Guest Editors' Notes.

SINCE IT'S FOUNDING IN 1979, in the tradition of its founding coeditors, Edward Said and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (Rahimahu allah), Arab Studies Quarterly has provided a forum for the critique of scholarship, policy and power politics as they relate to the Arab world. In providing a forum for critical analytic scholarship on the Arab world, the journal in effect has provided a forum for silenced voices in the academic cacophony of Western research on the Middle East. Its presence is evident in all of the major indexes, so any literature search on a Middle East topic is bound to turn up citations in Arab Studies Quarterly. Pedagogy on the Middle East has thus been irrevocably altered by the addition of alternative perspectives on the so-called "Arab predicament" in the body of literature on the Middle East.

The imposition of United Nations Security Council sanctions on Iraq in 1990 has essentially cornered the Iraqi people in a death trap between the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and the tyranny of the UN Security Council. The toll on the Iraqi people is genocidal and has continued for more than a decade in the full view of the international community. We have edited this issue on Iraq: Sanctions and the World now "in order that serious investigation of the Arabs might begin," as heralded by Said and Abu-Lughod in the first issue of ASQ, "at a time when in the West at least, no such opportunity or possibility exists" in scholarly forums devoted to Middle East studies.

We want to express our gratitude to the current editors of ASQ, especially Ghada H. Talhami and William W. Haddad, who have maintained the journal's commitment to discriminate "between good and bad scholarship, between a version of the truth and an ideological fiction," as the founding editors promised, and "between originality and lackluster derivativeness."

Tareq and Jacqueline Ismael

October 2001