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Damascus has a long and distinguished history as a center for scholars and scholarship. The Umayyad Mosque has been a hub for Muslim scholars since the first Islamic century. Under the Ayyubids and Mamluks, a flurry of madrasa-building brought professional scholars to Damascus from all corners of the Muslim world. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Damascus, many scattered manuscript collections were consolidated into the National Library, housed in the Mamluk-era Madrasa al-Zahiriyya, the pride of Syrian scholars in the age of Arab nationalism. With French rule in 1920 came an army of researchers and catalogers who established one of the region’s best library collections at the Institut Français des Études Arabes à Damas. And, in 1984, the Asad Library was established to serve as a national library and to house manuscript collections from around the country. The mid-1990s is an auspicious time for American researchers in Syria because of the establishment of the American Research Institute in Syria, Inc. (ARIS), a consortium of American universities that has been working for the past several years to establish an institute for research and residence in Damascus on par with the European facilities there. The Institute has yet to be officially approved by the Syrian government, and present efforts depend on the outcome of regional political discussions.

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