Though I agree that the summary was rather ridiculous, I think that it does point to one of the problems of archival research in the Middle East. I'm a linguist, so I don't do too much with this, but a friend was trying to find some documents about the Fatimid era in an Egyptian archive (obviously much more recent historically than the cuneiform mentioned here.)

The archive she used was a total mess. The indices were almost useless - when she could find what she was looking for, the index number didn't match any manuscripts, or the manuscript itself was in the wrong place (and therefore could not be found without a multiday search.) Even worse, another researcher was trying to find works on mathematics (riyaadiyaat in Arabic), and when looking through the index, found the letter "r" missing from an index that went "d-dh-z", when "r" comes in between "dh" and "z." (As if the index in English went "L-N-O"). When he asked, he was told to look under "h" for "hisaabaat" 'calculations', but wasn't told what would happen if he actually needed something from 'r'.

Contrast this to American and European libraries with thorough records, a consistent indexing system, and access to resources like Worldcat. Even the American open-stacks library is a bit of a rarity world-wide, and as anyone who has done research in closed-stack libraries can tell you, that makes things a lot easier.

Actually, this is still true to a certain degree in academia even today. In my field (Arabic linguistics) much of the work is done by Germans, often in German. My "German for Reading" course had students from a number of departments for the same reason, including a couple of engineers who were working on areas that are apparently quite hot in Germany right now but less so in the US.

Part of the reason for this is that German universities are much more lax in what they require from professors vs. the US. German professors often have a much lighter teaching load than in the US, freeing them up to do a lot more research.

If you're really working on important photography stuff, why not just buy an external monitor that has much better color reproduction and viewing angles. If you're working on this for a job, you should invest in the proper equipment for that job. I'm not even totally clear on why you need a laptop for final photographic production work.

I'm a linguist, and I can tell you that I wouldn't write an article on how bad the built-in speakers are for transcription of complex language data. I buy high quality headphones instead.

Actually, Sayyid Qutub started out as an extremely liberal secular cultural thinker, but became somewhat disenchanted with Western Liberalism. However, he didn't begin writing such radical works until he was jailed under Gamal Abd an-Nasr, and tortured heavily. His philosophy was not actually aimed at the west per se, but rather at the secular government of Nasr, whose legitimacy he tried to challenge on the basis of the idea of "daar al-haarb" and "daar as-salaam."

The quote you show above is not about Western powers per se, but rather about the illegitimacy of the Nasr regime. The "daar al-harb" here is Egypt, not the US.

In fact, his ideas would probably have been better articulated had he NOT died from torture in prison. However, the important point here is that acts of torture actually significantly radicallized Qutub, and led to him producing this sort of highly malleable doctrine, something we should think about with respect to our own actions today (torture of possibly innocent people in Guantanamo, bombing of Gaza).

And IAGSIAS(I Am a Graduate Student in Arabic Studies)

First, try this edit on for size:

Second, I think you forget that under the Ottomans, and in fact, throughout the history of the Middle East, the area now thought of as Palestine was one of the most cosmopolitan and dense areas in the region, due to the presence of important ports along the coast, as well as important religious sites (i.e. Jerusalem). It was a mercantile region focusing on crafts and trade as well as agriculture. To imply that the area west of the Jordan river was sparsely populated solely by bedouin nomads is not historically accurate.

I will come right out and say I have a bias - I did my undergrad in linguistics, and am doing my graduate work in Arabic linguistics (emphasizing pedagogy). However, I think a lot of people have been absolutely right that you should learn another language. The thing that a lot of the people here haven't really touched on here is that regardless of WHAT language you choose (and there are a lot of good suggestions) what you get out of learning language goes beyond the language itself. What you really learn is how different and varied language can be, which in turn makes you think about your own language in a lot of interesting ways, as well as making learning a third language even easier.

Think about it like a computer language - I originally learned BASIC, then went on to C/C++, then Java. With each language, it got easier, and I learned what to expect out of a computer language - methods to move data around, conditional statements, subroutines and functions. I learned how things fit together, and what to expect when I encounter a new language.

The same is true when learning another language - you find the startling, but totally logical way that other languages express concepts you take for granted. You learn words and phrases which barely have any equivalent your own language, and which are sort of a new world of concepts and vocabulary. It gets you thinking. And when you come to another language, no matter how closely or distantly related it might be to what you know, you'll look at things and think, "hey, I've seen that sort of thing before."

And this is true of any language - just because Spanish, French or German are related to English doesn't mean they're any less different or exotic than many other languages like Arabic and Chinese. You'll get fluent faster if you choose them, because vocabulary is one of the biggest limiting factors on fluency, but I really say you should something for the sake of the process as much as the result.