in Austria via two 9600 baud lines! (Compare with the 100 MB line between the United States and Japan) Why do the Iranian Internet links run through such slow lines? Some people believe that it is due to the effect of the U.S. embargo on Iran, which has made the acquisition and maintenance of powerful servers and workstations difficult.⁸⁾ Commercial Internet access is also available in Iran through some Internet service providers, although the services are limited substantially to e-mail.
There are no Internet services available in Libya, Syria and Iraq mainly due to the security concerns. However, even these countries recognize the need for the Internet.⁹⁾
An important characteristic of the Middle Eastern information infrastructure is that public telecommunication services in the region are provided largely by state agencies. This means that state-owned telecommunication agencies monopolize telephone lines and, therefore, the data communication infrastructure as well. In many Middle Eastern countries, government-led companies provide the Internet Services to the public. In these countries, private sector's role in the Internet is limited in sideline services like Web design or consulting. Exceptional cases are Israel, Egypt and Jordan, in which there are many private Internet Service Providers. According to Alaa K. Ashmawy's list updated February 14, 1997, there are 34 academic and commercial Internet access providers in Egypt.¹⁰⁾By contrast, most of the other Arab states have only a single local Internet Service Provider. The United Arab Emirates' sole Internet Provider, for example, is Emirates Internet which is operated by the semi-governmental Emirates Telecommunications Corporation - Etisalat. Q-Tel in Qatar and Batelco in Bahrain likewise play the solo ISP role in each country.
"In most developing countries, the initial Internet connection and its subsequent growth are the result of the efforts of a small group of people, or even one individual, who has a passionate devotion to the Net", David Zgodzinski has said.¹¹⁾ This principle does not apply to the Middle East, where in most countries, governments have taken the initiative in joining the Internet and some of them are still and will continue to take an initiative in operating the Internet as part of information strategy.

Connectivity	Country	Code
---	AF	Afghanistan
I--	DZ	Algeria
IU-	AM	Armenia
IU-	AZ	Azerbaijan
I--	BH	Bahrain
I-f	Cy	Cyprus
IU-	EG	Egypt
-uf	ER	Eritrea
I--	GI	Gibraltar
I--	IR	Iran
---	IQ	Iraq
IUF	IL	Israel
I-f	JO	Jordan
IUF	KZ	Kazakhstan
I--	KW	Kuwait
IU-	LB	Lebanon
---	LY	Libya
---	MR	Mauritania
Iuf	MA	Morocco
---	OM	Oman
---	QA	Qatar
---	SY	Syria
---	SO	Somalia
--f	SD	Sudan
-uf	TJ	Tajikistan
Iuf	TN	Tunisia
I-F	TR	Turkey
-uf	TM	Turkmenistan
I-f	AE	United Arab Emirates
IUF	UZ	Uzbekistan
---	EH	Western Sahara
---	YE	Yemen

I=Internet
U=UUCP Widespread
u=UUCP Minimal
F=Fidonet Widespread
f=Fidonet Minimal
-=N.A.
Larry Landweber, "Internet Connectivity", Version 15 - June 15, 1996

To the extent that the Internet remained quiet presence in the academic relm, Middle Eastern governments would not have been concerned about its expansion and development. It is convenient indeed and above all great fun; it could provide entertainment and education to the public not available through the existing local media. In addition, it has a bright future. People are talking about Internet commerce or digital money and the commercial potensial seems high. But the Middle Eastern governments found that Internet growth could not be easily contained. It proliferated irrespective of their plans. This has led to official efforts to control the Internet.
As was true with satellite television, governments in the region have taken a variety of measures in order to control the runaway network.
The most liberal countries are Israel, Turkey, Egypt and Kuwait and the most rigid Saudi Arabia and Iran. The other countries are generally falling into places between the two categories. The two Bathist governments are, as easily expected, out of question in this case.
In the liberal countries, people can enjoy more or less the same services of the Internet as in most of the Western countries. But, in conservative countries, Internet services are restricted substantially to some comparatively harmless services like e-mail especially when it comes to ordinary people, as mentioned above.
In the middle are countries which have not cut off the Internet services, but are currently trying to restrict the accesses to sites which authorities consider harmful for their societies and moral values.
To take an example, the United Arab Emirates' sole Internet provider, Emirates Internet launched a service on January 25, 1997 to censor sites that breached local traditions and moral values. Subscribers have to configure their World Wide Web (WWW) browser for the newly introduced Proxy Service. According to a report by Reuters, this service would be pre-fed with Internet addresses where access is blocked off.¹²⁾But it is almost impossible to block all the prohibited accesses on this server. The server won't block access if prohibited sites addresses listed there are changed. The provider says that any customer who abuses its service and violates order and law could be disconnected.
In the case of the UAE, police intervened in the Internet and set up the Internet National Strategic Committee in 1996, which recommended the Ministry of Information and the police, rather than Emirates Internet, should be authorized to issue Internet licenses. To censor Internet sites is, they asserted, their job, not the provider's. These China-Singapore formulae to censor have been seen not only in the Middle East but also in other Asian countries, where moral codes and family ties are considered stronger than in the West and Japan.
Even in Kuwait, the most liberal country in the Gulf region, some started arguing that government should curb on some sites in the Internet. An Islamist deputy, Abdullah al-Hajri submitted a proposal to the National Assembly in 1996 calling for the government to take measures to prevent all materials breaching local moral and religious values.
On the other hand, many Iranians expect their Internet will expand and develop rapidly once the U.S. embargo is lifted. Taking the technology they have accumulated into account, it will be possible, but conservative clerics don't want the Internet to expand so far beyond their reach. Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, a member of the most influential Guarding Council, said in a Friday sermon at Tehran University in December 1996 that the Internet should be limited to academic institutions. "Beyond that, it is poison fed to people. The Internet poisoned thought and moral and was much worse than food poisoning since 100 doctors put together could not cure such a case in a short time."¹³⁾ According to Reuters report, Iran's telecommunication ministry has over 10,000 Internet subscribers as of December 1996. They must sign a statement pledging not to access any information deemed un-Islamic.
What materials do the Middle Eastern authorities want to restrict or block? Naturally pornography is near the top of the blacklist. In all the countries of the Middle East except Israel, Islam is holding overwhelming majority; where many women are veiled and magazine pictures revealing cleavage or bare legs are blacked out. The Internet is, in Islamic moral values, something like the Wild West of the U.S. a century ago. Islam attaches the greatest importance to family ties. Any threat to such ties, such as pornography, is smashed as the enemy of Islam. That, incidentally, is why adultery is a capital offense.
Authorities are also very nervous about anything which leads to conflicts or tensions between religious sects like the Sunni and the Shiite. They are also hypersensitive in dealing with political affairs, though it is not easy to divide these political and religious elements in the Middle East context.
We have to take three aspects into considerations, when we talk about restrictions on political affairs in the Internet. The first one is a leak of domestic information. The first event which attracted global attention in the history of Middle Eastern Internet occured in mid-March of 1995, when someone circulated an Internet message urging the people to send letters of congratulations to the new chief of Israel's secret service, disclosing his name and address. The identity of the Shin Bet head was a top military secret. Despite this breach, his name remained a state secret until the Washington Post of the United States went public with his name, Karmi Gillon in January 1996 and Israeli television, quoting it, identified him for the first time. This episode may show that attempts to regulate information, control it or to block it are becoming impossible especially in cyberspace.
The second political issue is security against so-called hackers or crackers. Governments are getting computer-dependent day by day not only in civilian or academic fields but also in more sensitive security or military fields. Communications networks are vulnerable to attacks from outside. The Gulf War probed the importance of infowar, when the U.S.-led Allied Army bombed telephone exchanges in Iraq and used Sandcrab jammer that disrupted long-range radio links throughout Iraq. If governmental or military facilities are linked by the Internet and are not well-prepared for penetration from outside, these can be easily attacked by hackers or cyber terrorists through telephone lines. Terrorists do not need to stay in the country they want to attack. They can attack the targets while in abroad.
The Washington Post in 1995 warned an electronic Pearl Harbor in cyberspace, asking what if the Iraqis respond to the U.S. intervention by attacking the New York phone system. "Their weapon would not be a Scud missile or a bunch of terrorists but a professional hacker sitting in an Amsterdam apartment or an Ivy League-trained Iraqi computer scientist resting in Finland, either of whom could use the Internet to vandalize New York's phone exchanges," it said.¹⁴⁾
The third element is propaganda war in cyberspace, especially from oppositions, exiles, dissidents or terrorists living abroad.

After the end of the Cold War, and especially after the Gulf War, people started talking about the New World Order, in which the United States dominates the world as a sole superpower. The Soviet Union is history. Communist China is increasingly capitalist. Japan lacks the vigor to challenge the United States. Who will provide the alternative?
It is little to be wondered that some defiant essays like Samuel Huntington's "The Crash of Civilizations?" and Benjamin R. Barber's "Jihad versus McWorld", appeared in this ideologically chaotic period. Huntington's well-known 1993 essay draws the battle lines of the future on the fault line of the civilizations from Yugoslavia to the Middle East to Central Asia and concludes that the United States must forge alliances with similar cultures and spread its values wherever possible¹⁵⁾.
Benjamin Barber's essay, published in 1992, is in line with this post-Cold War paradigm of confrontation between the different cultures. His terminology is very catch, but in effect the two professors are discussing the same thing. Barber assumes the rift between universalism and particularism. The Universalism or the globalism is baptized by the name of McWorld, as the title indicates. It alludes Macintosh computer and McDonald hamburger and by extension covers the whole Western value system including Coca Cola, Hollywood films, and rock music as well as the Internet.
Jihad, the ideological opposite to McWorld, is represented not only by Islamic fundamentalism but by the set of forces which work to reinforce ethnic, religious or cultural particularism.
"The two axial principles of our age crash at every point", Barber writes¹⁶⁾. However, in spite of his clear-cut theory, some of those who are implementing Jihad these days are using Macintosh computers.
As already seen in the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, religious circles have not always rejected high technologies originated in the West. At that time, audio cassettes were used by the revolutionary clerics to spread their teachings. Currently, in succession to these cassettes, facsimiles are used as one of the most powerful weapons by political and religious oppositions as well as clandestine terrorists to spread their statements and to circulate infromation about their activities.
Now there is, of course, the Internet. The most enthusiastic user of the Internet in the Middle East must be the Israeli Government, which well understands the importance of providing information to the whole world in order to win the propaganda war against neighboring Arabs. The second most enthusiastic user group probably consists of Middle Eastern refugees and dissidents in exile in the United States or European countries, where the Internet can be used more easily and widely than in their home countries.
Numerous Middle Eastern opposition groups are active in cyberspace, including FIS and GIA of Algeria, Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, and Bahrain Freedom Movement. But the most interesting group in the Middle Eastern Internet may be Saudi Arabia's Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, CDLR. Its leader, Dr. Muhammad al-Mas'ari, former theoretical physics professor of King Saud University in Riyadh, formed the Committee in Riyadh in May 1993. It was soon outlawed by the government. Shortly after moving its headquarters to London, he started providing information on Saudi Arabia regularly by sending faxes or e-mails to those who are interested in Saudi affairs all over the world.
He also created the CDLR's web site in the Internet so that many people could access the page and obtain information about his activities and the corruption of the ruling Saud family. In addition, he has also posted many statements in some newsgroups on Saudi Arabia and Islam.
Seceded from the CDLR, Dr. Sa'd al-Faqih formed his own organization, Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, MIRA and started similar web site in the Internet.
Their successes in cyberspace have been temporary and limited so far, though al-Mas'ari became very popular personality not only in the British media but also in the Virtual Middle East. Muhammad al-Mas'ari was declared bankrupt by a British high court in January 1997. This was a very symbolic event in the history of Middle Eastern Internet and in the history of Middle Eastern opposition movements as well.
Mas'ari's debts stand at more than 100,000 pounds. He owes about 15,000 pounds to British Telecom, some 30,000 pounds to a company for issuing the CDLR's newsletter, more than 50,000 pounds to his lawyer who fought for his deportation case and 10,000 pounds in unpaid rent on his office.¹⁷⁾ He depended heavily on fax and other existing media including publishing magazine and books. He is said to send out about 1,000 fax messages a week.
"Allowing widespread Internet accsess is far more dangerous for security-conscious states than allowing satellite TV recievers ... because of the difficulty of monitoring or controling exhcange," Adrew Rathmell wrote.¹⁸⁾But, it is too eary to assess the impact of opposition activities in the Virtual Middle East. From the present circumstances, we can conclude that the threat to the regimes is so far exaggerated, especially judging from Mas'ari's case. Those who can use the Internet in The Middle East are still privileged minority. Given that they are the elite in government and society, the influence should not be underestimated.

The Middle Eastern governments have started opening their own official web sites in the Internet. Most of these are, however, still developing or under construction. The one and only exception is again Israeli government's sites which have reached the highest level in the global sense. Among them the web site of Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs is worthy of special mention. It provides us a huge amount of raw material related to the country and the Middle East Peace Process.
Of course, these are not purely for academic purpose. What is listed reflects Israeli interests. Some people accuse Israel of disinformation campaign on the Internet. For instance, Dubai Police Chief Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, a most eloquent critic against the Internet, said that Israel was trying to portray itself as a peace-loving nation through the Internet.¹⁹⁾
But, the solid documentation on the Peace Process can not be challenged by any other sites of Arab governments.
This Israeli site, along with other important homepages like those of the United State Department of States and the United Nations, may cover large part of documents concerning the Peace Process from the Balfor Declaration to the Peace Treaty between Israel and Jordan. In these sites, most materials are provided in digitized texts in English, in which many people other than orientalists can easily access information and the Middle East specialists can quote easily for their monographs.
Turkish government sites also maintain a high standard in comparison with Arabic or Iranian sites. Among Arab homepages, the web site of Saudi Arabian Royal Embassy in Washington, D.C. is interesting. It provides basic information on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia like member list of the current Saudi Cabinet and Consultative Council. Reports from state-run Saudi Press Agency, which are usually distributed a few days later after the issue, are covering what's going on in the Kingdom.
The other important information sources for current affairs in the Middle East are newspapers. Many leading Middle Eastern papers have opened their homepages. Israeli papers have a lead in this field, too. For example, the Jerusalem Post, an Israeli English paper, has achieved one of the highest level in Internet technology by providing beautiful and convenient contents.
Turkish newspapers are near, notable for effectively developoing Latin characters. But, the other papers, that is Arabic or Persian papers, have been facing a severe problem. The language problem is considered one of the biggest obstacles that discourage the spread of the Internet in the region. The language in the Middle East functions as the dual barrier that blocks popularization of the Internet as well as defends local identities from cultural invasion by the West.
But, technically speaking, Middle Eastern languages are still a minority presence in the Internet world, where English reigns as a despotic monarch, despite Arabic being the official languages of the United Nations.²⁰⁾
There is no standard (even de facto standard) for handling Arabic in the Internet. Most Arabic HTML files are currently written either in the ISO 8859-6 (ASMO 708) or Microsoft's 1256 code pages, but there are some strong competitors like UNICODE. The future of Arabic text in the Internet, therefore, is still unclear.
The most traditional way of displaying Arabic in the Internet is to use graphic files like GIF or JPEG. Leading Arabic newspapers like Asharq al-Awsat of Saudi Arabia, al-Watan of Kuwait or ad-Dustour of Jordan adopt this method, because graphic files do not require special browsers. It has wide compatibility and the only ones who can't have benefit from this are text-based Lynx users. Still, the graphic method burdens the users, since the dial up requires much more time and money.
The second option is Portable Documentation File (PDF) advocated by Adobe. Al Hayat on the Net is now using PDF. And the third one might be JAVA applet, but technical difficulties disturb newspapers in developing JAVA based web sites. The fourth option is a text code. Especially Microsoft's code is growing rapidly since Arabic version of Microsoft Windows 95 was issued in 1996.²⁰⁾
Until now, all the Middle Eastern newspapers in the Internet including weekly and monthly magazines have been distributing their articles to the public free of charge, though some have already declared the intention to introduce subscription fee.
There are some convenient sites which collect and link the URLs of the papers. The leader is no doubt pioneering Arabic Newsstand. This covers dozens of papers and magazines but is limited only to Arabic and English ones. You can find some other important resources in more comprehensive links like Electronic Journals and Newspapers--Alphabetical List.

In studying the Middle East, one should bookmark the homepages of research institutions like universities and academic organizations in addition to the above-mentioned useful sites. At present, the web sites of the Western academic institutions are much more substantial than those of the Middle Eastern countries. Above all, web sites of the Center for the Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and The Middle East-North Africa Internet Resource Guide of the University of Utah are excellent in creating comprehensive link collections of academic sites related to the Middle East.
As for the Gulf studies, the web site of Centre for Arab Gulf Studies of the University of Exeter is important. Its contents include; Introduction, Postgraduate Studies, The Documentation Unit, Annual Symposia, New Arabian Studies, Database, Staff of the Centre, Honorary Research Fellows, Sir Anthony Parsons, Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies and the University Library, Gulfnet and Address and Telephone Numbers. Among them, Gulfnet, not to be confused with the above-mentioned Saudi computer network, is an ambitious venture sponsored by the Centre, and is still under construction. According to its explanation, Gulfnet will provide on-line information on economic, political, social and geographic aspects of the Gulf and also provide a forum for discussion of issues affecting the Gulf.
The Middle East Documentation Unit (MEDU) in Durham University already provides on-line information services. According to the Unit, documents received since 1980 are recorded in an on-line catalogue, MEDUSA, which can be accessed through the Internet. Access to MEDUSA is only by telnet. People without knowledge of UNIX-based computer network could face some difficulties in operating the system.
As for documentation services, on-line catalogue on the Mamluk Dynasty at the University of Chicago can be considered one of the greatest achievements in the history of the Middle Eastern studies through the Internet. It enables all the scholars to share the frequent updated on-line bibliography on the Mamluk studies. Books and articles listed on the site are not only in English but also in the most heavily represented languages such as Arabic, French, German, Spanish and so on.
Another ambitious project is Winthrope University's Model League of Arab States which is sponsored by the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations. It provides basic information on each member states of the League. It has educational aims and enables students to learn much more about the real League.
Concerning organizations on the region, Middle East Studies Association's (MESA) homepage is worthy of access. It gives many links to Middle Eastern resources and some of the articles published in MESA Bulletin are available on-line, among which Jon W. Anderson's "On-Line Research & Teaching Resources for Middle Eastern Studies" is extremely useful for the present concern.
World Wide Web homepages seem to have integrated other Internet services. Gopher and FTP, which are not visually catchy, have been almost replaced by WWW for their functions to link sites or to copy files for non academic users. Services like Usenet or e-mail have been also integrated within WWW browsers as their own functions so that people can operate them without any knowledge of command-based UNIX.
But, these two services will not be absorbed in the WWW at least in the near future, because they have much more interactive features than the WWW has.
E-mail is a very powerful tool to communicate each other in cyberspace. It is also helpful in reaching a larger ambience. People who share common interests can discuss their interests by using mailing list. In this function, many people who register their names in the list can share information and discuss their interests. Mailing list can work as an electric bulletin of academic society or a kind of news providing system to members. There are so many listserv on the Middle East, though the majority are rather slow going. Among academic mailing lists²²⁾, the follows are important;

While mailing lists are restricted only for members who registered their names, Usenet newsgroups provide specific discussion fora which are open for the public. Anyone interested in specific themes can join the discussion without any approvals by the maintainers. Among newsgroups on the Middle East are the following.

You should not forget that this interactive nature of e-mail and newsgroups makes the discussions vigorous but often frivolous the same time. Furthermore, censorship works in some newsgroups in certain countries, where authorities censor newsgroups and ban access to some groups which they consider unsuitable for their Internet subscribers. Among the groups banned by the authorities, there are newsgroups of pornography as well as politically subtle discussions.

In addition to these academic sites, we should mention some religious sites. Religion has always enjoyed the highest communication technologies of the times. Cuneiform character Babylonian myths were written on clay boards. Gutenberg's first production was the Bible. Religions, naturally, are very much alive in cyberspace.²³⁾ Islam is no exception. Cyberspace is now a ground of faith, where we can visit virtual mosques and ask advises or fatwas from Cyber ulama on various social problems. There are countless Islamic sites in cyberspace, among which we may find a lot of information helpful for our studies from English translation of Qur'an and Hadith to Islamic software like Hijra calendar or ArabTex utilities.²⁴⁾
In the Virtual Middle East, extreme Islamists declared the holy war against the regimes or the United States and blamed the rulers for their corruption, injustice and unfairness. This is a battlefield between the regimes and the oppositions, the Sunnis and the Shiites and the radicals and the conservatives. Some people call it Netwar, a battleground of words without bloodshed.
The Internet is also providing the people of the Middle East a huge amount of information, including the news governments do not want them to know. Lack of credibility and trust in local media will accelerate the spread of the Internet. And the lack of entertainment will also give an insentive to Internet growth.
In addition, the Internet is now changing the method of Middle Eastern studies. The amount of resources and materials available for research has soared. The cost and time to manage them have drastically shortened. This benefits not only in well-equipped research institutions but individuals.
The Internet has become a pillar of national, regional and global information infrastructure since 1990s. It will be very hard for any government to oppose this trend even in the Middle East, where regimes control the input and output of information. While current leadership in the region who wants to restrict the Internet was not born with computer at home, the next generation has grown up with computer. For them, world wide computer network is axiomatic and innate.
The Middle East is a mixture of comparatively small states. Despite the fact that they share relatively similar culture and religion, most of them have severe problems with neighboring countries like border conflicts. These geographical characteristics and political conflicts have hampered the flow over borders of information among the Middle Eastern staets. Furthermore, censorship and a powerful governmental sector have disrupted fair competition among local Internet service providers. It also blocked the advance of global Internet providers like IBM, Microsoft and AOL, preventing visiting scholars from using the Internet in their fields.
In Asia, a new project has started to provide cross-border Internet access points in some states. In the Middle East, establishing such kind of regional Internet provider, or regional information super highway, is strongly recommended not only for the local people but also for foreign scholars in order to redress the cyber-fragmentation of the region.
At the same time, the spread of the Internet shows that cyberspace can be a research task. The Virtual Middle East or Cyber Islam is not simply a combination of zeros and ones. The Internet has already stepped into the real world.

1) CD-ROM version of al Hayat is only for Macintosh. As far as I know, among Middle Eastern newspapers which have issued CD-ROM versions are The Jerusalem Post of Israel and al-Qabas of Kuwait.
2) "It appeared that local news sources, including print and broadcast, are not really appreciated by the young of the GCC who instead prefer to watch CNN, NBC, or listen to the BBC Arabic service - about 75 percent of the students sampled (in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and UAE) said that foreign news services were more credible sources of information ... local sources of news are considered very poor," Jamal al-Suwaidi, director of the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, said on January 1997, "Satellite news most popular in Gulf - survey", Reuters, Abu Dhabi, Jan. 6, 1997.
3) Andrew Rathmell, "Netwar in the Gulf", Jane's Intelligence Review, January 1997, p.29.
4) "Mullas monitor the media", The Middle East, November 1996, p.37.
5) For Middle Eastern attitude towards satellite TV, see A. Rathmell, op.cit.
6) David Zgodzinski, "Third-World Internet", Internet World, December 1996 (Internet version).
7) Payman Arabshahi, "The Internet in Iran: A Survey".
8) Arabshahi, op.cit. The United States National Science Foundation ordered the University of Vienna to shut down the lines in August 1996 as a measure of embargo but later revoked the order.
9) Syria's Tishreen, January 21, 1997 reports Syria to become Internet Subscriber, and Iraqi governmental newspaper, al-Jumhuriya on November 24, 1996 says that Iraqi computer scientists hope to be able to have access to the Internet. But, the same paper says in an editorial on February 17, 1997 that the Internet is "the end of civilizations, cultures, interests and ethics and is one of the American means to enter every house in the world ... They want to become the only source for controlling human beings in the new electronic village." (Associated Press report from Baghdad).
10) http://pharos.bu.edu/Egypt/access.html.
11) David Zgodzinski, op.cit.
12) Rana Sabbagh, "UAE launches service to censor Internet", Reuters, Dubai, January 25, 1997. Gia Marie Lacuna, "UAE Internet is censored", PC Magazine, Middle & Near East, March 1997, p.13.
13) "Iranian cleric urges Internet restrictions", Reuters, Tehran, December 20, 1996.
14) Neil Muro, "The Pentagon's New Nightmare: An Electronic Pearl Harbor", The Washington Post, July 16, 1995.
15) Samuel P. Huntington, "The Crash of Civilizations?", Foreign Affairs, 72:5, November/December 1993, pp.29-30.
16) Benjamin R. Barber, "Jihad Vs. McWorld", The Atlantic Monthly, March 1992. This was later revised as the introduction to Jihad Versus McWorld (Time Books, 1995).
17) Andrew Malone and Paul Nuki, "Saudi rebel Masari talks himself into ruin", The Suday Times, January 12, 1997.
18) Adrew Rathmell, op.cit., p.31
19) "UAE accuses Israel of Internet disinformation", Reuters, Duibai, January 5, 1997.
20) Problem of computer software piracy is another big headache to block the spread of computer in the Middle East, which is considered as one of the world's worst regions for the piracy.
21) "8,000 copies a month are being downloarded...and considered against the growth of the Internet as a whole, that's a very impressive figure", Ahmed Chami, Microsoft Middle East's General Manager, said (PC Magazine, Middle & Near East, March 1997, p.14). For how to read Arabic HTML, see Nicholas Heer's site, URL of which is http://weber.u.washington.%20edu/~heer/.
22) The Middle East-North Africa Internet Resource Guide of the University of Utah lists up detailed collection of the Middle East related mailing lists, including some news services. In addition to this, it is noteworthy of FBIS pubilication being offered electronically. The hardcopy production has been phased out.
23) For faith on the web, see Joshua Cooper Ramo Chama, "Finding God on the Web," Time, December 16, 1996.
24) I have never heard about comprehensive and international text digitalizing project in the Middle East like Project Gutenberg of the United States which started in 1971 in order to provide digital texts of classics and masterpieces to the public. With standardization of local language codes, such a project will be required and developed also in the Middle East in cooperation with releted countries.