مراسلة مع الجمعية البريطانية لدراسات الشرق الأوسط

HAROLD WALKER

Tue 2/10/2009 6:14 AM

Dear Dr Mazen

 Thank you for your message about BRISMES sent by the Plaxo network.

 What BRISMES does, and what its members can expect from it, is largely to be found in the website - www.brismes.ac.uk

Home - BRISMES

The British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (popularly known as BRISMES) was established in 1973 to encourage and promote the study of the Middle East in the United Kingdom. We are the UK's premier Middle East Studies association. We bring together teachers, researchers, students, diplomats, journalists and others who deal professionally ...

www.brismes.ac.uk

 (the website is not a very exciting one, and we are currently engaged in a process to improve it). One might add that the BRISMES Council spends quite a lot of time representing its members vis-a-vis the funding bodies in the UK, the British Academy and indeed the government. In that sense the Society is of more value to its members resident in Britain than to those working overseas. However, you ought to have received at least our thrice-yearly Newsletter and also the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, which used to be issued twice a year but now comes out three times a year.

 According to the records held in BRISMES's Administrative Office you joined the Society in 2006 but did not rejoin in 2007. The address to which the Society's welcome letter was sent, and subsquently the Journals and Newsletters, was P O Box 2548, Riyadh 11453. This does not tie in with the address I have for you in my Outlook Express address book, which is P O Box 51049, Riyadh 11543. Possibly that would explain why you did not receive your Journals and Newsletters.

 I am at a loss to know how you were promised to be nominated BRISMES representative in Saudi Arabia, and suspect there was some misunderstanding. Do you recall the circumstances?

 However all that may be, I hope you will keep in touch. How is your project to teach, as it were, "Occidentalism", going?

 Coincidentally, I attended this morning a test showing of a film of which the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies was one of the two sponsors. The film, which is in IMAX form, illustrates the Hajj by telling the story of how Ibn Battuta performed it. Needless to say, the film shows some impressive scenes, both of the Hajj itself in Mecca and of the scenery that Ibn Battuta would have scene on his way there. There are only a few IMAX cinemas in the UK, so the film's makers were showing it to an invited audience with a view to persuading one of the cinemas to show it as a feature.

 Yours sincerely

Hooky Walker

(Sir Harold Walker, 39 Charlwood Street, London SW1V 2DU)