Historical writing by Syrians on Syria up to the 20th century followed the traditional patterns of annals, in chronicle form, biographical notes, and general histories. These histories, when written by Muslims, were mainly concerned with Islamic and Arab countries. Interest in other countries, especially Europe, discerned in the writings of Christians (a noted example is the history by Mīkhāīl Barīk, Tārīkh al-Shām 1720-1782, ed. Q. al-Bāshā [Harīsā, 1930J ) , became widespread in the writings of both Christians and Muslims in the 19th century as a result of the growing influence of Europe in Near Eastern affairs.

It is not easy to present a summary of Middle East studies in France. Traditionally located in several important institutions—Collège de France, School of Applied Higher Studies (EPHE), National School of Oriental Languages—they have burst out of these walls over the past two decades. Many courses on the Middle East are now given in the Universities of Paris and the provinces. The new organization of higher education created after the crisis of May 1968 was guided by a spirit of university autonomy and thus makes any general summary even more difficult. Several universities have often been created in the same city and specialists have been split up among them rather than remaining together.

The use of the computer as a research tool for the study of the Middle East is a relatively new phenomenon. As the social sciences preceeded history and the humanities in making use of the computer, so have American and European studies preceeded non-Western area studies in this respect. Older, purely literary methods are still dominant in area-specialist journals, computerized and quantitative articles appearing in any quantity only in the journals dealing with the modern period or those which have begun publication within the past decade or two (see my article in the American Research Center in Egypt Newsletter, 93 [Fall 1975]). Much of the social scientific research done on the Middle East, has, in common with that done on Europe and America, involved routine computer processing and statistical analysis, but this material is also generally published in disciplinary journals where most area scholars never see it. Many students of the Middle East are therefore often unaware of the very existence, let alone the potentialities, of much of this new methodology.