I N T E R N AT ! 0 N A L P E R S P E C T I V E S

Computing in the Middle East °mp" ng I

I communi ty in the Arab world, and

The role, status and future of the information technologies (IT) in the Middle East, with the" partial exceptions of Israel and Turkey, have been largely ignored or mis- understood by most of the world. The economic, political and strate- gic significance of this region make technological lacuna about it inex- cusable. Oil, a strategic locale, a complex range of economic and social problems, and conflict on many levels (e.g., Arabs/ Israel , Iran/Iraq, I raq /UN, Lebanon, So- malia) combine to make this an important, unstable, and rapidly changing part of the world.

Large ly un in fo rmed external coverage of the Middle East tends to project the image of peoples intent upon the eradicat ion of modernization, the abolition of tech- nologies synonymous with the West, and a generalized desire to revert to some earlier epoch in history. In our view, this impression of regional technophobia is oversim- plified and exaggerated. As the fol- lowing examples illustrate, there have been important applications of IT in the region, including some with unique indigenous character- istics. Yet, as we describe in this column, economic, political and

o cultural circumstances are such z that the overall acceptability and

value of these technologies remains ambiguous.

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Snapshots Egypt

< Egypt is the most populous country (about 55 million) in the region as well as one of the most cosmopoli-

J tan. It has the largest, most capable, and most internationally oriented

trained people are among its most important high-tech exports. Moh- tassem Billah Kaddah exemplifies this sophistication as head of the Debt Management Project of the Informat ion and Decision Support Center ( I D S C ) , the l ead IT- related organization under the Egyptian Cabinet. Becaus~ Egypt has one of the world's' largest foreign debts, Kaddal" and his staff have had tc d e v e l o p an i n f o r m a t i o r system for modeling differen~ debt rescheduling schemes The system is heavily used b5 senior officials, and is cred- ited with playing a key rok in producing a model thai resulted in the negotiation o: very favorable terms frorr foreign creditors. As a re- sult, other developing coun- t r i e s w i t h s e v e r e deb~ problems look to Egypt fo] technical assistance with deb~ rescheduling.

In a different realm, Fath~ Saleh and his team at th( Regional Information Tech- n o l o g y a n d S o f t w a r e E n g i n e e r i n g C e n t e r (RITSEC) in Cairo are working on cultural multi- media projects. Their goal is to capture some of the most valu- able artistic and library treasures in computerized forms accessible to large numbers of people. A proto- type system exists for storing and

S. E. Goodman and J. D. Green

displaying ancient manuscripts in the National Library on C D - R O M , including one of the oldest known copies of the complete Koran.

Saleh, Robert Cribbs, and Mah- moud Effat did a Fourier analysis of the digitized sound recordings of two original and five exact replicas

of ancient Egyptian flutes dating from the 18th Pharaonic Dynasty (around 1500 B.C.). They con- cluded that the Western musical scale was probably invented by the ancient Egyptians and not by Py- thagoras as has been believed for centuries. A similar analysis sug- gests that the Arabian musical scale, credited to the Persians, may also

C O M M U N I C A T I O N S OF T H E ACM/August 1992/Vo1.35, No.8 21

have been invented by the ancient Egyptians [9].

Iran An interest ing irony may be seen in the fact that a powerful synthesis of modern technologies and tradi- tional ideas were instrumental in the overthrow of the Shah and the victory of Iran 's Islamic Revolution of 1978-79. Without IT, this up- heaval may not have occurred [8]. The Shah had invested heavily in these technologies as a means to secure his own position. Particular attention was paid to the develop- ment of a state-of-the-art TV and radio infrastructure which was used to fur ther centralize his authori ty and cement his control. SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, was equipped with computers to keep track of Iran 's large and growing community of political dissidents. Copy machines, shortwave radio, and an improved te lephone system all became key elements in state- building. Yet jus t as the Shah had hoped to use these tools to suppor t his control, his opponents tu rned them against him. Copy machines churned out ant igovernment mate- rial, while cassette recorders were used to play tape-recorded exhor- tations by Ayatollah Khomeini from his places of exile in Iraq and France. People listened to the BBC and the Voice of America, which broadcast the exiled Ayatollah's in- structions to his followers in Iran. In less than a year, the region's strongest leader with its best- equipped military and secret police was chased out of the country by a movement headed by an elderly cleric who never had a bank ac- count nor driven an automobile.

Jordan The Middle East is home to an un- paral leled concentrat ion of great archaeological sites. The re is a growing threat of damage to many of these sites due to the rapid growth of populat ion and the at- tendant need for housing, utilities, roads, te lephone lines, and agricul-

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tural land. In recent years, govern- ment and international agencies concerned with the preservat ion of antiquities have started programs for establishing and maintaining computer ized inventories of their archaeological heritages. One of these is the Jo rdan Antiquities Database and Informat ion System (JADIS) project headed by Gaetano Palumbo. The goals of JADIS in- clude providing detailed informa- tion to government and private organizations under tak ing con- struction near antiquity sites and helping archaeologists to more ef- fectively plan their excavations and surveys. The hardware used for antiquities projects covers the full range of computer systems from mainframes to PCs. Many, includ- ing JADIS, are trying to combine databases and Geographical Infor- mation Systems (GIS) to provide a wide spectrum of useful outputs. Palumbo estimates that over 20,000 sites in Jo rdan will be recorded in JADIS and that there are hundreds of potential users [6].

Syria The most striking feature in Syria is the omnipresence of pictures of President Hafez al-Assad. Every building has at least one, and many government buildings have at least one on every piece of glass and wall. Even taxis (often pre-1970 Amer- ican-made cars) have two or three photos. The rul ing Baath Party and government generate new Assad posters frequently, and no one dares to remove old ones. Only 360 people from an electorate of 6.5 million voted against Assad in last December 's one-candidate election [4]. This ostentatious display of control is backed up by over a dozen enforcement and intelli- gence agencies.

Assad's control is d i f ferent in some ways from that of o ther "so- cialist" leader-worshipping states like I raq or Romania [1]. The mer- chant c lass- - inc luding smugglers and e n t r e p r e n e u r s - - i s largely left alone in re turn for various forms of

support . Food is good and reason- ably plentiful, and Damascus is a lively city, as the capitals of police states go. The re is little control of domestic use of technology, and PCs, photocopy machines, and tele- phones are in common use, subject more to cost constraints than to the heavy government control that ex- isted in places like pre-1986 Roma- nia, East Germany, and the USSR. PCs must be registered with an of- rice that is connected with the mili- tary, but no one seems to consider this threatening, and reregistrat ion is not necessary if the ownership of the machine changes.

Electronic communicat ions with the outside world are a di f ferent matter. The government is acutely aware of the potential power of IT. Syria has no international email links and limited international phone service. The importa t ion of telefax machines is illegal. Some people do have fax mach ines - - often smuggled in from nearby B e i r u t - - b u t these are usually kept out of sight in desk drawers.

Foreign contact of another sort has given Syrian merchants a prob- lem they deal with using an electro- optical technology not seen much elsewhere. They have electronic scanning devices for checking the authenticity of American currency. Apparen t ly the former Soviet Union used to pay some of its local clients in counterfei t $100 bills sup- posedly pr in ted under the auspices of the KGB.

Building Software Capabilities There is no computer hardware manufac tur ing industry of great consequence in the Middle East. However, many of the countries in the region have good universities and send large numbers of people abroad for technical and business training. Many Middle Easterners live in or have good contacts within the industrial ized countries. Taken together with existing or prospec- tive domestic and regional markets for I T applications, these factors have st imulated several countries to

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try to build indigenous software engineer ing and market ing capa- bilities to serve a variety of national needs and to provide expor t oppor- tunities. Software industries are being nur tu red in Egypt, Jordan , Libya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, and Tunisia, among others. So far, Egypt seems to have the most extensive and successful record, one which we hope to cover in more detail in a future column.

Tunisia's efforts are illustrative of activities in several countries. The Tunisian government has offi- cially made informatics a "privi- leged sector." The National Infor- matics Plan is formula ted by the Council for Comput ing and Tele- communications, which is chaired by the Prime Minister and whose membership consists of a small n u m b e r of cabinet ministers and other "key players." The National Informatics Center in Tunis has been Tunisia's lead IT organization since 1975. Its 250-member staff tries to do everything from oversee- ing the implementat ion of the Plan to playing a major role in the design and construction of a national data transmission network. The govern- ment recently cut tariffs on com- puter imports from 50% to 10%. These efforts are contr ibuting to increases in the use of IT: comput- ers are heavily used in banks and public utilities, and dur ing 1987- 91 Tunisia had a 31.5% average annual rate of increase in the value of its computer equipment stock, to a cur rent value of over 200 million dinars (1 d i n a r = U.S. $1.12 on Jan. 13, 1992) [5].

Even the Sudan, one of the poor- est countries in the region (and still suffering from a prolonged civil war), is trying to develop a software industry. The Sudan was an early serious user of computing, with two mainframes in 1965, one for data processing and one for scientific computat ion at the University of Khartoum. But this start was not sustained, and comput ing in the Sudan has suffered from the mi- grat ion of some of its best technical

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people to oil-rich neighbor ing countries. The re has also been a lack of government priority since re turn on resources spent on com- put ing was less tangible than in other areas [7]. Nevertheless, the comput ing community is growing and doing what it can to improve its software capabilities, including the 1992 introduct ion of a graduate p rogram in software engineer ing at the Sudan University of Science and Technology.

A common concern, and the focus of much effort from Morocco to Saudi Arabia, has naturally been the Arabization of software. The large regional population, and the localized utility of Arabic, guaran- tee a substantial amount of work and market for Arabized software products. An Arabic computer s tandardized code (ASMO-449) was established in 1985 under the Arab Standards and Metrology Organi- zation (ASMO) and the Arabization Coordinat ion Bureau, specialized organizations under the Arab League. However, both groups died of political and budgetary problems and the codes have not been updated , resulting in a prolif- eration of many new codes and addit ions [2]. (Arabic letters take different written forms depend ing on their position in a word. So Ara- bic word processors have to be a lit- tle smarter than those for Euro- pean languages because a previously typed character may have to change shape, depend ing on what is typed after it.)

One of the serious barriers to building national and regional soft- ware industries is the widespread software piracy that exists in most of the Middle East. Frank and open discussions of this sensitive subject were recently held at a major re- gional software engineer ing con- ference hosted by RITSEC/IDSC, under the direction of Hisham EI- Sherif, in Cairo in January , 1992. Al though extreme positions were stated (ranging from "let's take what we can and let Bush worry about the New World Order" to

"pirat ing countries should be ostra- cized from the world community"), most of the discussions centered on the need to respect intellectual p roper ty and to become legitimate members of the international soft- ware community. There was gen- eral agreement that piracy has done much to increase computer literacy in developing countries. But so has the availability of inexpensive mi- crocomputers , and users in pirat ing countries always seem to find enough money to buy PCs from Taiwan or Korea, al though they claim they are too poor to buy soft- ware. It is simply much easier to steal software than hardware, and little respect for intellectual prop- erty has evolved in most developing countries, at least partially because so little software is created there (see also the December 1991 "Inter- national Perspectives" column). A concern of the Middle Eastern soft- ware engineer ing communit ies is that little commercial software will ever be created where piracy is so prevalent since the practice under- mines their incentives. Compro- mises in pricing strategies were advocated as ways to balance the needs of foreign and domestic soft- ware producers and users in devel- oping countries, e.g., poor country discounts similar to educational dis- counts used by book producers, or special site licenses.

Information Technologies and Social-Political Control In a part of the world where mon- archies, dictatorships, and theoc- racies are dominant , and where tra- ditional values are still important , the acceptability of IT is mixed. Controls and technological inhibi- tions remain prominent and wide- spread.

Dur ing this time of incredible global prol iferat ion of computer networks, the Middle East is note- worthy for the near absence of this technology. Al though plans for national or regional data networks have been raised in several coun- tries, we know of no extensive im-

C O M M U N I C A T I O N S OF THE ACM/August 1992/Vol.35, No.8 9 3

plemented network in any of these countries. According to Larry Landweber 's international connec- tivity table [3], there are no Bitnet, Internet , UUCP or Fidonet sites in Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan , Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, UAE, or Yemen. Egypt and Saudi Arabia have small numbers of domestic sites. Tunisia is the Arab country that is most exten- sively connected, with at least five In ternet sites and fewer Bitnet and Fidonet sites. Of the three promi- nent non-Arab countries in the re- gion, I ran is unconnected, but Is- rael and Turkey are.

Why is there so little network ac- tivity? We have no simple, credible explanation. Money is often cited as a reason, but unconvincingly. The cost of the technology is decreasing rapidly, there are inexpensive link- ages available in significantly poorer parts of the world, and many Mideastern countries that can easily afford sites are among the most conspicuous nonusers. Cul- tural factors may provide a partial explanation. In a par t of the world in which distrust for govermnent is high, Middle Easterners m~,y be unwilling to send communications which can be easily collected and read. Islamic religious constraints have been cited by some as inhibit- ing the introduct ion of new tech- nologies, but we have not fbund any generally accepted tenets to this effect. Indeed, some Muslims with whom we spoke believe that Islam encourages the progressive use of new techniques. A better explana- tion may be found in cultures where personal contact is p re fe r red to colder and more abstract long- distance ties. Middle Easterners rely heavily on face-to-face commu- nications; a handshake is often as good as a written contract. The re is still a s t rong human element to a te lephone conversation, but people may think compute r networks de- prive individuals of any personal- ized contact.

A significant part of the explana-

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tion is political. Regional politics have always been difficult and con- tentious, and are likely to have im- peded the regionalization of IT. At least some frustrated Jo rdan ian computer scientists think so: "Plans to create a national network in Jor- d a n . . , opera t ing within a Central Arab Network and linking it to o ther Arab national networks th rough Gulfnet and Maghrebnet , under the umbrel la of Aris-Net, are still a gl immer in the eyes of in- focrats because of regional political reasons"[2].

As the example of faxes in Syria illustrates, there are higher-level political controls in some places. One senior compute r scientist blamed the region's I T troubles on the kinds of governments most of the countries have, where people with power think and have the au- thority to act as if power is in con- trolling and containing information (especially information that crosses borders) ra ther than in distr ibuting it. But a few controls are loosening. Dur ing the Gulf War hundreds of Saudis purchased previously re- stricted satellite dishes to watch news of the conflict. After the war ended, certain government officials felt that the dishes should be regis- tered, monitored, or dismantled. They were repor tedly overruled by the King himself who recognized how disruptive such a policy might prove. Once people are exposed to a useful new technology, they can- not be forced to forget it.

Not all o f the political controls on IT are of local origin. Some come from outside, e.g., the unilateral U.S. expor t controls on such items as personal computers . Imposed on Syria for its pu rpo r t ed suppor t for terrorist activities, controls on these part icular products do little more than punish affiliates of American companies like IBM and NCR (the latter has been opera t ing in Syria since 1952). Microcomputers based on Intel Corporat ion 's 80286, 80386, and 80486 microprocessors are impor ted from the Far East and Europe without impediments and

in whatever numbers the market will bear.

Conclusions We have tried to make the case that the heterogenei ty and complexity of I T use in the Middle East is far greater than many Western observ- ers may realize. What is part icularly noteworthy is the openness of the comput ing professionals whom we encountered dur ing our visit to the region in January 1992, when we gathered much of the informat ion presented here. Al though it might be trite to emphasize the degree to which commitment to technological deve lopment seems to t ranscend individual nationalisms, we were both struck by the degree to which our colleagues in the Middle East were eager to discuss with us the role of I T in their individual coun- tries. It is this kind of openness that may ultimately undermine the op- position to fur ther pursui t of the types of studies advocated in this column. We would be interested in hear ing from colleagues sharing an interest both in I T and its applica- tions th roughout a highly varie- gated Middle East.

References 1. Goodman, S.E. Computing and the

resuscitation of Romania. Commun. ACM 34, 9 (Sept. 1991), 19-22.

2. Kanaan, T., Alul S., Abdullah, G. Jordan: Country briefing note. Re- gional Seminar on Establishing Re- gional Software Centers. Cairo, Jan. 14-16, 1992.

3. Landweber, L. International connectiv- ity, Version 5. Apr. 10, 1992.

4. Miller, J. Syria's game: Put on a Western face. The New York Times Magazine (Jan. 26, 1992), 12-21.

5. National Center for Informatics. In- formatics in Tunisia. Regional Semi- nar on Establishing Regional Soft- ware Centers. Cairo, Jan. 14-16, 1992; and Center brochure, un- dated.

6. Palumbo, G. Jordan antiquities data- base and information system. Un- published project description. Amman, Jordan, Jan. 15, 1992.

7. Status of software engineering and information technology in the

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Sudan. Regional Seminar on Estab- lishing Regional Software Centers. Cairo, Jan. 14-16, 1992.

8. Tehranian, M. Iran: Communica- tion, alienation, revolution. Interme- dia (Mar. 1979), 6-12.

9. Wafai, C. Music's new Rosetta Stone. Alam AI-Computer (Dec. 1991 ), 49-51.

F o l l o w - u p s a n d P o i n t e r s Jerrold Green is Di rec tor of the Cen te r for Middle Eastern Studies at the Univers i ty o f Arizona. He regular ly visits the reg ion and has lived for ex t ended per iods in Egypt, Israel, and Iran.

As discussed in the Apri l 1992 " In te rna t iona l Perspectives," the economic crisis cur ren t ly devastat- ing Brazil has been part icularly hard on the universi ty c o m p u t i n g communi t i e s there. Samuel Oli- veira and others have o rgan ized an e f fo r t to send used ha rdware and software to Brazilian universit ies. Oliveira may be contac ted at: Samuel R. Oliveira, D e p a r t m e n t o f P h y s i c s - - R L M 9.216, Univers i ty o f Texas at Aust in, Aust in, T X 78712- 1081 or (512) 471-4700 or 322- 0369 or sam@eins te in .ph .u texas . edu; B R A S - N E T @ C S . U C L A . E D U - - (Braz i l i an email list) soc.culture. b r a z i l - - ( n e w s g r o u p on Brazil)

Readers are e n c o u r a g e d to send comments , suggestions, anecdotes , insightful speculat ion (especially on the issue o f social-political controls o r inhibit ions on I T in the Middle East), raw data, and submissions for guest co lumns on subjects re la t ing to in terna t ional aspects o f IT. All c o r r e s p o n d e n c e should be ad- dressed to:

Sy Goodman MIS/BPA

University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721or

goodman@mis.arizona.edu or fax: (602) 621-2433

[]

Seymour E. Goodman, a professor of manage- ment information systems and policy at the University of Arizona, studies international developments in computing.

D. TAYLOR, Intuitive Systems, Mountain View, CA

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