Last summer, Sari Hanafi, professor and chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB) was elected vice president as part 2014-2018 Executive Committee of the International Sociological Association (ISA). He was the first Arab scholar to be voted to such a position since the organization`s creation in 1948. ISA has seven thousand members. Hanafi hopes to contribute to the promotion of the scholarly community in the Middle East region and make it more visibile on the international scene. So far, only two Arab associations are represented: Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. The total number of participants coming from the Arab world in the recent World Congress is five. In comparison, there were seventy-six from Israel, sixteen from Iran, forty-five from Turkey, and 182 from India. Such invisibility is constant. Few scholars coming from the Arab world attend international conferences as their national universities rarely provide funding to attend them. For instance, there were only five, seven, ten, and six Arab participants in the World Congress of the International Sociology Association in Madrid (1990), Bielefeld (1994) and Montreal (1998), and Durban (2002), respectively.