While this was going on the Bolshevik Revolution occurred and he started acquiring materials from Russia as well. In fact one of the more significant collections in the institutions achieves was acquired then even though it was not made public until 50 years later. Until it was made public no one knew that the Russian secret police, the tsarist secret police had maintained two sets of files, one in St Petersburg and one in Paris. Two almost identical sets. The revolutionaries kept travelling backwards and forwards between the two cities ahd the Russian embassy in Paris kept track of the revolutionaries. The set in St Petersburg was supposed to be destroyed by the bolsheviks when they took over. They ordered the ambassador in Paris to destroy it. He told them it had been destroyed and he gathered all the material and handed it to Hoover.
Since its establishment as a library documenting the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution the Hoover Institution has developed into the archive library service that is today. It concentrates on 20th century political and social events. The social movements are really political movements.
There are certain distinctive features about the Hoover Institution. We belong to Stanford University but we do not belong to the Stanford University Library. We are open to any researcher who wants to come and use our materials. There are restrictions on some of our materials and some of our archival materials are closed.
I personally brought to the institution one archival collection which I can’t talk about. I can’t tell you whose archival collection it was. That collection will not be open for 20 or 30 years. In fact there are two collections.
Other collections are restricted. They are listed but there are restrictions on the date when scholars can come and look at the materials.
Our library holds about 1.6 million volumes, our archives hold 4500 individual collections, some of them could fill this room.
The library is divided into six area collections each headed by a curator. The collections are Europe, Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, East Asia, the Americas, Africa and the Middle East.
At the Hoover Institution we define the Middle East as being all of the Arab states, North Africa, the central Arab states, what we call the Arab states of West-Asia: Turkey, Israel, Iran and Afghanistan.
We collect materials in Arabic, Kurdish and Persian. We have materials in Turkic languages and Central Asian languages. The Middle East collection is altogether about 125,000 volumes and the Middle East archives total about 200.
I will give you a breakdown of what we have: about 25,000 catalogued Arabic books and another 5000 – 6000 which need cataloguing. We have 12,000 volumes of Arabic serials and newspapers. There are about 1500 Persian books of 500 volumes of serials and newspapers. Turkish books total about 6000 volumes and perhaps 22,000 serials and newspapers. Of the western langauge materials (I am not going to separate them) over 50,000 volumes. There is a good possibility that the figures I have just given you do not add up to 125,000. I can’t balance my cheque book, I am very bad at figures.
We have about 200 archival collections related to the Middle East. I have with me here a copy of the list of our archival collection. By way of comparison I also have a copy of our archival holdings on Russia which is three times what we have on the Middle East.
In our Arabic collections we have fairly good holdings of materials that can be broadly defined as turath. We no longer develop these materials. What we concentrate on is 20th century political and social movements.Sometimes we talk about 20th century politics, economics, military affairs, communism and socialism, education as a factor in social change, US national security affairs. But it all boils down to politics and international relations.
The title of this talk is documenting the Middle East and I want to say a few words that will explain to you how we differ from other libraries in what we collect and how we collect it.
I know most of my colleagues in other American libraries would have a Middle East collection. There are 50 such libraries around the country. They buy large amounts of books from various sources in the Middle East. They buy magazines. Many of them buy far more than we do. We also buy books. I buy books on modern politics in universities in Egypt and Lebanon and in Massacuettes. There is an excellent dealer in Cambridge Massacuettues who supplies me with excellent material from Jordan and occasionally from Saudia and often from London.
But one of the things we try and do is to document local opposition movements, communism and socialism and even local fringe groups. And to do that we can’t simply rely on dealers. My Lebanese dealer will not supply me with political materials. I regularly ask him that if something happens and there are going to leaflets in the street, please send them to me. And he simply won’t do it.
So we have to find other sources. And that is why I am here. My dealer in Massacuettes comes to London and wires materials for me. I was here two summers ago and had a meeting with a shiekh who leads one of the political groups. I can’t reveal his name. We were sitting in a station cafe. This was the best place for us to meet. He was there with his assistant and at a certain point he simply leaned back in his chair spread his arms wide and said welcome to London, the capital of Islamic fundamentalism. That brings a person like me to London because we are interested in Islamic fundamentalism and the Islamist movement and their publications.
We have try to make personal visits and build contacts and so on. We have developed fairly good collections on the publications of the Saudi opposition and the Bahrain Freedom Movement as well, thanks to Dr Shehabi.
We have an especially good collection on the Iranian opposition consisting of well over 3000 pieces plus some microfiche collections. For a long time they were in my office. The Iranian opposition collection is a good illustration of how the Hoover Institution differs from other libraries. Since we look for special materials which other libraries do not necessarily collect we have actually acquired a substantial part of our collection from other libraries like the University of Texas which could not handle the materials.
Within our archives we have fairly important collections relating to the Middle East. Our archives are perhaps most famous for the Russian collections and the European collections and also the American collections. We had the papers of Ronald Reagan when he was the governor of California. The Reagan papers were transferred to the Reagan Library when it was established. We now hold the paper of George Schultz the former Secretary of State who was a distinguished fellow of the Hoover Institution.
Within the archives we have extensive documentation of the Russian Revolution, the white Russians. Our Russian archival programme, which I bring up only bring up by way of example of what we do, includes very large projects. They are now filming by agreement with the state archive of the Russian Federation to film a substantial part of their holdings in exchange for copies from our holdings. This is an exchange of 25,000 reels of microfilm from each side.
We are filming substantial parts of the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, perhaps even some KGB archives. We have an agreement with the Gorbachev Foundation to use some of their material relating to Gorbachev and some of his associates.
We recently entered into an agreement with the Polish achieves and other eastern European governments to make copies of their holdings. It is unfortunate that there is not much chance that we will be able to make such co-operative archival filming agreements with the governments of the Middle East. But one hopes.
I am rather proud of having acquired a certain number of archival collections over the past 16 years. I would like to mention them as they are examples of the kinds of materials that we regularly look for. The reason we bring them into our archives and into our library is to preserve them for present scholars to use and for scholars in the future to use.
And given the way we are organised, we make materials available to any scholar who comes to the institute without charge. This has helped the transmission of knowledge over the years.
One of the first collections I brought into the institute was our Iranian poster collection which consists of about 450 posters and illustrations, most of them originating from Iran during and after the revolution. I went through the collection, I catalogued it myself and I can recall one poster from the pre-revolutionary days against the Shah. Everything else has to do with the revolution.
In fact, I have one poster which I don’t tell anybody about. I never put it on the achieves. I kept it in the office on my wall and I get very interesting reactions from people who come in to meet me.
I am a Polish-American Roman Catholic and I deal with the Middle East collection and on my wall I have this poster of Ayatollah Khoemini. It is a very colourful very attractive poster but it is also interesting to see the reactions. They can’t figure me out when they see that.
That collection of 450 posters and illustrations of Iranian art has been used by several scholars in their publications. I have gone through them with some of the scholars and identified the various elements. Some of them have ten, 20 layers of Persian, Shite, Islamic and modern political meanings.
We also have the collection of the Iran Freedom Foundation, which is an American anti-Khoemini group which was looking for a home for its papers. It was once a blanket organisation which tried to serve as a unifier for a number of different organisations.
We have a collection of the works of Mustapha Shah Ayam a great economist. Iran’s own writings. They were hand written and passed around in secret, without the police knowing what was going on.
I have already mentioned the opposition literature which is not yet in the archives. But some Iranian and other opposition literature is contained in the James Hazelburg Collection which includes a lot of material relating to the Iranian opposition but mostly relating to the Gulf Arab opposition. Printed materials, posters, flyers, brochures audio tapes of speakers. We continue to collect that kind of material. I just bought about $1000 worth of video and audio tapes of speeches.
We also hold collection of Ahmed Sadiq Saeed, the Egyptian communist. It is largely composed of his own unpublished manuscripts and autobiography. That is available for scholars to use.
Dr Jamari mentioned the memoirs of Dr Hussein Ali which unfortunately can’t be used until 2017 but they were translated into English. This served as the basis for the French and the Chinese translation.
There are three other collections, the Steven Green Collection. They were used by Steven Green in his books Living by the Sword and Taking Sides which deal with the US wars against Israel.
The Paul Findley collection contains materials by former congressman Paul Findley called They Dare to Speak Out. He lost his seat in congress because of the actions of the Israeli lobby.
The last collection that I will mention is a groups of collections relating to the USS Liberty. During the 1967 war USS Liberty an American reconnaissance spy ship was attacked by Israeli forces. It is a very sad in many ways and I tried to document it at the Hoover Institution. I acquired two collections: one of James Aines who was the author of the Attack on the Liberty. He was the deck officer at the time of the attack. The other was based on the proceedings of the US court of inquiry into the attack.
I would like to finish by saying that I am here in London to acquire books and other materials for political collections. I am looking for archival collections. We are very much interested in getting collections of political groups and political opposition groups.
We as I said deal with 20th century politics. As part of that we are very much interested in documenting what, for lack of a better word, is called Islamic fundamentalism. We are also interested in documenting democracy and democratisation in the Middle East such as it is.
We have a new acquisitions programme on democracy and democratisation which has new funding to acquire materials.
The reason I am here is because London is the capital of Islamic fundamentalism, it is the world centre for publications on the Middle East. Unfortunately it is a sad comment that it is the world centre for so much publication and activity on the Middle East. It means it can’t be done in the Middle East itself.
The Middle East is the place in the world where the alphabet was invented. So much intellectual activity is taking place there. It is unfortunate that the Middle East is coming under severe censorship, publications are closing and access to materials is restricted.
Perhaps one day the Middle East will become, as London is now, a centre of publishing and reasearch activity.
provide surprising confirmation of the power of the anal personality. To sell shares, to get rid of them, to expel them is something very difficult for the anal personality to do. Many unconscious resistances work against it.
Two other empirical studies suggest that Furnham and Argyle are being over-critical. Paul Kline is not a Freudian but one of Britain’s great experts on psychometric tests. Interested in whether there was any link between obsessional behaviur and anal personality, he constructed a questionnaire which included questions such as ‘When eating out do you think of what.
