The historic appearance of the social sciences as an intellectual activity seeking to be scientific is directly tied to the birth and development of industrialization in Europe and in other areas taken over by Europeans, notably North America. If one opens a treatise on sociology, for example, one sees that all the founding fathers of the discipline are men of European culture. It is true that in the last few years Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) had often been cited as one of the forerunners of scientific thought, but he is a forerunner, and not a founding father like Conte, Durkheim, Marx, etc. The principal preoccupations of these figures were obviously those of their society, which at that time was going through a phase of upheavels connected with industrialization. But with the colonial expansion, which is one of the principle concequences of that industrialization, the curiousity of European scholars in social sciences overflowed the limits of their own society; thus was born ethnography, ethnology, and later, anthropology.

Both public opinion and planners have generally emphasized and in some cases overestimated the importance of industrialization in the Middle East. Yet the needed research for sustained industrial development has lagged behind the desire for and interest in that sector and such research and literature are still in only the beginning phases.

Literature on Middle East industrial development has been constrained by, (1) modern industrialization is a relatively new phenomenon in the region. (2) Analysis of industry and its related sophisticated technology is heavily dependent on quantitative measurements and data, the inadequacy of which is still a major obstacle to researchers and writers. (3) Even with the dominant feature of Middle Eastern economics--oil--authors have tended to deal with the region overwhelmingly as a raw material producer rather than as a center for refining and processing. These difficulties have led to two approaches in literature on the Middle East's industrialization.