Sheikh Abdul Kader Kabbani

Kabbani was born in Zuqaq al-Blat, Beirut. His father, Mustafa Agha Kabbani, had commanded the garrison at Acre and was captured during Ibrahim Pasha’s siege. Muhammad Ali of Egypt offered him rank and money to change sides; he refused, remaining loyal to the Ottoman sultan, and escaped to Istanbul. In revenge, Muhammad Ali exiled the family to Cyprus for about ten years. They returned to Beirut after the Egyptian withdrawal, and Abdul Kader was born soon after.

The family says its roots lie in the Hijaz, from where it moved to Iraq, Syria and Jbeil before settling in Beirut. His wives included Safiyya al-Sajaan, Princess Aliyya Shihab (a descendant of Emir Bashir Shihab), Ghufran Sabbagh and Fatima Nadr. He had sons and daughters, among them Najib, Nur al-Din, Adnan, Rushdi and Abd al-Rahman.

After early schooling in Quranic schools, he attended the National School, founded in 1863 by the scholar Butrus al-Bustani to give an education open to all Lebanese regardless of faith or class, independent of the foreign missions. Its curriculum covered Arabic, French, English, Greek, mathematics and the sciences.

His teachers included Sheikh Abd al-Qadir al-Khalili, Sheikh Muhyiddin al-Yafi, Sheikh Ibrahim al-Ahdab and the poet-scholar Sheikh Yusuf al-Asir. Education remained the cause he returned to throughout his career.

The weekly newspaper Thamarat al-Funun (“The Fruits of the Arts”) first appeared on 20 April 1875. It was launched for the Society of Arts, but passed into Kabbani’s hands when the society dissolved. At first he was editor, manager, proofreader and correspondent in one; after he became mayor, Sheikh Ahmad Hasan Tabbara took over the editing.

The paper covered politics, society, the economy, science and religion. It had correspondents in cities from Baghdad to Algeria and so reached well beyond Beirut. It was loyal to the Ottoman state but argued steadily for education and reform. Its closure came in 1908, after the constitutional revolution turned against its editor.

In 1878 Kabbani and a group of Beiruti notables founded the Makassed Philanthropic Islamic Society, a non-profit body for education, health and welfare. The first meetings were held at his home. Its founding statement lists around 1,500 donors, including Ottoman officials and both Muslims and Christians.

The society’s first project was a girls’ school in Bashoura, opened in 1878 with 230 pupils and six teachers. Schools for boys followed. Makassed is still one of Lebanon’s major educational and health institutions.

As head of the municipality from the late 1890s, Kabbani first rescued the city’s finances from near bankruptcy, then walked the streets himself to oversee projects. During the 1899 locust invasion he ordered each resident to hand over a quota of locusts and eggs, and about thirty thousand uqqas were destroyed.

Landmarks and institutions

The Hamidi fountain, a marble public fountain eight metres high, was inaugurated in 1900 in what is now Riad al-Solh Square and moved in 1957 to the Sanayeh garden. The clock tower, 25 metres and five storeys, was built with municipal funds beside the Ottoman barracks, with its clock imported from Paris; it was restored and restarted in 1996. The municipal hospital gave free treatment, food and lodging to the poor. He also chaired the committee that raised money for the Sanayeh crafts school, financed in part by a small fee on entering Beirut.

In 1898 he welcomed Kaiser Wilhelm II, who is said to have called the city the jewel of the Ottoman crown and awarded him the Order of the Red Eagle.

In August 1908, a month after the Young Turks forced the restoration of the constitution, Kabbani was dismissed from his post as director of education without any legal ground. A court cleared him of wrongdoing, but his newspaper was closed. He had already helped found the Ottoman Union society and later joined the reform movement that called for decentralisation.

Aged about sixty, he obtained a licence to prospect for iron and petroleum in Syria and Lebanon, reportedly the first of its kind in the region, and hired German engineers. The First World War ended the project. Under the French Mandate he returned to public life as director of the Awqaf, the Muslim endowments, hoping to reform them.

The Lebanese researcher Nader Siraj titled an article on him “Abdul Kader Kabbani: the story of a city in the life of one man”. It sums up how closely his career and Beirut’s development were tied.

Read the full Arabic biography