Further Reading

There are countless books that deal with Arab history, Arab society, and Islam – the dominant religion of the Arab world. For a recent, concise history of this world, from pre-Islamic Arabia to the present time, see Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), which covers a wide range of topics, including the rise and spread of Islam and of the Arabic language, empire formation, the Ottoman age and the age of European empires, Arab culture and the structures of Arab societies, the role of women, arts and letters, socio-political conditions, Arab nationalism, and Arab unity and disunity. Another worthwhile history is Tarif Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period (Cambridge, Mass., 1994). Khalidi’s highly readable book traces the development of historical thought in the Arabic-Islamic tradition and how this tradition is reflected in social and political developments.

For a detailed, country-by-country account of the Arab world, see Hassan S. Haddad and Basheer K. Nijim, eds., The Arab World: A Handbook (Wilmette, Ill., 1978). A valuable source for a history of Islam is the recently published four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World (New York, 1995). For readers interested in the substance of Islam, the Islamic scholar Sayyid Qutb’s The Religion of Islam (Palo Alto, Calif., 1967) is a useful reference.

Baha Abu-Laban and Michael W. Suleiman, eds., Arab Americans: Continuity and Change (Belmont, Mass. 1989), is a collection of recent studies of Arab-origin communities both in Canada and the United States. The first major collection of studies of Arab and non-Arab Muslim families and family life in Canada and the United States is Earle H. Waugh, Sharon McIrvin Abu-Laban, and Regula B. Qureshi, eds., Muslim Families in North America (Edmonton, 1991).

General studies on Arabs in Canada include Baha Abu-Laban, An Olive Branch on the Family Tree: The Arabs in Canada (Toronto, 1980), which covers Arabs in Canada from the early days of immigration to the late 1970s. It is available in a French-language translation as La presence arabe au Canada (Montreal, 1981). A major study of Arab immigration to Canada, with emphasis on Ontario, is Farid E. Ohan and Ibrahim Hayani, The Arabs in Ontario: A Misunderstood Community (Toronto, 1993), in which the authors provide a demographic profile of Arab-Canadian and Arab-Ontarian communities and also report findings from an original study of the values and attitudes of Arab-origin Ontarians.

Peter Baker, Memoirs of an Arctic Arab (Saskatoon, Sask., 1976), provides an account of the adventures of a Lebanese-origin Canadian who took trade goods by dog-team to hunters and trappers in the Canadian north. Sharon McIrvin Abu-Laban, “Arab Canadian Family Life,” Arab Studies Quarterly, vol.1, no.2 (1979), 135–56, examines Arab-Canadian family life and compares traditional and emerging patterns of mate selection, gender roles, kinship ties, and parent-child relations. Baha Abu-Laban, “Canadian Muslims: The Need for a New Survival Strategy,” Journal Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, vol.3 (1981), 98–109, identifies various issues and challenges facing Muslims and their children, Arab or otherwise, in their adoptive land, while the same author’s “Social and Political Attitudes of Arab-Americans: What the 1989 ADC Survey Reveals,” American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee Issue Paper no.24 (Washington, D.C., 1990) is a survey of the attitudes and opinions of some 2,500 Arab-origin Americans and Canadians on a wide range of social, political, and current public issues.

Baha Abu-Laban, “Arab-Canadians and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” Arab Studies Quarterly, vol.10 (1988), 104– 26, focuses on Arab-Canadian attitudes towards Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Baha Abu-Laban and Sharon McIrvin Abu-Laban, “The Gulf War and Its Impact on Canadians of Arab and Muslim Descent,” in Baha Abu-Laban and M. Ibrahim Alladin, eds., Beyond the Gulf War: Muslims, Arabs and the West (Edmonton, 1991), 119–42, discusses the difficulties and problems faced by Arab and other Muslim Canadians during the 1991 Gulf War in which Canada was an active participant against Iraq.