3. Knowledge and Ignorance

When an Ottoman admiral, Halil Pasha, was ordered to inspect the condition of Mount Lebanon in the turbulent years of the mid-nineteenth century, he immediately paid a visit to the exiled emir of Mount Lebanon, Bashir Shihab. According to the memoirs of Bashir’s principal advisor, after the usual compliments and after the dispensation of coffee, sherbet, and sweets—signs of prestige that Bashir was loathe to forgo even in the ignominy of exile—the Pasha turned to his host and asked how he had managed to rule Mount Lebanon for so long and what could he tell him about the nature of the region’s inhabitants. Bashir, after all, had ruled Mount Lebanon (with a few brief interludes) from 1788 until his fall in 1840. “Efendim,” replied Bashir, “it is true that I ruled for that long, but every three or four years [the inhabitants] would rebel, although they never succeeded. I would kill, hang, imprison and beat without opposition to make them submit.” As for their nature, Bashir contented himself by relating the following proverb. “Efendim,” he said at length, “there is a bird in Mount Lebanon called Abu Far, which hunts mice. He is bigger than a falcon and perches on a high tree. When the sun rises, he looks to his shadow and sees it larger than it actually is and so he tells himself ‘Today, I must hunt a camel.’ But as the sun rises higher, his shadow grows proportionally smaller until the sun looms over his head; then Abu Far looks to his shadow and sees it smaller than it actually is, and so he settles on hunting mice.”^[1]

At first glance, such wistful admissions by Bashir, who described himself as “an old man, melancholy and aged, powerless and stooping to the level of poverty,” seem incongruous with his standing as the founding father of modern Lebanese history.^[2] The metaphorical and physical worlds that Bashir inhabited have little in common with twentieth-century Lebanese descriptions of their country’s history and with earlier European perceptions of a romantic refuge. Contrary to Lamartine’s depiction of a spiritual haven and contrary to a Lebanese historiography that has constructed (indeed is dependent on) a narrative of national tolerance corrupted by sectarianism, violence existed in pre-1860 Ottoman Lebanese society, but it consisted primarily of elite violence deployed to reaffirm a rigid, status-based social order defined as the rule of knowledge over ignorance. Local communities did not identify themselves tribally or nationally, and they subsumed their religious identities within a political and public space that accommodated differences of faith.^[3] Ottoman Lebanese society was shaped less by centuries of sectarian tolerance (or strife) than by a social order that, heuristically speaking, cut Mount Lebanon in two. At the top, an elite community regarded its control over religious and secular knowledge as essential to a hierarchical ordering of society. This community included Lebanese notables and those who chronicled their histories as well as Ottoman government officials and religious leaders. It existed above, exploited, and defined itself against the second community, the ahali, or the common Druze and Maronite villagers constituting the bulk of indigenous society. The aim of this chapter is to sketch the outlines of social order in this multireligious society and to explore the nature of violence that regulated this order.

The Genealogical Geography of Mount Lebanon

Long before the first missionaries arrived to reform them, Christians had been living in Mount Lebanon. Maronites settled in Mount Lebanon during the tenth and eleventh centuries following persecution by the Byzantines. During the Crusades, the Maronite Church entered into a formal union with Rome but maintained its autonomy and its Syriac liturgy. Initially the Maronites settled in the northern reaches of Mount Lebanon, in Qannubin, which served as the seat of the Maronite patriarchate. Over time, their monasteries developed from remote refuges, inconspicuously nestled along the sheer sides of the Lebanese mountains, to splendid structures.^[4] By the nineteenth century a considerable Christian population was spread across Mount Lebanon, including the southern Druze-dominated regions.^[5] The Druzes first appeared in the eleventh century and established themselves in the southern part of Mount Lebanon and various regions of southwestern Syria.^[6] In addition to Druzes and Maronites, there were also significant Greek Orthodox and Catholic as well as Shi‘a communities that dwelled in and around Mount Lebanon.^[7] Several parts of Mount Lebanon were home to a religiously mixed population. Regional accents aside, both Christian and Druze shared a common culture and a common respect of agricultural cycles, were bound by the same customs and hierarchies, and submitted to the same lords. Like all other peoples of the area, the local inhabitants placed tremendous stock in their religious identities. For the vast majority of the religiously mixed population, life in Mount Lebanon was a struggle to reconcile conflicting pulls. Leaders and villagers, priests and townspeople eked out a precarious existence within a coherent world that had two cardinal limits: those set by God and those set by the temporal elites who claimed to rule with God’s mandate.

Mount Lebanon was a region that straddled three Ottoman vilayets (eyalets), or provinces. To the north of Mount Lebanon was the vilayet of Tripoli; to its east was the important vilayet of Damascus; to the south was that of Sayda (Sidon), which was specifically established in 1660 to keep a firm grip on Mount Lebanon and the surrounding hinterlands. Although the idea of Lebanon as an independent nation did not exist, the Ottoman government accepted a certain degree of autonomy for Mount Lebanon.^[8] Ultimate authority after 1660, however, always rested with the Ottoman governor of the vilayet of Sayda. Historically, the term Mount Lebanon (Jabal Lubnan) referred to the mountain range on the western fringes of the area the Mamelukes had called Bilad al-Sham and that the Ottomans simply called Suriye, or Syria, in the nineteenth century.^[9] The southern part of Mount Lebanon was often referred to in local chronicles as Jabal al-Duruz (Ott. Cebel-i Düruz or Dürzi Dağı), or the Mountain of the Druze, or simply as Jabal al-Shuf. The northern part was sometimes described as Jabal Kisrawan, or the Mountain of Kisrawan. Indeed, only in the beginning of the nineteenth century, under the rule of Bashir Shihab, did the term Mount Lebanon become widespread (especially among European travelers), and it was only in the mid-nineteenth century that it was finally adopted by the Ottoman authorities (as Cebel-i Lübnan) to signify a coherent and separate entity.

There was nothing impermeable about Mount Lebanon, although the physical landscape was crisscrossed by several rivers which formed its natural boundaries. Trade and economy organically linked Mount Lebanon to the rest of Syria. Wheat was not produced in Mount Lebanon, and, therefore, the major staple had to be imported from other Syrian regions, such as the Bekaa and the Hawran. Commodities produced in Mount Lebanon, like silk, were exported primarily to local and regional markets, such as Damascus.^[10] Travel was not often undertaken, and those who did travel, the makaris (or muleteers), were the men who brought a village into contact with other villages and towns on a regular basis. Caravansaries, or rest stations, were built along the Beirut-Damascus road, which cut across Mount Lebanon. There were several on the coastal road in Jbayl and in Juniya; there were also some higher up like the one in Mdayrij.^[11] The cities that surrounded Mount Lebanon—Tripoli, Beirut, Sayda, Damascus, and Acre—were walled citadels where the urban confronted the rural.^[12]

Map 3. Old-regime Mount Lebanon

The largest towns in Mount Lebanon, such as Dayr al-Qamar, were small in comparison with the major cities of Syria. Six hours by horseback from Beirut, Dayr al-Qamar served as an entrepôt for the villages of the Shuf. It was one of the major artisanal centers of the Mountain. Dayr al-Qamar clothed the shaykhs of Mount Lebanon. Makers of wool shawls and silk and cotton textiles, blacksmiths, tailors, soap manufacturers, tanners, and bakers as well as a silk weighing machine could all be found in Dayr al-Qamar. Before 1860, according to one of its inhabitants, it boasted of having three hundred looms.^[13] Predominantly Maronite, it also had a sizable Druze population. Its markets were stocked with goods from Aleppo, Sidon, and Damascus. Its merchants loaned money to the great landowning families and built large houses, and from its population the emirs of Mount Lebanon often chose scribes and secretaries, such as Mikhayil Mishaqa and Rustum Baz.^[14] Not surprisingly Bashir Shihab built his palace across the valley from Dayr al-Qamar, in Bayt al-Din. Although Dayr al-Qamar was called the “city of Lebanon,” its inhabitants were known to each other. And like other villages in Mount Lebanon, Dayr al-Qamar was under the control of a notable family, in this case the Druze Abu Nakad shaykhs. In addition to rivers and ravines, the various elite families gave each region its overarching identity; they carved out spheres of influence and autonomously administered districts as muqata‘jis. They collected taxes, maintained tranquillity, and assured good government over the ahali. They defined and gave expression to a genealogical geography, for Mount Lebanon was divided not religiously but according to various districts inherited by important families.^[15]

Of these, the Shihabs ranked first. Like many of the important families, the Shihabs were divided into rival households which competed for the privilege to rule Mount Lebanon. They and two other families, the Christian Abilam‘s and the Druze Arslans, were the only princely families of Mount Lebanon.^[16] The Abilam‘s’ stronghold was the Matn district; the Arslans dominated the Gharb district. Next in line came those who were ranked as muqaddams, such as the Shi‘a Hamada family who came from the Hirmil region and originally ruled large areas of the Kisrawan district—although by the nineteenth century they had long since lost their grip on the Kisrawan, which passed quite firmly into the hands of the Maronite families.^[17] Following the muqaddams in prestige were the shaykhly Druze families; of these, the most powerful was the Janbulat family, which dominated the Shuf, Iqlim al-Tuffah, Iqlim al-Kharrub, Iqlim Jazzin, and Jabal Rayhan districts. There were also the ‘Imads in the ‘Urqub district, the Abu Nakads in Manasif and part of the Gharb, the Talhuqs in the upper Gharb, and the ‘Abd al-Maliks in the Jurd district. The Maronites also had important families such as the Khazins, who were lords of Kisrawan with the exception of the village of Ghazir, which was associated with the Hubayshes. The rise of the Maronite families was intimately connected to their allegiance to the Shihabs and to their ties with the Druze families.^[18]

These great families and the host of smaller, less significant, but nonetheless important families were interdependent; they shared a code of conduct, distinctive dress, and similar responsibilities and privileges. Many notables lived in palaces, entertained lavishly, and even traveled. Myriad differences nuanced their relationships, but between them and the ahali of Mount Lebanon was a vast chasm, one defined not only by material wealth but by social custom. Never was the title that separated the shaykh from the ahali forgotten, for according to a contemporary chronicler “in this country there is tremendous preservation of the rank of people according to custom, which does not disappear in poverty and cannot be obtained through wealth.”^[19] Depending on the rank of his visitor, the Shihab emir would stand up immediately, or he would stand up only after his guest crossed halfway into the room, or he would stand up only after his guest bowed to salute him, or he would not stand up at all. He would embrace only some families, allow his shoulder to be kissed by others, extend his hand to be kissed by still others, and he would not even allow some, mostly the commoners, the privilege of seeing, let alone kissing, his hand.^[20]

The great divide within Lebanese society was further extended by forms of letter writing. How much of the paper was written on and where the fold was made reflected the social standing of the writer and the recipient.^[21] Certain salutations were used with the shaykhly class, others with the Ottoman governors, and still others with the Sultan or the Grand Vizier. The notables were often referred to in Ottoman as söz sahibleri, those who have a say and the “masters of words” in an overwhelmingly illiterate society.^[22] Family rank, to be sure, was not to be taken for granted. Even a cursory reading of the local chronicles reveals the tragedies and triumphs that beset every notable family. The power of the Shihabs, who came to power with the blessing of the Ottomans in 1697, was consolidated only after they defeated their ‘Alam al-Din rivals at the battle of ‘Ayn Dara in 1711—after which it became, according to Mishaqa, “an established custom in the land of the Druze that no one would raise a weapon against a Shihabi emir unless he had another emir with him.”^[23] Even then, the power of the Shihabs was always heavily dependent on local alliances and imperial patronage networks. When in 1797 the Nakad shaykhs were decimated, their lands expropriated, and their families scattered, a contemporary chronicler concluded that the “Nakad name was obliterated.”^[24] The historical event, the extirpation of the five Nakad shaykhs, was commemorated with a cruel play on words: “Vanquished are the Oppressors who are called the People of Calamities and Misfortune [ahl al-balaya wa al-nakad].”^[25] Just as a name could be “[literated,” a name could, on rare occasion, also be elevated by the Shihab emir after a particular instance of loyalty. For example, if a Shihab emir addressed a letter “al akh al-‘aziz,” that automatically entitled the recipient to the rank of shaykh.^[26] In either case, for better or worse, title and rank depended ultimately on loyalty to the hierarchy, and they were bestowed rather than acquired.

Rank rather than religion was the all-important marker of elite status in rural Mount Lebanon. Family alliances occurred across religious lines, creating alternate kinships that transcended differences of faith.^[27] Bashir Shihab addressed his namesake, the Druze Bashir Janbulat, as his “brother.” Marriage alliances were stricter. Members of the Shihab family, which itself was divided into Christian and Sunni branches, could marry only within their family or from among the Abilam‘ family.^[28] Mishaqa, writing long after the collapse of the old regime, noted that “at that time the members of the [Shihab] family married amongst themselves and were unconcerned with a difference in religion.”^[29] It is not surprising, then, that Christian and Druze notables took an oath of allegiance at the shrine of the Virgin Mary, that one loyal Shi‘a emir was buried in the Sunni Shihab family cemetery and that a Christian merchant funded the construction of a mosque.^[30] Even the French poet Lamartine acknowledged that Emir Bashir appeared to be a Druze to the Druzes, a Christian to the Christians, and a Muslim to the Muslims. At his palace in Bayt al-Din Bashir built both a mosque and a church.^[31] The Arabic word used today to denote a religious sect, ta’ifa, was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often used to denote a family of rank regardless of its religious persuasion.^[32] The great families of Mount Lebanon presented themselves as the intermediaries between religious communities.^[33] They drew their pride and their social position from a combination of their religious standing and the respect, tradition, and reciprocity that they enjoyed with other elite families.

Although belonging to a religious community was intertwined with a number of secular identities (such as family, village, and rank), there was an undeniable respect for the sacred boundaries of faith. The public, political culture of Mount Lebanon functioned through an unspoken recognition of the temporality of loyalty: no Ottoman governor lived forever and no ruler could rely on the automatic allegiance of his subordinates but instead had to be constantly alert to shifting alliances. The private cultures of faith, however, depended on the strict and absolute loyalty of their respective believers. As members of religious communities, Druzes and Maronites fully accepted each other with the understanding that neither side would encroach on the other’s sacred territory; they respected, acknowledged, and often participated in the various Christian and Muslim religious feasts, ceremonies, and customs that marked a living multicommunal society. Even in times of conflict, “it was the custom in the mountain in times of unrest to place valuables inside houses of worship, where they would be respected by the victor.”^[34] I do not meant to paint a picture of “tolerance” (for that is to emphasize a discourse on sectarianism that was not yet present) nor to deny the availability of a language of religious discrimination and differentiation. From shari‘a courts, Ottoman decrees, village proverbs, and zajaliyyat (poems in the Arabic vernacular) of the Maronite historian and bishop Ibn al-Qila‘i (d. 1516), it is clear that such a language existed, but it was subordinate to and enmeshed in a range of competing discourses of obedience, allegiance, and loyalty inherent in local society. It presented, in other words, no significant barrier to a social order founded on the shared values and interests of a nonsectarian political elite.

Conversion was a sin, a treachery that far surpassed that of secular betrayal, for secular betrayal could be justified and rationalized, even forgiven and forgotten. Conversion marked an absolute break with the past, a rejection of heritage and history, and a new beginning. Moreover, it indicated an intrusion by others into a private, sacred sphere of life—a theft that undermined the very basis of social order, which depended on a quiescent and theoretically unchanging religiosity. The zeal for conversion to the “true” faith expressed by foreign missionaries elicited a generally negative response from local secular and religious authorities as well as from the Ottoman government. It provoked a singularly hostile reaction from the Maronite and Greek Orthodox Churches, especially after Catholic missionaries succeeded in attracting numerous Orthodox converts in eighteenth-century Aleppo, Damascus, and Mount Lebanon and after American missionaries openly proclaimed the “error” of indigenous Christian belief. Notables, however, by virtue of their power and influence, were able to defy such strictures. By the nineteenth century, several branches of the Shihab family had already converted to Christianity. Because of the status of their family, those branches of the Shihabs which did convert were not exposed to charges of apostasy; in fact, they continued to intermarry with other branches of the family.^[35] Nevertheless, Bashir Shihab, who was born a Christian, practiced a studied ambivalence, and maintained a public fiction that he was Muslim, swore on the Quran (as well as the Gospel), for example, and he distributed alms to the Druze poor. Neither he nor his Ottoman masters saw a need to emphasize what would, for an ordinary person, have been a flagrant violation of social norms.^[36]

Limits of Ottoman Influence

In 1516 the Ottoman armies invaded Syria, and until the First World War they ruled the province continuously (with a brief exception between 1831 and 1840). Ottoman control of Mount Lebanon persisted for four centuries, so by the eighteenth century, if not much earlier, Ottoman rule was a normal and accepted fact of life.

Mount Lebanon’s proximity to Damascus made its stability and pacification a perennial Ottoman concern. When a local ruler became too ambitious, as did Fakhr al-Din, or when its elites became too troublesome, the Ottomans intervened with brutal force to crush what one Ottoman chronicler described as the “jerboas and mice.”^[37] In general, the rural character of Mount Lebanon, which so appealed to European travelers in the nineteenth century, held little fascination for Ottoman officials, who were occasionally called on to pacify the region, and to the Ottoman governors, who were meant to rule it. The word Druze, or dürzü in Turkish, was derogatory and meant scoundrel. To those accustomed to urban Ottoman culture, Mount Lebanon represented an insignificant backwater inhabited by those whose rough manners merited not the gentle treatment handed down to civilized peoples but a summary denouncement; one nineteenth-century Ottoman military commander referred to an “ entirely seditious people, inherently endowed with the most abominable nature and deserving of reproach.”^[38]

Nevertheless, protected under the rubric of the Ottoman state’s millet system, whereby the major non-Muslim communities were granted civil and religious self-government, the inhabitants of Mount Lebanon were consigned to benign neglect on the fringes of an imperial Ottoman imagination.^[39] The autonomy which was granted to them was not absolute; rather, as the chronicles bear out year after year, the shaykhs and emirs ingratiated themselves with the Ottoman governors—through oral or written supplications or gifts and rituals of humility such as kissing a governor’s hands or the hem of his robe. In return, the ruler of Mount Lebanon annually received the hil‘at, or ceremonial robe of honor, which confirmed him in his official position as an Ottoman functionary. By and large, however, Mount Lebanon was left to its own devices; its notables could and did preserve their pre-Ottoman traditions as long as they were totally obedient to their Ottoman masters. Abdullah Pasha’s proclamation to Bashir Shihab in 1829 summed up the essential nature of the relationship. He conferred legitimacy on Bashir, and, in exchange, he expected discipline, prosperity, tranquillity, and security of the imperial subjects, as well as the prompt deliverance of required taxes and all other obligations, the safeguarding of roads, and the eradication without forgiveness of all those who would sow corruption and transcend their hudud, or limits.^[40] When Bashir, following a brief spell of disgrace, again won the favor of Abdullah, the Ottoman governor reminded Bashir that “we never for a moment removed you from our good graces; it was you who allowed doubts and anxieties to enter your mind which distanced you from our service. It is evident that if a servant won’t serve his master, the master will find another who will.”^[41]

Metaphors of subordination were an integral part of Ottoman political discourse. The Sultan was the “shadow of God on earth,” and all his subjects were, metaphorically, his slaves (kullar or ‘abid). Like a Spanish king who ruled over an empire in the Americas, the Sultan in the Levant was a paradoxically absent presence.^[42] Justice was administered with his “compassion,” and in the mosques of the land Friday prayers were said in his name. He granted equity without equality. The notables and the villagers constantly sparred over the significance of the Sultan’s name: taxes were levied in his name, and petitions were addressed to his exalted throne. The Sultan’s name was an icon that all subjects believed in, a symbol they could all share, and a recourse beyond local authority. It was also the apex of a secular loyalty that bound all his subjects.

Knowledge and Power

All subjects knew they must be loyal to the Sultan. Whereas both commoners and notables accepted inherited norms that organized political space and determined the composition of hierarchy—such as the fundamental separation between high and low, rich and poor, elite and nonelite—only members of the community of knowledge, which included secular notables, their advisors (the mudabbirs), the upper Christian clergy, and the Druze mashayikh ‘aql, had the power to explain, legitimate, alter, or otherwise mediate such boundaries. Religious and secular knowledge were deployed in the service of stability and hierarchy. Although personal law and education lay within the purview of each religious community, the realms of education, law, and politics reinforced one another; each was an element in maintaining the domain of secular obedience to the Sultan.^[43]

A symbiotic relationship existed between secular and ecclesiastical authorities of Mount Lebanon. The Druze qadis of the shari‘a court in Dayr al-Qamar, who judged matters as diverse as inheritance, land and property ownership, and debt, and whose competence was acknowledged by both Christian and Druze inhabitants of the Shuf, owed their position to the Shihab ruler.^[44] The Maronite Khazin shaykhs (one of whom became patriarch in 1845) had a complex and long-standing relationship with the Maronite Church. They were intimately involved in the consolidation of Maronite hegemony in Kisrawan; they involved themselves in Church politics, but they also donated land to the Church and to the monastic orders in Mount Lebanon, partially to limit the fragmentation of their estates, partially to relieve themselves of financial responsibilities for unprofitable monasteries traditionally under their patronage, and partially to receive spiritual blessing.^[45] For their part, the Druze elites did not view the Maronite Church as a hostile institution, even with the increasing Latinization and reform of the Church.^[46] In several cases, Druze notables funded the development of monasteries and were themselves called on to mediate in disputes among Christians.^[47]

In turn, the clergy were exempt from military service, were spared the trauma of having troops quartered in their homes, and were not subject to corvée labor.^[48] They were expected, however, to support the secular powers, to educate the children of the shaykhs, and to rally the villagers when and if needed behind causes which may not necessarily have concerned the villagers themselves. The Maronite patriarch often acted to ensure that the villages under his spiritual authority abided in “peace, tranquility, and repose” and that villagers remained in “the good graces of the emirs.”^[49] And if they did not, the patriarch was quick to invoke divine intervention. In the eighteenth as in the nineteenth century, excommunication was the patriarch’s ultimate recourse with recalcitrant villagers.^[50] Although the eighteenth century had witnessed a revival of Maronite monasticism, secular clergy could not afford to be aloof from the rigors of daily life.^[51] The few boys destined to become village priests were given a parochial education comprising basic reading and writing skills.^[52] This was all they needed to keep simple accounts and to write simple formulaic petitions in a largely illiterate society. Village priests, who often inherited their position, oversaw contracts for buying and selling, wills, sharecropping agreements, and documents outlining the obligations of peasant families to notables.

Just as the clergy played an essential role in legitimating the social order, the chroniclers (many of whom were priests or monks) recorded its history. They told the story of an interdependent elite culture that traversed and intersected narrower communities of faith. Although these historians were dismissed by the likes of Churchill, who said of them “to dignify this performance with the title of History, would be absurd,”^[53] it is in large part due to them that some semblance of the prereform world still remains today. Compared to Churchill’s closed narrative, where development and forward movement could come only from without, the local narratives do not conclude, they end. In other words, chronicles such as Emir Haydar Ahmad al-Shihabi’s Al-Ghurar al-hisan fi akhbar abna’ al-zaman drew on several different sources and were not constrained within a teleological narrative of progress.^[54]

The local histories were meant to be added to by later generations. Perhaps most illustrative in this respect is the manuscript left behind by Hananiyya al-Munayyar, a Greek Catholic monk of the monastery of Mar Yuhanna in Khinshara. His early nineteenth-century chronicle was urgently set to paper to capture the oral histories he had inherited because “it has been proved that what is not recorded does not endure in the memory.” He wrote that he had tried to be faithful to the truth but did not know when his “appointment with death” would arrive, so “I desire that whoever reads my book to correct its mistakes, and to he who completes it after me, full recompense and credit [from God].”^[55] Some of the chronicles such as Istifan Duwayhi’s Tarikh al-azmina, span centuries and some, such as Munayyar’s, span little over a century, from 1697 to 1807. The chronicler never entirely succeeded in removing himself from the history he reflected. Unlike Henri Guys, the former French consul whose history of Mount Lebanon flows from the “superiority of a European who observes from the heights of Christian civilization,” the local chroniclers were more attuned to the rhythms of a dynamic society.^[56]

Above all, the scope of the chronicles is impressive. Although they were concerned principally with Mount Lebanon, the chroniclers understood that its history was incomprehensible, literally unrecordable, without constant reference to the other provinces of Ottoman Syria. The history of Mount Lebanon as a separate “refuge” from the world of Islam was not recorded because it was not conceived of as such. Although all the chroniclers mentioned were Christians, they registered no concern over the imminent threat to their religion supposedly posed by Muslims—a threat that consumed the missionaries.^[57] If anything, it was the arrival of missionaries that sparked an indigenous concern for the preservation of Christian faith, for it was the missionaries, and not the Ottomans, who refused to accept the legitimacy of traditional Christian practice. To writers like Haydar Ahmad, such terms as decline were as foreign as “the English princes [who] would travel in Arabistan and observe these countries and record what they saw.”^[58] And while these writers certainly made note of different villages, regions, religions, and cities, the cultural and geographic integrity and the interconnectedness of the Ottoman world was never for a moment denied.

The chroniclers reflected the imperial Ottoman discourse that equated good government with stability and loyalty with order. Far from lacking interpretation, as has commonly been asserted, their pages were animated by the divisions of local society—if one can imagine the different groups of people who carried out the orders of the governors, collected the taxes, created bonfires to ward off locusts, and hailed returning shaykhs from long or short exiles, all literally allowing the passage of society from year to year. The chroniclers described a world in which social rank was not only a natural fact but an inviolate reflection of the will of God. They took a dim view of popular mobilizations, including the French Revolution, which Haydar Ahmad described as having thrown open the “doors of hell” and allowed the “Lord of Darkness” to emerge.^[59] They feared the breakdown of social order and submerged the history of the commoners in a narrative of the elites.^[60]

Recorded history was confined to the elites. When they were mentioned in the chronicles, commoners were represented collectively. I do not mean simply that their individual, everyday lives were largely outside of recorded history but that their episodic entry into politics (always framed as an instigation of feuding elites) was a trope deployed by chroniclers to embellish a particular plot or narrative. They were inserted and removed from history at certain predictable moments; they rebelled and they submitted, but they were not the subject of history. What brought history alive to the chroniclers were the elements of duplicity and surprise that dotted the narrative of elite politics, what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as “the room for strategies” that made known rituals unpredictable.^[61] When a ritual (of hospitality, for example) had the possibility of going awry, when an Ottoman governor whose displeasure had been incurred invited a notable to share with him the boat ride to Acre, when a Shihab emir invited a disaffected rival to his home—these were the moments when the unpredictable unfolded and when terror occurred.^[62]

The Domain of Obedience

The “domain of obedience” invoked by the Ottoman government encompassed politics and religion, public and private—all that contributed to a stable and tranquil social order. This metaphorical domain was grounded in the material world of Mount Lebanon and structured around the local inhabitants’ attachment to the land, an attachment nourished by a high population density and a scarcity of arable land. “Elsewhere man has cultivated the land,” wrote David Urquhart, “in Lebanon he has made it.”^[63]

Contrary to the letter of Ottoman law, which stipulated that all land was the property of the Sultan, parcels of land were openly bought and sold in Mount Lebanon.^[64] The established families and the Maronite Church owned the largest tracts of land. Taking advantage of the growth of the Christian population in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Janbulats along with several other Druze families encouraged Christian families to migrate south to work their lands, usually on a sharecropping basis.^[65] They also donated land to Christians to erect churches, and by the nineteenth century the Christian population in the southern districts of Mount Lebanon was considerable. Although most of the land remained in the hands of a few Druze families, in several villages and a few towns such as Dayr al-Qamar the Christians predominated, and in them Christians owned houses, livestock, flour mills, soap factories, silk looms, and, of course, whatever agricultural produce they managed to grow.^[66] In Kisrawan, the Maronite Khazins had established pious endowments in the eighteenth century to consolidate their power and to protect their property from confiscation (particularly in the absence of male heirs), a development which had both expanded lands under cultivation and promoted permanent Maronite settlement. By the nineteenth century, therefore, land in Kisrawan was controlled largely by various households of the Khazin family—each of which further subdivided its inheritance—as well as by the Maronite monasteries.^[67] For many villagers, however, the only long-term security lay in the service of one or another of the notable families.

Caught between Ottoman imperial will, irade-i senniye, and their local elites, the villagers of Mount Lebanon grappled with complex and competing forces and pulls that severely tested the dynamic and interlocking affiliations and loyalties that were grounded in material concerns—in the mulberry tree, the olive orchard, and the silkworm. The men and women who were born into this society—the ahali of a village—opened their eyes to their village and for the most part lived their lives in close proximity to it. The lot of the “labouring classes,” as one consul described the majority of Mount Lebanon’s population, was to produce and to do so with diligence.^[68] The villagers centered their lives around various crops and trees. Seasons were described by the produce they brought in their wake, and the all-important mulberry tree’s yield made the difference between prosperity and penury. Women unwound and reeled raw silk and participated in battles. Together with the men of the village they struggled to pay a number of taxes, the largest of which was the basic Ottoman land tax known as the miri, which amounted to 10 percent of the produce of the cultivated land.^[69] Depending on the region, villagers had numerous other obligations: in Kisrawan, they presented their shaykhs with a quantity of soap, coffee, honey, or tobacco at Easter or on the occasion of the marriages of the shaykhs’ daughters, sons, or sisters. Villagers could not marry without the permission of their lord, and it would have been unheard of to have a celebration or feast without inviting the clergy.^[70] Certain plots of land that the shaykh owned were set aside and not taxed. The produce of this land defrayed the costs of hospitality, but it was the peasants who had to work the land collectively, usually on a Sunday after the local clergymen had exhorted them to do God’s bidding.^[71]

Nonpayment of taxes, default on repayments of loans, or any other serious infraction brought a particularly onerous punishment. Men-at-arms were billeted in the homes of the ahali, reminding them of the power of Bashir Shihab and depleting them of scant resources. For a peasant to think of taking refuge in a church or monastery was improbable; in fact, monasteries in many cases acted as intermediaries between creditor and debtor, often collecting the debt itself. While the Maronite clergy could and did offer sanctuary to many a refugee, those who were escaping creditors were expressly forbidden by the Lebanese Council in 1736 to be offered refuge under pain of excommunication.^[72] Even when the Maronite Church sanctioned days off to celebrate a local patron saint, it issued strict warnings that a village could take only one day off for a saint’s holiday a year, and the rest of the saints’ holidays were to be observed with simple tokens of respect. It was up to the bishops (and their subordinates) to make sure that residents of one village did not join the celebrations of another village in order to avoid work.^[73]

Hospitality reproduced and reflected the social divisions of Mount Lebanon. From the bounty of his inherited land the shaykh could afford to entertain the guests who passed through his domain. Rituals of hospitality were crucial to the conduct of politics, to the reputation of notables, and hence to the maintenance of public order and obedience.^[74] Hospitality was an expression of power and affluence and covered, as Urquhart astutely noted, “a multitude of sins.”^[75] Foreigners, including missionaries, were quick to appreciate this aspect of sociability in a land where beds and silverware were unknown. Guests of the notables were presented with hot embroidered silk and gold towelettes perfumed with rose water to wash their hands and face, after which they were offered pipes, sherbet, and coffee.^[76] Ordinary villagers, whose own simple diet consisted of bread, olives, lentils, bulgur, and kishk (a fermented mixture of bulgur and yogurt), were not allowed to offer coffee to their guests but had to be content with giving it to the shaykh, who monopolized its dispensation.^[77]

Village solidarity mediated the division between elites and nonelites. The village square was an arena of sociability. If the village were Christian, or even mixed, a church would often be located near or on the square; the tolling of its bells was a collective summoning, a warning, a notice of sadness or happiness. In the church also would be kept the standard of the village, to be unfurled as was Dayr al-Qamar’s in times of war.^[78] And, of course, in the square the different village hierarchies—the priest, the lord, the cultivator, and the artisan—interacted on an everyday basis. It was a small world, in which the surrounding villages were the outer edges of the familiar. War and peace and life and death were village concerns. A villager signed petitions and fought battles on behalf of the village. When called on to furnish a contingent of men for war, the village elders decided who would go as part of the village unit.^[79] Villagers also shared the “dead” (mawat) land in the areas surrounding the village, which was uncultivated and left for the common good.^[80] The poor could forage in this area, which served as a common pasture. The springs and other natural resources were left for all to use.

A discourse of loyalty also mediated the social order. As one chronicler put it, “It is the custom among clansmen to distinguish followers not with regard to sect, but with regard to allegiance and loyalty.”^[81] The ahali carried on their humble existence expecting that their shaykh would protect and defend them.^[82] The shaykh was a man who in theory put the village first and in return he was put at the head of the village. He was a secular patriarch; ideally, he thought and acted for the village, and he controlled, inspired, and disciplined its young men, or shabab. In the hard times of the locust plagues, he was expected to gather the village men and lead the expedition to repulse the invasions.^[83] And in good times he was expected to preside over the community, to lead village processions, and to bear on his shoulders the mantle of village honor. Sa‘id Janbulat, the paramount Druze shaykh of the mid-nineteenth century, presided over daily gatherings of men who came to his home to eat meat, rice, stuffed vegetables, sweets, and seasonal fruits and to pay homage. The shaykh’s power derived from the hospitality and generosity given to his retinue, and in return he expected service.^[84]

Ignorance and Punishment

Nowhere did the hierarchy of traditional social order express itself more graphically than in punishment. The notion of political betrayal and treachery was contingent on a notion of secular loyalty. According to the chronicler Haydar Ahmad, commoners “betrayed” a Shihab emir when his extraordinary levies compelled them to revolt in 1790.^[85] Christians and Druzes were punished in the same manner; commoners and notables were not. Only Bashir Shihab authorized capital punishment for the commoners; only Ottoman governors authorized the outright murder of elites. Notables were executed by strangulation, while commoners were hanged.^[86] Because local custom frowned on the killing of notables by other notables, Bashir Shihab often disposed of rivals by cutting out their tongues or, if they were from his own family, by gouging out their eyes. Since a notable was the face and voice of respectable society (awjuh al-bilad in Arabic; söz sahibleri in Ottoman), mutilation, especially blinding and muting, rendered a notable unfit to govern.^[87]

One of the great sins that a notable could commit was “corrupting” (ifsad) the social order by instigating the common folk to abandon the “domain of obedience”—either by inciting commoners to enter into the elite space of politics or, conversely, by denying them their tranquillity, which might force them into rebellion. An accusation often made by notables against one another, in letters to Ottoman governors or to prospective allies, was that their rivals were “stoking the passion” of the commoners and “seducing” them into rebellion.^[88] According to the chroniclers, the willful act was not the commoners’ disobedience, which was emotive rather than rational, but the deliberate upsetting of the natural order by otherwise sensible elites for their own political advantage.^[89] Hence the measures elites took to placate the commoners were often described as being taken “to extinguish the fire of their fury.” This form of elite prose—what Ranajit Guha famously described as the “prose of counter-insurgency”—was haunted by the potential violation of the boundary that separated the communities of knowledge and ignorance.

The violence of the Ottoman state in the Lebanese periphery may be understood as ritualized, episodic purifications of a corrupted public order that normally depended on an accommodation of religious difference. When the Druze leader Bashir Janbulat rebelled against the authority of Abdullah Pasha in 1824, he was executed on the grounds that he was a “heretic.” His allegedly “abominable crimes” had “polluted the earth,” for he had forsaken a compact of notability through “sedition” and had instigated “disorder” and popular unrest. Thus a man who was normally upheld as one of the söz sahibleri, or “masters of words,” was expelled from the society of Ottoman civility, branded a “heretic rebel,” and strangled, and his body was exhibited as an example of the absolute power of the Sultan.^[90]

Such punishment was not only a warning to other notables who strayed from the domain of obedience but also an indication of the contingent nature of public religious identity. Designations of heresy or infidelity were assigned and revoked rather than permanently affixed. They were tactical devices and not absolute expressions of religious hostility. For example, it was only when Bashir Shihab sided with Mehmed Ali during Mehmed Ali’s invasion of Syria in 1831 that Bashir was accused by Abdullah of being a “hain gavur”—a treacherous and ungrateful infidel—who was “performing his gavurlikeness [gavurluğunu icra etmekte olduğuna].”^[91] Just a few decades earlier, when Bashir was threatened by his rivals, Abdullah’s predecessor, the legendary Cezzar Pasha, had warned Bashir’s rivals (and their followers) in Mount Lebanon to be “informed” that those who persisted in forsaking “truth” in their opposition to Bashir risked annihilation. “O ye who believe!” he wrote, quoting a verse from the Quran, “Obey Allah, and obey the messenger and those who are in authority.”^[92] The buyrultu (an official Ottoman decree or mandate) continued, “Submit and you will be saved; and if you are obstinate you will regret.…If you are ahl al sunna and the community, then enter into the domain of obedience, for the hand of Allah is with the community, and if you refuse, you will face the most malicious of conditions and misfortune.”^[93]

Islamic metaphors were deployed in Ottoman political practice not to impose an Islamic despotism over persecuted minorities (as Lamartine and Orientalist historiography have insisted) but rather to reinforce an allegedly inviolable social hierarchy. In other words, it was mostly when the social hierarchy was “corrupted” that markers of difference, especially religious difference, were highlighted. It was only at particular historical moments that the realities of Ottoman power—the accommodation of theory to practice, of Islamic Ottoman discourse to a diverse and multireligious empire—were elided momentarily to produce a necessary (at least in the eyes of officials like Abdullah Pasha) Islamic despotism to save the empire from the corruption of insidious heretics and infidels. But this despotism, assumed by Lamartine to be unchanging, did not persist. Rather, it was always reconfigured as the theoretical “anomaly” that was everyday Ottoman politics—the perfectly routine and reciprocal, if hierarchical, intercourse between urban Ottoman governors on the one hand and rural Druze chieftains and Maronite emirs on the other.

Ordinary villagers who rebelled were condemned in an altogether different manner. Their sin, according to the community of knowledge, originated in ignorance rather than in conscious heresy. The chronicles, which were expressions of the social order, consistently used the terms ‘umum, ‘amma, a‘wam (Ott. halk) to distinguish the “commoner” ahali from the notable awjuh and a‘yan (Ott. söz sahibleri). Because order and Ottoman government were necessarily “just,” anything that tended to disrupt public order, with its built-in restrictions and hierarchies, was immediately interpreted as the work of mischief-makers who had stoked the passions of the ignorant and unwise common folk. For instance, when both Muslim and Christian villagers rebelled against Bashir Shihab’s onerous levies in 1821, Bashir and the Druze notables hunted down the “rebels.” The chronicler Haydar Ahmad (who was a cousin of Bashir’s) describes how the exhausted commoners threw themselves at the feet of their master and begged for forgiveness, “acknowledging their errors, admitting their guilt and their juhl [ignorance] and the baseness and inferiority of their minds.”^[94]

For his part, the Ottoman governor Abdullah Pasha was no less explicit in framing the rebellion as a lack of perceptivity on the part of the commoners. His decree of 15 September 1821 was addressed to the ahali of Kisrawan and Bilad Jbayl, to both dhimmis (Christians) and to the Hamadiyya (the Shi‘a), who were commanded to listen:

We announce to you that we have heard that a few seditious and evil people have removed from their heads the necklaces of obedience and have tried to instigate the imperial subjects and to disturb their peace and discomfort them through their intrigues, cunning and deception which has only resulted in triviality and the stoking of our anger. And of the things that happened is that some of you rebelled and put yourselves at odds with the pride of the emirs, the authority of great men, our child the venerable Bashir Shihab, may his glory increase. You claimed that you would not pay more than one miri, and you united and [appeared to be] turned away from evil; so our child was coming to you, bringing you order and security and tending to your affairs, and yet you twice met him with evil in Lahfad and on the coast of Jbayl. And despite the fact that your rebellious and deviant actions gave you no satisfaction for you failed, you till now remain stubborn, and till now wield the rod of rebellion, a state of affairs which perplexes us. Such boldness has never before occurred from any of the imperial subjects, for you well know that you are weak people, unable to withstand power and battle. You also know that there is no way for you except through mercy and compassion. With God’s help, we are always capable of suppressing you, of driving you away, and forcing you back into the domain of obedience after we have disciplined those who have to be punished, for this situation cannot be forgiven or passed over in silence by us because it is well-known that we hold [Bashir] in our good graces, and that we have put the Mountain and Bilad Jbayl and its districts under his control . . . and that he is authorized by us to collect the miri without delay and without a piaster less than is customarily levied.…How, then, did it enter your base minds to suggest such a null and void claim? How, then, did you try to rebel? How, then, did you assemble as if you were an army ready fo battle? You who are easier [to crush] than the spider’s web.

We should have met your actions by giving the orders to crush you, to suppress you, to discipline and punish you so that you would become a lesson to those who need a lesson. But because you are our subjects, we decided to show mercy and compassion towards you to advise you to abandon these seditions. You should all appreciate the drastic consequences of your actions which you are going to regret. All of you know that you are the subjects held in compassion and protection, and thus you should return to your villages and preoccupy yourselves with your own affairs and render what is required of you. Your notables should all go to [Bashir] and proclaim their obedience to him so that they can jointly endeavor to render the miri that is required of you.^[95]

Abdullah’s incredulousness was rooted in his conviction that, ordinarily, imperial subjects were apolitical, passive, and quiescent. The buyrultu itself was a prescription for normalcy. To the extent that commoners were meant to “know” anything, they were expected to recognize that their weakness was easier to crush than “the spider’s web” and that their salvation would come only through the “mercy and compassion” of the elites. Their insubordination was therefore a consequence of their seditious actions rather than their seditious minds. What the ahali did not know, however, was how to actively conspire, and that was why the buyrultu made a very clear distinction between the conspiratorial and corrupting arbab al-fasad and the ultimately pure yet gullible reaya (imperial subjects).

By this distancing process, the rebels, who clearly rose up because of excessive taxation, were rendered childlike, incapable of distinguishing good from evil and powerless to resist temptations that the devil and the arbab al-fasad—the instigators of corruption and sedition—placed before them. The rebels had strayed from the patriarchal system or the domain of obedience that extended from the Sultan downward to all his subjects—hence the reference to Bashir Shihab as “our child,” who in turn was a lord over the commoners. By rebelling, the commoners had placed themselves in the domain of insubordination; they had exceeded their boundaries. Being Christians and Shi‘a, they were doubly audacious (hence the double meaning of the Islamic discourse regarding dhimmis as weak men who do not fight but also as weak commoners vanquished in the field of battle) for not only had they exceeded the temporal limits set by the Sultan, their master, they had also violated the commandments of God. A classical Sunni Islamic discourse was entirely sublimated within a nonsectarian hierarchical discourse. The point here was not to castigate Christians or Shi‘a generally but to denounce the boldness of the commoners whose popular movement had threatened to break the social order and to corrupt the ordered civility of public space.

The need for a show of force to purify the notability from the incursion of commoners and to reaffirm the public order was a hallmark of the social hierarchy that dominated Mount Lebanon throughout Bashir’s reign. The reaction against popular mobilization also underscored the relations of violence that underlay a system in which the various inbuilt restraints, the compassion of rulers, the discourse of Islamic toleration of dhimmis, the paternalism of the shaykhs, and of course the absent presence of the Sultan himself ultimately shored up a social order that separated knowledge from ignorance.

Time and Empire

Crucial to the operation of Ottoman political culture was the notion of nonlinear time. Every punishment implicitly carried within in it a provision for pardon; every exile was mitigated by the knowledge that return and clemency were imminent. The Nakad name was obliterated only to be eventually rehabilitated. The “heretic” Bashir Janbulat was executed, but his son took his place as an “esteemed” face of society. It was recognized by notable and commoner alike that every present situation might eventually give way to a reclaimable past. The exact nature of this reversion depended on circumstances, especially on the strategies deployed by those seeking pardon and by those who had the power to grant it.^[96] In tandem with agricultural seasons and annual pilgrimages, politics had a cyclical element. The granting of clemency (aman) immediately returned things to what they had been; the phrase sometimes used to describe the forgiveness of a ruler was that he had “cleared and purified his mind.” Outcasts prostrated themselves before authority, revitalizing hierarchy, which reciprocally erased the memory of transgression and pollution. Time paradoxically flowed in two directions. Sultans died, years passed, subjects rebelled but could always return to the domain of obedience. The past was not irrevocable. Like the House of Osman, which protected it, social order was assumed to be eternal and unchanging in a world that recognizably changed.^[97]

As long as European power remained marginal, such paradoxes of Ottoman rule persisted. Until the age of reform, the provincial capitals continued to issue decrees that gave standard formulas for praying for the Sultan’s health and were suffused with the knowledge that the House of Osman would continue to rule “’til the end of time.”^[98] Sooner than anyone could have expected, that “end of time” drew near. Seemingly invincible and immortal, the Ottoman Empire plunged itself into an era of rapid transition and, more to the point, an era of European time and European discourses of progress and modernization. Bashir Shihab’s metaphor about Abu Far—the bird of prey which could not comprehend its own limits—represented, as we shall see, local society and the Ottoman Empire as they together confronted the possibilities of nineteenth-century change. Sectarianism marked a turning point in local history. It signified a culmination of sovereign Ottoman time and marked the construction of a new metaphorical universe, a new political stage, that transformed the old regime.

Notes