The State And The City - Uncovering The Early History Of The Municipality Of Beirut

The Anis Makdisi Program in Literature cordially invites you to a lecture by Malek Sharif The State and the CityUncovering the early history of the municipality of Beirut AUB, Bldg. 37 (behind the Lee Observatory), Thursday March 13, 2014 (5:00pm) The standard literature on the Ottoman Tanzimat period largely ignores or barely touches on the provincial urban institutions. They ignore the formative years of the municipalities in the provinces and the laws by which they were constituted. Consequently they date the foundation of municipalities at a later period of time. They also tend to attribute the establishment of this new institution to the influence of either prominent governors, such as Midhat Pasha (1822-1884), or to the impact of foreign nationals who collaborated with them. The local agency, dynamics and contributions have never been properly investigated. This talk will try to shed some light on the formative years of the municipality of Beirut prior to 1867—the date of the first municipal law for the provinces—and its ambivalent relationship with the central authorities in Istanbul. MALEK SHARIF holds a PhD in Turkic Studies from the Free University of Berlin. From 2004 till 2007 he was affiliated to the German Orient Institute in Istanbul, as a post doctoral fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin and the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. He is the author of Imperial Norms and Local Realities (2014) and the coeditor of The First Ottoman Experiment in Democracy (2010). Currently he is lecturer at the Civilization Sequence Program and the Department of History and Archaeology.