Introduction

Abstract

Khaled Ziadeh’s Neighborhood and Boulevard: Reading through the Modern Arab City appeared in Arabic at an interesting moment in both the career of the author and in Arab letters more generally. The author grew up during the 1950s and ’60s in Tripoli, Lebanon, the unnamed—and therefore broadly generalized—city that serves as the focus of this text. After a brief period studying for a doctorate in history at the Sorbonne in Paris in the late ’70s, he returned to Lebanon and became a professor of history and social science at the Lebanese University. His first three books were archival studies of Ottoman rule in Lebanon that were written strictly for other educators and advanced students. A typical title of this period was his The Traditional Image of Civil Society: A Critical Reading of the Records of Tripoli Shari’a Court, Beirut: Publications of the Institute of Social Sciences, 1983. Respected as these early works may have been among specialists, nothing about their style or composition moved beyond the author’s tradi-tional elite academic training in Europe.