Cyma Farah is a constitutional and cultural historian of the Middle East with special interest in Palestine and Lebanon. She is currently an Early Career Fellow at the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and a part-time lecturer at the American University of Beirut. While she completed her award-winning doctoral dissertation on the Lebanese constitution of 1926 at Rice University, her professional career began as a social studies teacher in Beirut. She holds a BA and MA in History from the American University of Beirut.

Project description: 

From the Grand Serail to the Great Revolt: Constitutionalism and Revolution in Lebanon, 1925-1927 

Through rigorous archival and other research into yet-untapped Arabic, French, and English sources in Lebanon and France, my research aims to address the tension between the rational-legal discourse of High Politics during the French mandate over Lebanon and the seemingly chaotic circumstances of popular unrest. I examine this issue in a specific historical context which I believe has wider significance – the drafting of the 1926 Lebanese constitution and the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925-1927. Although, they take place simultaneously, one ushering the other, the literature pertaining to these formative years mainly discusses them as isolated events.