This paper examines the differences between archived material that was always a digital record and hard-copy archives that were subsequently digitised. It considers the rationales behind the digitisation of archives in established western democracies as digitised collections and ad-hoc files are made available online. It compares this with how the archives of regimes in the Middle East and North Africa that collapsed between 1990 and 2011 were digitised. Overt political expediency determined the circumstances under which documents were released and recalled from public view. It examines the digitisation of archival material after the wars in Iraq in 1991 and 2003 and its political implications . Then it examines material that has always been digital: the record of social media exchanges on the day when Colonel Qaddafi was killed in Libya in October 2011 and how the archived digital form reflects the origins and purposes under which it was produced. In both cases the electronic format is not simply a question of ease of distribution, both have become a record because they were assembled for particular purposes. Like 'traditional' archived documents, they were never intended to satisfy the needs of later historians but they became a source by being brought together.

ONE of the many difficulties in writing about the history of the rural Middle East and North Africa is that sources are far more limited than they are for urban areas. The towns are better recorded, partly because of higher literacy, partly because of greater government control and supervision. Even within the towns the historical record is skewed in favour of the elite, and particularly the political leadership. That leadership was (and is) largely male. In an article published in 1970. 2 Nikki Keddie suggested that one way of overcoming a reliance on what she called 'ideal sources' ('the Quran and the traditional sayings of Muhammad, jurists and theologians') might be to make more use of material taken from prose, poetry, geographies, legal and theological writings, chronicles, wills, legal cases and so on. 3 This of course is being done, but even so the picture of the activities of women in the Islamic world is biased towards the urban or upper-class sections of the various societies of the region. That is not to dismiss it, for such studies present some useful and important insights into women's roles in society as a whole.One of the most intriguing of these suggestions is that women were by no means powerless; that there existed, because of the separation between the sexes, distinct female systems of power. Dengler, writing of upper-class Turkish women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries noted that: by the mere nature of the separation of men's and women's worlds in Ottoman society, each sex came to acquire a separate hierarchy with its own specific system of information exchange and decision making. Women of the ruling elites, in part through personal ability, but primarily through linkage with their own friends, kin groups, and the army of subordinates placed under them, became the heads of vast clientage and patronage networks that at times gave them direct control over the entire State apparatus. 4Bates, in an article on 'Women as patrons of architecture in Turkey', 5 in 1 I wish to thank my friends Dr Marion Farouk Sluglett and Dr Peter Sluglett for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. I should also like to thank my friends and former colleagues at

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