An avid photographer and leader of the National Democratic Party in Iraq, Kamil Chadirji (1897-1968) marked the beginning of his prolific political career by joining Jama’at al-Ahali in 1932. Al-Ahali would eventually term its populist nationalist ideology as Sha`biyyah by the mid-1930s. The son of two-term Ottoman Baghdad mayor Rifat Chadirji and father of the renowned Iraqi architect of the same name, Chadirji occupied a distinct position as a liberal landowning aristocrat that sought the realization of an independent Iraq free from British imperialism. He hoped that this Iraq would usher in an age of benevolent capitalism where industrial and social progress would be distributed in relative proportions among the various urban and rural classes of Iraq. While Chadriji’s political activism has been well documented, it has been treated by historians as independent of his vast photographic archive. This paper argues that Chadirji’s 1930s photographs reveal an attempt to capture an objective reality of social and political life in Iraq that tie into a parallel scientific reformist agenda regarding the demarcation of social classes, land distribution, worker’s rights, housing shortages and negotiating the spatial boundaries of urban Baghdad’s rural frontier. Chadirji’s photographs of ‘typical’ landscapes and figures vacillate between a neo-realist representation of different landscapes of poverty and an anthropological enumeration of peasant types that are differentiated either by their gender, profession, or ethnicity. They also indicate the epistemologies of the elite eye as it represents the ‘great majority’ of the country. While photographs of the Chadirji family are labeled with specific dates and names, most of the typical landscapes and figures remain unnamed, existing neither in place nor in time as forms of raw material waiting to be integrated into a brave new developmental state.

Beirut evolved from a minor Ottoman maritime town of about 10,000 inhabitants (early nineteenth century) into a thriving Levantine city that accommodated a population of over 100,000 individuals (early twentieth century) and specialized in transit trade due to its newly constructed port (1890–1893) that was sponsored by French money. Engaging a comparative analysis of various histories of the making of the Levantine city, this study demonstrates how most scholarly works have in fact divided Beirut’s history into divergent narratives that are tied to one of the two governing regimes: Ottoman and French. Fin-de-siècle Beirut acquired two distinctive political statuses; first it was capital of an Ottoman province (1888–1918) and later, with the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the inception of the French Mandate, it became capital of the newly founded Grand Liban (1920–1943). Histories of pre-WWI Beirut, despite their rich and comprehensive nuances, emphasized one of two theoretical positions. Highlighting the economic relapse of the late Ottoman Empire, some scholars represented the modern project as a colonial one that is preoccupied with the employment of Western forms and norms. Others, attempting to avoid Orientalist and essentialist views that point to the weakness of the Ottoman Empire in its latter days before its demise, emphasized the role of the Ottoman reformation system (tanzimat) in the modernization of Beirut. I argue that the two opposing intellectual trends, with their respective modernist and postcolonial leanings, have been influenced by the tradition of splitting the two areas of study—Ottoman and French—as though the two histories never overlapped. Local Beiruti elites in fact developed a commercial system that reflected, as well as resisted at times, projects of imperial scale. The local system emerged as a result of a larger politico-economic alliance between the Ottoman Empire and France in the wake of the uprisings in Mount Lebanon and the establishment of the Mutasarrifiyya in 1861. It thrived in the interstices between the centralized Ottoman tanzimat and the European concessionary business, which developed from an earlier form of regulated trade between the Ottoman state and French merchant-consuls. The history of Beirut is best expressed through a statement by Philip Mansel: “Beirut, the last [Levantine] city where neither Christianity nor Islam dominates, [was] born from one of the most successful alliances between France and the Ottoman Empire.”

In the years following his architecture studies in Alexandria, Mecca-born Mohamed El Farsi worked as an architect for the government in 1963. He was quickly promoted to the post of “Planning Officer for the Kingdom of Western Saudi Arabia” and by 1972, he became the mayor of Jeddah, holding office until 1986. In this period (particularly during the 1970’s) Farsi led one of the largest commission and acquisition sprees of public art in the Arab world. The city of Jeddah boasts – since the inception of its early planning – some four hundred artworks, many of which are becoming the subject of contemporary scholarly interest. The acquisition included works by renowned artists, some of whom visited the city, including Henry Moore, Aref El Rayyes, Alexander Calder, Joan Miro and others. The collection was developed closely with the late Spanish artist and architect Julio Lafuente. The renewed interest in the work, both by the city of Jeddah and its burgeoning art milieu, as well as scholars, is part of the attention that is lacing the symbolic capital that the Arab Gulf is amassing around the institutions of art – claiming new stakes through art markets and museums. The historic context in which Farsi developed Jeddah’s open-air museum, and vested the city with this iconic cache of modernist artworks, denotes an interest in a type of globalism through aesthetic strategies within urban space. This inquiry is vested in the common stories and myths around the sculptures of Jeddah, and the evolving historiography of this under-recognized body of public works.

“We all miss those days, when we could go from one street to another covered by the voluptuous darkness of the night to find the new ‘house of pleasure’… Now ! there is nowhere to hide now, If you go down the street of Zarkoun, you are going to the brothel and everyone would know it. There is one unique space and a unique shame. Those French bastards, they have left us with only two choices: Marriage or public disgrace.” Ali Douagi, 1938. This paper starts with the following premise: a brothel is a space that is exclusively dedicated to female prostitution. The latter is defined as a sexual practice involving a female worker, a client and a specific amount of money given in exchange of a sexual intercourse, taking place in a public space exclusively affected to that role. When applied to the Tunisian context, this premise can lead to the following primary conclusion: the first brothel ever implemented in the city of Tunis is the Karti, and this happened in 1936. However, this date does not announce the birth of organized and illicit sexual practices in the city. Proscribed extramarital relations have always existed and different references to sexual workers in Tunis indicate the presence of several ‘spaces of sexuality’ since the 12th century. What happened in 1936 is, in reality, the replacement of ‘immoral’ and fluid sexual practices by ‘prostitution’ per se and its spatialization through the creation of the well defined and heavily regulated space of the brothel. This paper will try to analyze this institutional and spatial transition. It will look at the ways in which this ‘function’ was created and how it has been translated into space within the urban fabric. It will examine the relationship of this brothel to the city and to the process of colonization in general. It is finally an attempt to unravel the colonial strategies of micro-spatial control and to oppose it to the idea of a colonial ‘domination totale’ proposed by thinkers such as Ali Mahjoubi and Hachemi Karoui.