From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Syrians/Habeeb Salloum
A general English-language history of Syria is Philip Khuri Hitti, Syria: A Short History (London, 1959), Eli‘ezer Ta’uber, The Formation of Modern Syria and Iraq (Ilford, U.K., and Portland, Ore., 1995), and Salma Mardam Bey, Syria’s Quest for Independence (Reading, U.K., 1994), discuss Syrian history in modern times.
Baha Abu-Laban, An Olive Branch on the Family Tree – The Arabs in Canada (Toronto, 1985), is the most comprehensive study of Arab-Canadians in general. It covers the period from the beginnings of emigration to Canada in the late nineteenth century to the early 1980s. The book provides a wealth of information about Arabs in Canada and specific data, not found elsewhere, on the pre-1914 Syrians. Joseph G. Jabbra and Nancy W. Jabbra, Voyageurs to a Rocky Shore: The Lebanese and Syrians in Nova Scotia (Halifax, 1984), is a detailed study of the Syrians and Lebanese in one province. Peter Baker, An Arctic Arab (Saskatoon, 1976), is an account of the au-thor’s life in Arctic Canada. Sheikh Muhammad Said Massoud, I Fought As I Believed (Montreal, 1976), includes a considerable amount of material on his efforts to inform the Canadian public of the Arab side of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Gilbert Johnson, “The Syrians in Western Canada,” Saskatchewan History, vol.12, no. 1 (1959), 31–32, is the first published article about Syrians who settled on the prairies. Habeeb Salloum, “Reminiscence of an Arab Family Homesteading in Southern Saskatchewan,” Canadian Ethnic Studies, vol.15, no.2 (1983), 130–38, and “The Urbanization of an Arab Homesteading Family,” Saskatchewan History, vol.42, no.2 (1989), 79–84, detail the evolution of the author’s family from prairie pioneers to city dwellers. Farid E. Ohan and Ibrahim Hayani, in The Arabs in Ontario: A Misunderstood Community (Toronto, 1993), survey the perceptions of Arab-Canadians in relation to their lives in Ontario and their views about fellow Canadians.
