Wajdi Mallat

Wajdi Mallat (Arabic: وجدي ملاّط) (November 22, 1919 – April 17, 2010) was a Lebanese jurist, statesman and author. He was the first president of the Constitutional Council (Arabic المجلس الدستوري) of Lebanon, from 1994 to 1997. He resigned from the Council over the handling of the parliamentary elections of 1996.

Early years

Born on November 22, 1919, Wajdi Mallat was the scion of a family of poets from the city of Baabda, the capital of Ottoman Mount Lebanon. His uncle Tamer (1856–1914), a judge during the Ottoman era, was a well-known poet who stood publicly against the arbitrariness and corruption of Wasa Basha (Arabic واصا باشا), the plenipotentiary governor of Mount Lebanon. His mother, Marie Checrallah, hailed from a family of physicians educated in Constantinople. His father, Shibli (1875–1961), was celebrated as the "Poet of the Cedars" (Arabic شاعر الأرز) in Cairo and Alexandria, Baghdad, Damascus, Aleppo and Haifa, and entertained close friendships across the region, from then Emir Abdallah of Transjordan (later King Abdullah I of Jordan) to the first president of independent Lebanon, Bechara El-Khoury.

Education and early career

Wajdi Mallat was educated at the Jesuit college of Beirut, then studied for an advanced degree in Latin while earning a Masters in law from Saint Joseph University, where his classmates included many of the subsequent intellectual and political leaders of Lebanon. Among his professors was Choucri Cardahi. Wajdi Mallat was attached early on to the unique interwar experiment of liberalism in the Levant, especially Egypt, which he lived first hand from the close friendship between his father and the leader of the Egyptian national movement, Saad Zaghloul.