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.