Tripolitania

Tripolitania or Tripolitana (Arabic: طرابلس, transliterated: Tarābulus) is a historic region and an ex Province or State ("muhafazah" or "wilayah") of Libya (alongside Cyrenaica and Fezzan [1]), in an old system of administrative divisions which was abolished in the early 1970s in favour of a system of smaller-size municipality or "baladiyat" singular "baladiyah") . The "Baladiyat"-system was subsequently changed many times and has lately become "Sha'biyat"-system. What used to be Tripolitania in the old system became divided up into several "Baladiyat" or "Sha'biyat", see administrative divisions in ''Libya''. In the old system, Tripolitania included Tripoli, the capital city of Libya and a vast north-western portion of the country; in the subsequent systems, the "Baladiyah" or "Sha'biyah" of Tripoli has became much smaller than the original Tripolitania to include merely the city of Tripoli and its more immediate surroundings. Because the City and the "Sha'biyah" are nowadays almost coextensive, the term Tripolitania is of more value for historical contexts than for contemporary ones. In Arabic the same word ( طرابلس ) is used for both the City and the region, and that word alone would be understood to mean only the City; in order to designate Tripolitania in Arabic, a word like "State", "Province" or "Sha'biyah" must be used as a qualifier.