ABSTRACT
Sari Hanafi is a 54-year-old professor of sociology at the American University of Beirut and the founding editor of Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology. The North African Arab Ibn Khaldun was writing clearly sociological analyses of Arabian societies more than four centuries before Max Weber was born. Hanafi stands in a long line of Arab social scientists and is not, therefore, some sort of historical or cultural anachronism. "The objective is to unfold the way Arab sociologists produce knowledge in sociology" but in the course of the analysis, Hanafi reveals some interesting differences and some striking similarities between the journal process in the Arab world vs. that in the West. In terms of national origins of Arab Idafat authors, the countries of the Maghreb contribute the most papers: Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. The access problem was even more acute for researchers working in non-Arab countries whose libraries rarely or never procure Arabic-language journals.
