Status Updates From الاستشراق: المفاهيم الغربية...

..what was clearly at stake, Graves argued, was the need for 'much better American understanding of the forces which are contending with the American idea for acceptance by the Near East. The principal of these are, of course, communism and Islam." Out of such a concern, and as a contemporary adjunct to the more backward-looking Am. Oriental Society, was born the entire vast apparatus for research on the Middle East.