6. The Return of the Juhhal

We beg to remind you that to support or abandon us is supporting or abandoning all the Christians in the Lebanon, not because we are of so much importance in the world but because when the disorderly in the mountain [see] that crimes such as those committed by the people of our district pass unpunished the disorders [extend] to most of the mountains.

A crisis of communal representation unfolded in Mount Lebanon. This crisis originated in the tumult of the restoration period but came to the fore most dramatically during a popular revolt in the predominantly Maronite district of Kisrawan in 1858 and in the Druze-Maronite war of 1860. At stake, as the above plea of the Maronite Khazin shaykhs to the British consul-general illustrates, was a struggle over the meaning of community and geography in the postpartition world. It was a struggle epitomized by the social unrest that invaded and undermined elite politics. For while Ottomans, Europeans, and local Druze and Maronite leaders engaged in negotiations premised on the idea of an age-old sectarian reality and on immutable sectarian identities, while Jesuit missionaries persisted in their gentle crusade and Şekib Efendi’s unwieldy regulations sought to reconstitute an elite sectarian social order, a movement was afoot in the villages of Kisrawan that forced open the closed circle of Ottoman politics.

In 1858 common Maronite villagers took advantage of a debilitating feud between Maronite notables to press for a reform of the social order. The insurgents were galvanized by the Tanzimat, the ample amounts of weaponry available since the 1840s, a climate of economic hardship, and scarcity of land.^[1] Their initial grievances were formulated against what they claimed were the excessive and unjust taxes and humiliating gifts they were traditionally compelled to present to the Khazin shaykhs. In December of 1858, a muleteer from Rayfun by the name of Tanyus Shahin took over the leadership of the rebellion. Under his direction, the revolt escalated despite Maronite Church efforts to mediate between shaykhs and commoners. Villagers demanded equality with the shaykhs and formal representation. They took the unprecedented action of evicting the Khazin notables from their homes and from the district that had in bygone years “belonged” to them.^[2] Shahin’s popularity spread to neighboring districts as he presented himself and was perceived as a savior of the common Christian inhabitants of Mount Lebanon, especially after a Druze-Maronite clash in August 1859 in the village of Bayt Miri. By 1860, Shahin was in de facto control of most of Kisrawan, defying Ottoman efforts to silence him.

Rebellions, of course, had occurred in the past and were a feature of the political landscape of nineteenth-century Mount Lebanon. But these events were different, not so much because of their scope but because of their location and timing. Not only was the Kisrawan uprising played out in an almost exclusively Maronite district—and hence contrary to the logic of partition—but it occurred after the promulgation of the second major reform decree of the Tanzimat, the 1856 Hatt-i Hümayun.^[3] The rebel villagers consistently justified their actions by referring to the Tanzimat; they drew in equal measure on notions of imperial reform as well as on a discourse of just and unjust traditions. As a result, the Kisrawan uprising represented a fundamental crisis in local and Ottoman identity. It explicitly challenged elite conceptions of a quietist Maronite identity in postrestoration Mount Lebanon, and, implicitly, it raised vital questions about the meaning of modern post-Tanzimat Ottoman subjecthood. The movement in Kisrawan exploited the open-ended nature of sectarian politics, which could not be contained within the closed narratives produced about it—either textually as in the case of Bishop Nicolas Murad’s Notice historique or legally through Şekib Efendi’s double kaymakamate system. Shahin and his followers imposed a popular Christian reading on what was traditionally a genealogical geography; they asserted new rights of freedom and equality, and, above all, they represented themselves rather than allowed themselves to be represented.^[4] This will to knowledge on the part of the Christian juhhal—the “ignorants,” which is the epithet the elites bestowed on them for their insubordination—indicated a world enveloped in momentous change, when order was no longer defined in terms of master and slave, when hierarchy was violated, and when the members of the ahali deliberately and autonomously sought to carve out their own place in the modern world and to enter the realm of traditionally elite politics.^[5]

This chapter tells the story of the most sustained popular mobilization in nineteenth-century Mount Lebanon, recognizing from the outset that it is implicated in another tale of the unfolding of the Tanzimat. I begin with a discussion of a crisis in local representation that was sparked by the revolt by examining rebel demands and the Khazin reaction to the rebellion. Then I elaborate on the implications of Shahin’s movement for modern Ottoman subjecthood (and citizenship) by analyzing Ottoman responses to the rebellion. My main purpose is to depict what I see as the overlapping social and religious layers and the limits inherent in modern sectarian identity.

The Crisis in Local Representation

While Murad was musing over the essential characteristics of the Maronite “nation,” in Kisrawan—heartland of the Maronites of Mount Lebanon—the very notion of who could speak for the Maronites was subject to an intense struggle between the Khazins, who insisted that they ruled and thus represented Kisrawan, and Shahin and his followers, who presented the justness of their cause in terms of popular and general interests and rights in Kisrawan. The sheer audacity of the rebellious ahali of Kisrawan both in their rebellion against their notables in 1858 and in the expulsion of the majority of the Khazin family in January of 1859, estimated by several sources to number several hundred individuals, reverberated across the elite community of Mount Lebanon.^[6] Never before had the commoners acted with such decided “ignorance”; never before had a notable family been uprooted by the ahali. The uprising came on the heels of a simmering dispute between the Christian kaymakam Bashir Ahmad (from the Abilam‘ family) and several of the Khazin notables because they refused to recognize his authority over them in the Kisrawan. In addition, the situation was complicated by intense rivalries between various branches of the Khazin family, rivalries that were finally resolved in December of 1858, when the family “united” in the face of the threat from the juhhal.^[7] At first, each notable faction assumed that the other was inciting the ahali to harass it; indeed, it seemed to be yet another episode of the familiar tale of elite rivalries, in which each side mobilized its men and reined them in or let them loose depending on the circumstances.

Far from being an organized and centrally directed rebellion run by the bishops to weaken the power of the secular notability, the resistance to Khazin domination took a more local and sporadic form. The epicenter of the revolt was five villages in southern Kisrawan: Rayfun (Shahin’s own village), ‘Ajaltun, ‘Ashqut, al-Qlay‘at, and Mazra‘at Kfar Dabyan. The representatives of these villages tried to rally, through civil and coercive means alike, recalcitrant villages to an imagined community of villagers united in voice and deed. Other villages, however, such as ‘Aramun, hesitated or simply refused to join the Kisrawan uprising. Ghazir, stronghold of the Hubaysh notable family, condemned the attacks on one of their shaykhs by insisting that “crimes against the shaykh is not only directed against him but against all of Ghazir.”^[8] The village notables in Ftuh assured their Dahdah shaykhs that they were completely against Tanyus Shahin’s call for a general uprising.^[9] Places like Ghusta remained staunchly pro-Khazin, a state of affairs denounced by Shahin, who remarked in a letter to the ahali of Zuq Mikayil that “from the beginning of the haraka [movement] no result has come from Ghusta.”^[10] Unquestionably some regions participated more actively in the rebellion than others. By the middle of 1859, Tanyus Shahin enjoyed de facto control over most of Kisrawan and was addressed by rebel partisans as the “general representative of all Kisrawan.”^[11]

In most cases reported by the Khazins, either their trees were cut down or their harvests were appropriated or their homes were looted. Apart from the mass expulsion in January 1859, beatings of Khazin and other notables seemed to occur at random intervals. A Hubaysh shaykh was in his house in a village near Ghazir in May of 1860 when several men attacked him; he fled, but the rebels stole his gun and went about “from place to place” cursing and threatening the notable’s sharecroppers. A Dahdah shaykh was beaten and cursed on his way to Ghazir in the same month, and he was lucky to escape with some of his clothing intact.^[12] The wife of Khalil Khazin was often prevented from moving about freely and was insulted when she did, according to a report from January of 1860.^[13] The only confirmed deaths that occurred in the revolt took place at ‘Ajaltun on the evening of 13 July 1859 in murky circumstances. There, the wife and daughter of a Khazin shaykh were killed in their house. Their murderers were never found, but the Patriarch was appalled by the “horrific crime.”^[14]

These and other assaults occurred throughout 1859 and 1860. The only common strand was that attacks were generally quick affairs, in which villagers took advantage of the relative weakness or absence of the notables; the point was to act under cover of night or through the collective anger of an “ignorant” mob, and then to deny any involvement.^[15] Because the insurgent villagers could never be certain when the shaykhs would return, houses were not occupied but were looted. The booty was, in some cases at least, taken to Shahin’s own house “by virtue of the authority of the populace” and from there distributed to his followers.^[16] Fields were used by shepherds to graze their flocks, and orchards stood unattended. One Khazin shaykh bitterly complained to the Patriarch that anybody could “come and pick the berries and leaves as he pleased” and that his silk factory had been stripped to its very boards.^[17] Another Khazin shaykh, surveying his ruined domain following the uprising, penned a long list of the items stolen: silver objects and valuables such as crystal and porcelain as well as hunting paraphernalia, local and European gunpowder, pistols, and a game bag. Also carried off were his pipe, harnesses, a coffee grinder and roaster, various silks and grains, and his great bed. His house was even stripped of its doors; all that could not be carried away was broken.^[18]

When the Patriarch insisted that the ahali return the bounties of stolen harvests, the ahali simply denied taking anything and stated repeatedly that the shaykhs were welcome to return to their homes.^[19] Similarly, villagers denied to an Ottoman commission of inquiry sent to investigate the disturbances in Kisrawan all knowledge of the murderers and any involvement in the plunder of the shaykhs’ houses. They claimed that neither the shaykhs nor the government had appointed the ahali to watch over the houses. Besides, they asserted that to the best of their knowledge the shaykhs had cleaned out their homes before they left. As for stolen harvests, the ahali insisted that the Khazins had taken a share of them. and the rest was with the sharecroppers who had outstanding accounts with their notables. So the government officials went from village to village across the Kisrawan. In all they received the same answers—no knowledge of the murderers, plundered goods, or stolen harvests.^[20] In another letter to the Patriarch in January of 1860, the insurgents again denied that they were rebels, adding only that they demanded the rule of law as stipulated by the Tanzimat but that, given the circumstances of their dispute with the Khazins, it was to be expected that “some indecencies” might occur at the behest of the “jahala.” Ignorance, both in the sense of submitting to the wisdom of government (as well as the Maronite Patriarch and the French consul) and in the sense of manipulating a well-established trope of the “ignorant” commoner, provided a convenient cover for insubordinate villagers to ignore the government’s intrusive questioning. The Khazins remained frustrated in their attempts to restore the old regime.^[21]

If the actions of some of the ahali were thus more sporadic than planned, the demands they put forward on several occasions indicated that they had in mind more than just looting.^[22] In one petition submitted to the Maronite Church, rebel villagers insisted that the Khazins indemnify them for all the costs incurred during the rebellion. They called for an abolition of all “gifts” required of the ahali.^[23] In another list of demands, villagers pressed for an end to the marriage taxes levied by the Khazins, the beating of the ahali, and the practice of passing the taxes due from the shaykhs on to the ahali. They also called for compensation for all taxes that had been thus extorted from the ahali as well as for an end to the encroachment on the “common grazing lands” in the Jurud of Kisrawan. They also asked for compensation for money taken for a cadastral survey that was never carried out and for the disbursement of money promised but never delivered to the “army of ahali Kisrawan” during the 1840 war against the Egyptians.^[24]

The villagers made repeated references to the idea of representation, social equality, and the Tanzimat. Representation was, of course, central to Şekib Efendi’s regulations, but it had not been introduced in Kisrawan because it was not a “mixed” district. According to one petition submitted for the Church’s arbitration, the ahali of some rebel villages asked that disputes between the ahali and the Khazins henceforth be settled by two wakils, one elected by the Khazins and the other by the ahali. They subsequently demanded, however, that “the station [manzalat] of the shaykhs be [equal] to ours without exception” and added that “nobody from the shaykhs will be an official over us.”^[25] Rebels from other villages asked for wakils “to defend the rights of the poor ahali who were not capable of defending themselves.”^[26]

Such evidence suggests that rebel villagers not only were willing to invoke tradition and the Tanzimat interchangeably but were quite able to interpret them in accordance with their own goals. Şekib Efendi had never countenanced a wakil system that was an integral part of an essentially popular rule, and he certainly would never have accepted Tanyus Shahin’s election as general representative of Kisrawan or the appointment of wakils by each of the rebel villages. Nor had the Tanzimat statesmen ever intended to make all subjects of the empire socially equal. But that is precisely what the rebels demanded; in one petition they reminded the Patriarch that the Tanzimat had stipulated “general equality and total freedom” and had abolished “distinctions and disdain in the forms of address.”^[27] Not only had the material foundations of the old regime been disrupted by the rebels’ refusal to tolerate what they considered to be unjust taxes and customs, but the ideological and symbolic bases of traditional society had also been undermined by the rebels’ eviction of the Khazins from their properties. The French consul, to give another example, was aghast at the reports he received that at some of their “riots” the rebels had hoisted French flags to indicate the support they believed they enjoyed from the French consul.^[28] As far back as 1657, the name of France had been symbolically associated with the Khazin family, who had served France as consuls until just before the French Revolution. Shahin—or some of his followers who hoisted French flags—apparently understood this and in unfurling the French flag not only invoked a spurious French support but implicitly challenged the Khazins’ historical connection to France.

Implacably opposed to such ideas, of course, stood the Khazins, who consistently referred to the rebellion as an “excitement” rather than as a rational movement. To them rights meant “keeping property in the hands of its owner.”^[29] Although at the outset of the rebellion in 1858 the Khazins reacted slowly and were divided among themselves, they quickly formulated as their basic demand the return of their “usurped” property.^[30] Their increasingly wretched condition, their mounting debts while exiled from their lands, and their inability to force the ahali into submission did not shake their belief that they had been cheated and robbed of their birthright. The property was theirs after all; their function as tax collectors had been reaffirmed by Şekib’s regulations. The right to property—and with it the confirmation of social hierarchy—was far more important to them than the nebulous Tanzimat right to equity of treatment; to be fair, nothing in the history of the past few decades had indicated to them that their stand against the juhhal was not the one sanctioned by the Great Powers or the Ottoman government. For the Khazins as well as the Maronite Church, the defiance of the ahali had to be the result of an ignorance manipulated by a few conspirators. Such places as Rayfun and ‘Ajaltun, villages which had “belonged” to them as far back as any could remember, seemed to the Khazins to be the center of the “excitement” of the ignorant ahali, who refused to recognize the limits sanctioned by tradition, history, and law.

The Khazins reasoned that the ahali acted out of their juhl, or ignorance. This ignorance was, in their opinion, being manipulated by some more important force, something or someone who was perched higher on the social hierarchy. Some of the Khazins blamed the Maronite bishops, for it was reported to the Maronite Patriarch that the Khazins believed that “the ahali don’t do anything without your order.”^[31] The Patriarch received a report that Qa‘dan Bek Khazin had told an assembly of Druze and Christian notables in the fall of 1859 that the revolt came not from the ahali but at the instigation of the Patriarch and the Maronite bishop of Beirut, Tubiyya ‘Awn. The report added that Qa‘dan Bek insisted that, had he not been restrained by his relatives, he would have “split open the brains of the Patriarch.” Had he been allowed to do so, he continued, “we would have all been spared these actions [by the ahali].”^[32] Although several of the Khazin shaykhs swore that they had never blamed the Patriarch and that any declarations to that effect with their seals on them were forgeries, the inability of the Khazins to accept the autonomy of popular mobilization was indicated by their search for conspirators of “[evil] intentions.”^[33] The confusion was compounded because the rebels often invoked the name of the Patriarch to justify their actions.

For the Maronite Church, the Kisrawan revolt could not have come at a more awkward moment. In 1858, Patriarch Bulus Mas‘ad had convened a Maronite council at Bkirke in an effort to lay the moral, spiritual, and educational basis for a modern Maronite clergy and community.^[34] Therefore, as the Church was positioning itself as the sole representative of the Maronite “nation”—as it was deliberately cultivating a self-consciously modern image—it was paralyzed by a popular movement that, according to an advisor to the Patriarch, threatened the ta’c ifa with “destruction.”^[35] The Patriarch’s role as a spiritual guide and as a moral arbitrator in the troubled times of the mid-nineteenth century was inherently compromised by the fact that the Maronite Church was among the largest landowners in Mount Lebanon and was therefore committed to the inviolability of property. As an institution, it was also a staunch supporter of social hierarchy, and in no manner did it condone the individual activities of some village clergy who actively participated in the uprising.^[36] Not only were several Khazins members of the Church establishment, but the movement of the juhhal threatened to weaken the “common cause” of the Christians. The Patriarch repeatedly exhorted the ahali, as he did in a letter to the (Maronite) ahali of Baskinta in May of 1860, “to adhere to the spirit of peace and tranquility, to avoid all contrary causes, and to remain in the good graces of the emirs [fi khatir al-umara’].”^[37] At the same time, the Maronite Patriarch worked to end the rebellion by addressing at least some of the principal rebel demands. For instance, an undated draft reconciliation found in the Patriarchal papers proposed that each village was to have its own wakils elected by the ahali. It stated that the shaykhs were not to have the right to “compel, insult or beat” any of the ahali; if they did, the incident would have to be investigated in accordance with the imperial reform edicts. Moreover, “just as the ahali were asked to respect the dignity of the shaykhs and to show them the respect emanating from their standing,” it was also asked of the shaykhs to respect the rights of the ahali, to abolish the old humiliations, both those in writing and in greeting, and to stop addressing any of the respectable ahali as a fellah, or peasant.^[38]

While all sides referred to the Patriarch as the ultimate recourse for settling disputes, several competing visions of the rights he was meant to protect emerged. Shahin and the ahali urged him to remain faithful to the majority of his flock—at one point even firing shots toward Bkirke, where some Khazin notables took refuge. The Khazins urged the Patriarch to remain constant to his duties toward a family that had long supported the Maronite Church. His bishops pleaded with him to take a firm stand to unite the Maronites. But the Patriarch hesitated, unable to control the situation on the ground and the pace of events. He always urged “calm” but was unable to bridge the contradiction between the old-regime social order, on the one hand, and the Tanzimat discourse of rights and a communal identity on the other.

At stake in Kisrawan was more than a simple physical struggle over control of land. There was a contest to redefine the term ahali, a well-embedded trope in old-regime chronicles. A single, undifferentiated category of the ahali was, after all, a construction of old-regime chronicles; it was a source of legitimacy for those rulers who guaranteed the tranquillity of the common people and who maintained a stable social order. For the Khazins, the Maronite Church, and the Ottoman state, therefore, the term ahali implied the ideal of a politically quiescent population; it intimated a passive community whose legitimate and lawful needs (about which there was no consensus) were represented by others. They deployed the trope of the passive and obedient ahali primarily to isolate and delegitimize the rebels, whom they accused of being at the forefront of a conspiracy whose goal was to overturn the order of things and to instigate the innate “ignorance” of the commoner class. At the most basic level, this accusation reflected elite unease in the face of a genuinely popular movement, an inability to comprehend that the meaning of ahali was itself bound to change following the Tanzimat, and a refusal to accept the idea that commoners had a stake in the making and interpretation of history or that they could participate in rational rule or government. The Khazin shaykhs explained to the sympathetic British consul-general that, as a rule, “when a people, who are by nature inclined toward sedition, desire to be given free rein in every village or place [and] are permitted [such freedom], they are [inevitably going to] commit terrible crimes.”^[39] Shahin, appropriating the mantle of reform, pushed for an alternative understanding of the ahali. For Shahin and the rebels under his command, the term ahali signified an active, unified, discerning, and mobilized population willing and able to legitimately represent itself. Shahin often signed documents as a “general representative” (wakil ‘am) of the ahali of Kisrawan. Many petitions forwarded by the rebels to the Patriarch were often simply signed by “ahali Kisrawan.” When Shahin was called on by the Patriarch to settle the dispute with the Khazins in March of 1859, he replied that “we cannot accept anything until we consult with all the ahali and all the villages.”^[40] In another letter to a priest, Shahin replied that he was bound to “the interest of the masses [maslahat al-jumhur].”^[41] That many villages refused to join the rebellion—that Ghazir, Ghusta and the villages of Ftuh remained staunchly loyal to their shaykhs—did not deflect from the fact that a subaltern movement now claimed to speak for all and, in so doing, impinged on the coherence of an elite Maronite identity peddled by Bishop Murad in front of the European powers. That there was a movement at all, that Maronite villages organized, delegated representatives, set up tribunals, evicted landlords, distributed harvests and provisions all in the name of the common people and without direction from the Maronite Church, was crisis enough.

The Crisis in Ottoman Representation

The inter-Maronite battle in Kisrawan not only eroded the coherence of sectarian narratives proposed by the various elites but also reflected a struggle to define the contours of the Tanzimat in Mount Lebanon. The revolt had important implications for the definition of modern Ottoman subjecthood because both the Khazins and Shahin insisted that they were loyal Ottoman servants interested in promoting rights guaranteed them by the Tanzimat. Shahin underscored a crisis in Ottoman representation because he linked religion and reform in a manner that turned an imperial project of reform on its head. The Sultan and his reforming ministers assumed that the traditional social order—the separation of high and low, elite and nonelite—would remain unchanged by reform. Indeed Ottoman officials saw that the right to religious equality in a modernizing empire was possible and desirable only if all subjects maintained their hudud, or station in life. It never occurred to the reformers that the upheavals of reform would provide for a subaltern understanding of the Tanzimat. Shahin’s insistence that the Tanzimat mandated equality within as well as between religious communities contradicted an imperial Ottoman understanding of the Tanzimat as a socially conservative project of secular modernization. The anxiety of the Ottomans in the face of Shahin’s rebellion was magnified by the fact that Kisrawan was a rural region of a hitherto insignificant hinterland which had occupied, at best, a marginal place in Ottoman imperial imagination. How could a villager from Kisrawan—and an allegedly illiterate Arabic-speaking muleteer to boot—represent the Tanzimat? And by whose authority did he rebel? Was he an Ottoman? Imperial officials answered these questions in the language of the old regime. Their categorically negative answers reflected their inability, indeed their refusal, to comprehend the manifold consequences of the Tanzimat, one of which was the rise of Tanyus Shahin.

The Ottoman government was neither directly nor indirectly supportive of the Kisrawan revolt.^[42] The governor of Sayda, Hurşid Pasha, never for a moment doubted that a restoration of order was the highest priority. His sympathies were inclined toward the Khazins, but his powerlessness and lack of money, far more than his duty to ensure justice for all subjects, steered him in a more equitable direction. Despite the historiographical myth put forward by many historians of Lebanon and by European chroniclers that Hurşid was “behind” (or at least tacitly supported) the uprising to weaken a putative Lebanese solidarity, all evidence points to the fact that he was a man constrained from pacifying the region by the European insistence that he not send Ottoman troops into Kisrawan.^[43]

The Ottoman attitude toward the Kisrawan uprising was dominated by a desire to contain the unrest and restore the social order while maintaining the myth of sultanic benevolence for all subjects. Hurşid wrote to the Patriarch complaining of the “leaders of sedition ” who were behind the uprising; he accused them of manipulating the “minds of the simple ones [‘uqul al-sadhijin]”—that is to say, the minds of the ahali who were in rebellion against Khazin domination. Hurşid’s polemic against Tanyus Shahin centered around his accusation that Shahin used “deceit to lead astray the minds of the people and to seduce them into following his evil ways” by playing on their religious sentiments and claiming the Patriarch’s support. Hurşid urged the Patriarch to use his considerable spiritual authority to reclaim the minds of the ignorant ahali.^[44] The insistence of the Ottoman governor on the simple folk–evil conspirator theme was not fortuitous. Like the discourse of juhhal employed by the Khazins, the idea was to invoke a basic and constant loyalty of the ahali to the Ottoman government’s rigid social order, which was manipulated by Shahin’s clever ploys.

Silencing Shahin, the logic of government went, would restore the ahali to their senses—a sentiment echoed by the Khazins and the Maronite Church; the implication, of course, was that, at bottom, the social order was not in crisis.^[45] The Ottoman government rarely uttered Shahin’s name, preferring to label him the “leader of corruption and sedition.” When Hurşid Pasha sent Emir Yusuf ‘Ali Murad, a Maronite notable from the Abilam‘ family, to discipline the rebels, Shahin informed the emir that “the Christians of Bilad Jbayl have united with the ahali of Kisrawan” and warned him not to intervene in the affairs of the Christians of Jbayl, “as you may be aware that all the Christians of Syria have made common cause just as you have united with the Druzes, the shaykhs, the muqata‘jis in all areas as is evident by the compacts you have stamped with your seals, your objective being to subjugate [qahr] the Christians after we achieved our [freedom?].” Shahin continued his accusations, saying that “all your actions have become common knowledge,” including an attack by “your relatives the Druzes” on a monastery. “Return without delay, for if you do not, we will not be held responsible.…Do not remain even an hour longer.” In a postscript to this same letter, which he signed as “the general representative of the Christians,” Shahin declared:

Because you are Christian, and because your intentions [are in alliance with] the Druzes, we are warning you without haughtiness: if you desire [to fight], we are more eager than you, and we are not afraid, because the death of a youth in his prime is like his wedding.…Return without [causing] treachery like the ahali of Baskinta, and stay dignified without becoming a laughingstock, because nobody will respect the stature of he who does not maintain his station. Because you are a man of knowledge, there is no need to be any clearer, because our warning deserves some attention, for he who makes you laugh, makes you cry and he who makes you cry, makes you laugh. If you say that emirs are not written to in this manner, it still serves you better than other [means] because writing can be concealed, but what do you do to someone who curses you openly?^[46]

Such an astounding warning only added to the general anxiety among the elites, especially among the Maronite Patriarch, the Christian kaymakam, and the Ottoman government. It represented a reversal of established hierarchy and discourse, as a muleteer was now addressing an emir with impudence, respecting the forms of neither letter writing nor language. The letter began with the ritual honorific “after kissing your noble hands,” which implied respect for tradition and hierarchy. However, as is obvious from the rest of the letter, which is written in common dialect, Shahin neither would kiss the hands of a “traitor” who had sided with the Druzes nor would allow Emir Yusuf ‘Ali’s “plans” to bear fruit. Beyond the mere insults and threats, it was Shahin’s claim to knowledge that infuriated the elites—and removed him, in their eyes, from the level of the “ignorant” ahali into the realm of shadowy cunning conspirators.

Shahin spoke with the authority of a man who knew he had the support, or at least the intimidated consent, of most of the ahali of Kisrawan. He spoke of love of religion, which no Christian emir and certainly not the Patriarch could dismiss out of hand. Shahin deployed a religious discourse to galvanize support for the uprising and defend its achievements in the face of the elitist counterreaction. By presenting the betrayal of the Christian elites in religious terms and equating it with sin, Shahin justified his own course of sedition. In another letter to Emir Yusuf ‘Ali Murad’s adjunct, one Yazbak Lahud, Shahin repeated his threats against the elites “who desired to make war on those who have joined with the ahali of Kisrawan, because all the Christians are joined in common cause.” Shahin could not resist adding that “you deserve to be humiliated in writing and otherwise for your actions. Return to your religion and stand united. Where do you get the right to abandon your religion of Christianity without opprobrium? Religion can not be sold for money; [besides] you are not needy [and thus do not need] to pursue this course that satisfies nobody.”^[47] Here, then, was a popular voice, disquieting both in its lack of refinement and in its recourse to a populist, religious-based knowledge. Shahin posed an obvious challenge to the Ottoman state by claiming to know, to interpret, and, above all, to act in defense of certain rights to which he felt entitled because he was Christian. For Shahin to be a modern Ottoman subject was to be a sectarian subject. And, yet, Shahin posed an enormous challenge for the entire elite sectarian system because he equated a religious Christian discourse of freedom with a social discourse of equality.

The Layers of Sectarian Identity

Shahin’s reliance on sectarian language has been variously interpreted in the historiography of Kisrawan as a diversion or corruption of a class struggle into a religious struggle—the idea being, of course, that sectarian struggle is necessarily less legitimate than class struggle and indeed is contradictory to it.^[48] Such history, however, overlooks the fact that the popular movement and the opposition to it were from the outset informed by a religious discourse. The battle between the Khazins and Shahin to appropriate the name of the Patriarch—through the various appeals to the Patriarch as well as through actions said to have the Patriarch’s blessing—was symptomatic of this struggle to define a quiescent or mobilized sectarian identity. But it went far beyond this struggle, for the issue was one of survival in a postpartition world. Both sides insisted that their respective position guaranteed a viable Christian community; both sides invariably conflated Maronite with Christian; and both insisted that their opponents doomed it to destruction. From the beginning of the rebellion, the relationship between communal identity and a stable social order defined the problem at hand. For the Khazins, the survival of Christianity in Mount Lebanon was tied to a suppression of what they considered the orchestrated events of Kisrawan. Their wretched fate, they warned the British consul, foreshadowed the fate of the region’s Christian inhabitants, for it was clear to them, as they explained separately to the Patriarch, that a “foreign,” satanically inspired, non-Maronite conspiracy motivated the “ignorant” villagers of Kisrawan.^[49] For Shahin and the rebels, however, exactly the opposite was true. In repeated petitions to the Patriarch, the villagers claimed that they desired only to live in dignity with the Patriarch’s blessing, free from corruption and intimidation, and in accordance with the freedom guaranteed to them by the Tanzimat. Shahin went even further. He asserted that “I have a boyoroldi [buyrultu, official Ottoman decree or mandate] from the Seven Sovereigns . . . giving liberty to all Christians [stating] that they are not to be in bondage to anyone; if you desire emancipation from slavery, no one can prevent you, neither the mushir [a reference to Hurşid Pasha] nor the kaimakam.”^[50]

To a certain degree, Shahin’s own background and religiosity facilitated the task of the ahali to present a subversive “Christian” alternative to the status quo. Born into poverty, Shahin nevertheless associated himself with the Lazarist school in Rayfun and became a muleteer. He made use of his contact with the Lazarists; they obtained for him credentials from the French consulate in Beirut that allowed him to travel into cities, and he kept close company with village priests.^[51] The documents that bear his seal (and sometimes his signature) were probably written by clergymen sympathetic to his cause.^[52] He was allegedly so devout that he prayed twice a day and refused to eat meat except on Sundays and religious holidays.^[53] One of the surviving documents containing his seal is a letter to the clergy of the village of ‘Aramun, in which he writes:

Then we inform Your Reverences what must already be known to you, concerning the incidents that occur on festival days as a result of drinking ‘araq and wine. The Council agreed that it was necessary to announce in all places that whoever drinks ‘araq or wine outside his house and there results from it any mischief, unseemly talk, cursing or quarreling, etc. this is in itself a very vile thing. Then may God—be He exalted!—the faithful of the Church, and the leaders all proclaim this. We hope that Your Reverences will announce this in church to all the populace. Whoever transgresses after the announcement is made, and does the slightest mischief, will be punished by one month’s [imprisonment] or several times that much. We are sure that such things will not occur from among your congregation, but since the announcement was to be made in all places, it was necessary to inform Your Reverences and the populace of it.^[54]

Shahin derived his authority from a genuinely popular base, but he spread it, at least in part, through the pulpits of Mount Lebanon. Even as he enacted new laws and drew up punishments—in the case of insalubrious behavior and disorderly conduct the rather arbitrary “one month’s imprisonment or several times that much”—by referring back to his subversive authority, he nevertheless used established channels of communication, such as Sunday sermons, to diffuse his message of a sober, Christian way of life. In his mind at least, the survival of Christians was organically connected to liberation from Khazin domination and, soon enough, from the grip that the Druze landowners maintained over the Christians in the mixed districts.

Shahin also tapped a wider Christian discourse when he went from calling himself the “general representative of Kisrawan” to the “general representative of the Christians.” The religiosity of the uprising present from the beginning intensified when the popular rebellion reached beyond the boundaries of Kisrawan into regions inhabited by Druzes, by Shi‘a, and by other Christian sects. In May of 1859, for example, the Christian villagers of Hammana (in the Matn district) refused to accept the authority of the kaymakam, justifying their insubordination by pointing to the example of Kisrawan. Bashir Ahmad had made the unpopular decision of “returning” the village to a Druze notable family that had “traditional” claims to the land. The Christian ahali immediately sent off appeals to the Patriarch and to Hurşid pleading their case. It was, they said to the Ottoman governor, “contrary to the Lebanese order and privileges that were granted to us by the mercies of the Sublime Porte, as we are entirely Christian and the aforementioned muqaddam is a Druze.”^[55] In an appeal to the Patriarch they not only stated that the decision by Bashir Ahmad was against “the regulations and privileges of Mount Lebanon granted to it [by the Sublime Porte]” but wondered, “If the ahali of Ghazir who are of the same sect as their shaykhs, and who have been ruled by them from time immemorial . . . at present refuse to acknowledge or submit to the authority of any of [their] shaykhs, how is it possible that a Druze ruler be imposed on us, who are all Christian?”^[56]

Soon, in other areas of Mount Lebanon, the religiosity of the Kisrawan uprising began to become its most defining characteristic; it gave the movement strength. Far from reducing Shahin’s status, it increased his prestige as he began to wage campaigns against neighboring Shi‘a notables and ordinary Shi‘a villagers, who suffered the brunt of these expeditions. An undated letter written by a priest addressed Shahin as a bek [bey, an Ottoman title for a notable] and informed him that a Christian from his village went to a Shi‘a village to “try and collect some money owed to him by one Husayn Haydar and by ‘Ali Hasan ‘Abbas. They maltreated him and beat him painfully.” The priest continued, “Since Your Excellency asked after us when we had no complaints, now that we do have complaints you must ask after us [again] and restrain the Mutawalis (Shi‘a) from us. For the Creator gave you a strong voice with which to defend the rights of all Christians and set our minds at rest. As for the Mutawalis, they are disrespectful of you. We hope to recover our rights [and indemnity for] the beating.”^[57] In June of 1859, Shi‘a villagers in Jbayl protested the attacks they were suffering at the hands of the “Maronite ahali of Kisrawan, Ftuh and Bilad Jbayl,” which were led, they claimed, by Tanyus Shahin, who plundered their property and waylaid hapless villagers on the main roads. Some of the Shi‘a villagers were made to change “their religion” if they wished to be spared. Such gross violations of social order, of course, increased the contempt that elites reserved for Shahin and the “men of the jumhuriyya [literally, republic],” but they bolstered Shahin’s reputation as a defender of Christian rights.^[58] Many Maronite villagers claimed that Shahin had, in fact, saved them “from the attacks of the Shi‘a on us.” They interpreted any Ottoman attempt to arrest Shahin and, therefore, to “break the cause of the Chrstians” to be the result of bribery on the part of the Khazins.^[59]

Sectarian imagery was very much tied to popular mobilization, in which Shahin’s followers began to take on the task of “protecting” Christianity, even representing it, in light of the elite feuds that tore apart the notion of the communal solidarity of Christians. In other words, the growing frustration of the elites with their combined inability to suppress Shahin was contrasted with the increasing boldness of the ahali. These rebels, the majority of whom remain anonymous, articulated—in sectarian attacks against the Shi‘a villagers, in raids across the borders of Kisrawan, in threats against quietist villages like Ghusta, in beatings of Christian notables, in the expulsion of the Khazins, and in indirect defiance of both Ottoman and Patriarchal orders of calm by turning the discourse of “ignorance” on its head—a populist communal vision of the role of the Christian in postpartition Mount Lebanon. To them, Shahin was defending the “rights” granted by the Tanzimat, in terms of both equity with the notables and equality with the non-Muslims; he was to defend Christian villagers from the alleged depredations of non-Christians as much as he was to ward off elitist attempts to pacify Kisrawan, especially after the notables had “betrayed” the religion of the Christians as well as the spirit of the Tanzimat.

This “betrayal” became clearer in the eyes of the rebellious ahali following the Druze-Christian battle of Bayt Miri in August of 1859. This intercommunal fracas, according to a report compiled by Bishop ‘Awn, began with a “trivial” incident. A Druze, ‘Awn claimed, fought with a Christian boy “on the road” and hit him. The Christian went home and told his father what had happened. The father, rather impulsively, implies ‘Awn, took two men with him and “took revenge” on the first Druze whom he came across, who was not the man who had hit his son nor even from the same family. When reports of this arbitrary beating were heard, a great “commotion” occurred, as “both sides” prepared for hostilities; then “Iblis [the Devil] played with the minds of the juhhal of both sides, and suddenly the sedition began, with both sides firing shots on the other.”^[60] Nine Christian men and one Christian woman were killed, and “it was said” that thirty Druzes were slain. Fighting spread across the “mixed” villages of the Matn district. The Maronite bishops and Druze religious leaders (by ‘Awn’s own admission) struggled to retain order there and castigated the “ignorant” for their actions. ‘Awn even appealed to the Ottoman authorities for help and promptly received it when they sent an expeditionary force to separate the warring factions. The elites of both sides tried to “calm” the situation by ordering the armed men to disband; in Hammana—the same village that had seen the ahali reject the imposition of a Druze notable over them just months before—“the respectable faces of the Christians and Druzes of the Matn” jointly vowed to “prevent the extension of the movement.” ‘Awn concluded his report with the observation that “although precaution and alertness against being double-crossed [by the Druze notables] are necessary, it is our opinion . . . that those who are wise from both sides [realize that fighting] will end in loss, destruction and obliteration.”^[61]

The atmosphere was so tense an American missionary residing in Mount Lebanon remarked that “great excitement prevails yet throughout the entire mountains. It is my expectation however, that there will be no general war. There is no political motive, and all Emers [sic], Sheiks, and influential men of both parties, are anxious to preserve peace. They have everything to lose and nothing to gain by a war, and if there is a civil war, it will be waged by the people without the concurrence of their leaders.”^[62] This is exactly what worried ‘Awn even more than his fear of the Druzes. The longer tension remained in the air, the less he was able to control the ta’ifa. He warned ominously and rather cryptically, “Foreign hands are at play, and our people are [endowed with] little perception and knowledge and thus tend to the voice of the foreigner, doing away with that of their shepherd and guardian [ra‘ihi].” Moreover, he warned the Patriarch that the government took a dim view of “our ta’ifa” because of the events of Kisrawan.

Instead of the ordered and unified Maronite nation extolled by Bishop Murad, ‘Awn sensed, much to his horror, a popular fury that was supposedly being controlled by conspiratorial hands. His worries were compounded because in their moment of fear and crisis, the ahali of Bayt Miri turned to the hero of the Christian popular imagination, the bek Tanyus Shahin. To him and to the other leaders of the shabab (young men) of Kisrawan they appealed as “brothers” in distress surrounded by Druzes who, in their view, had commenced hostilities. They asked Shahin to “come quickly with a large jumhur so that if they desire evil we will be ready with our own masses.”^[63] They appealed to Shahin in part because his reputation had spread far beyond the borders of Kisrawan, in part because he embodied the only hope of the Christian ahali overwhelmed by a fear of their Druze neighbors.^[64]

The appeal to Shahin was, if nothing else, a reflection of the growing disillusionment with the efficacy of the local elites. While Shahin was presenting himself in increasingly strident tones and with “Christian zeal,” the notables tried, once more, to maintain their tenuous hold on the ahali and on social order. In the aftermath of the Bayt Miri incident and the fighting that engulfed the Matn district, Druze and Christian notables met first in Hammana and then at Mdayrij (where Hurşid set up camp to oversee the restoration of order) toward the end of August. Their meeting had all the hallmarks of a declaration of a counterrevolution against the mobilization of the ahali—both in Kisrawan and in the Matn. It represented their attempt to contain once more the subaltern mobilization and to stifle the ahali by reclaiming the representation of their respective ta’ifas. The meeting was meant to end the years of bickering, infighting, and competing claims of compensation from the Ottoman authorities in Beirut. There in Mdayrij in the Shuf, a stone’s throw from the Dahr al-Baydar mountain pass, from whose vantage point the notables could survey their domains, which were inhabited by the unruly ahali, a Druze landowner, shaykh Husayn Talhuq, addressed the Christian notables with not a little impatience, according to a report of the meeting sent to the Patriarch.^[65] The most important reason for all the disturbances, he stressed to the gathering of Mount Lebanon’s elites, was the fact that the Druze and Christian notables and kaymakams had been unable to agree in the recent past; this lack of agreement had “diminished from their station and caused the lack of deference for them on the part of the ahali.” It had also, he continued, turning toward the notables from Kisrawan, brought about the demise of the Khazins. Then shaykh Husayn stoped and asked each notable present, one by one, Druze and Christian, whether their ahali respected their positions and rank. Each notable solemnly said no; shaykh Husayn proposed that all the notables sign a compact to be “one hand.” They did. And they agreed to march on Kisrawan to “discipline” the ahali.

Satisfied, the notables returned to their districts and, according to the report, “exhibited an unusual determination to subdue the ahali” and began to prepare for the joint onslaught on Kisrawan to “return the Khazin shaykhs by any means necessary” with the support of the Ottoman government. But before the march could begin, the insurgent ahali of Kisrawan got word of the impending expedition; they too issued calls for unity, and rumors spread about a compact of the Christian ahali to be “one hand” and to defend their “common interest against any, grand or small, who might infringe upon their rights.” The shaykhs of the Matn were suddenly seized with a fear that what had happened to the Khazins in Kisrawan might happen to them. The expedition was aborted when it became clear that the Christians of the Matn would not march on Kisrawan under the notables.

On August 29 the ahali of Jbayl and Batrun agreed to be “one hand and one mind” in opposition to any who might attack their jumhur.^[66] The agreement stated that “this our compact is also to help our brothers the Christians living in the other neighboring districts to the best of our abilities.” It was also decided that in each village a wakil, or representative, would be chosen by the ahali to tend to their “interests.” The wakil had to be someone who worked not for his own private interests but for the interests of the masses; he had to be “conscious” (mudrikan) of the “common welfare” (al-khayr al-‘am). In return the people had to listen to him and to follow the common good just as the wakil was not to take any decision without first consulting with the ahali. Before making any decision affecting the “common interests” of all, the wakils had to discuss the decision with each other. If ever a wakil was found to be “untrustworthy to represent the interests of his village or the interests of the jumhur,” he would be dismissed. “We ask God,” concluded the ahali signing the agreement, “that this unity meets with His glory and [results in] the repose of our jumhur.”^[67]

The elitist countermovement of Mdayrij and the intercommunal Matn clashes of the summer of 1859 did not weaken the resolve of the popular mobilizations in Kisrawan; in fact, it gave them a general orientation that extended beyond the immediate problems of particular villages with their traditional notables. The jumhur—in this context, the gathering of the commoners—was aimed at defending their rights against both the Druzes and the Christian notables, whom Shahin had disparagingly described as the “relatives” of the Druzes. In the prereform society, this association between the elites of different sects had a positive connotation that reflected the brotherhood of the notables in a hierarchical society in which power was shared among the major families. But in the postrestoration society it was increasingly becoming synonymous with betrayal. In part this change in meaning stemmed from the memory of sectarian conflict in 1841; in part, it reflected the overlap of social and sectarian interests in a partitioned society that thrust Christian ahali under the rule of Druze notables in the “mixed” districts of Mount Lebanon. In the main, however, it illustrated a popular participation in politics that conflated the defense of reform with the salvation of “the” Christian community. It shifted, in other words, the basis of loyalty away from a notable family toward an imagined political sectarian community.

Shahin’s uprising contested the notion of community and its leadership in the post-Tanzimat era. The notion of a singular ahali, quiescent or mobilized, was a figment of imagination, a rhetorical, political, and moral construction that was deployed by both Shahin and the Khazins to legitimize or delegitimize the Kisrawan rebellion. However, Shahin’s fiery Christian rhetoric, his attacks on Shi‘a communities in and around Kisrawan, and his call for the liberation of all Christians announced a popular sectarian vision that, in essence, overturned the hierarchical social order. His popularity, attested to by the panicked letters sent by Maronite bishops to their Patriarch warning him that they were losing control of their flock to Shahin’s populism and by the letters sent to Shahin by Christian villagers in the Druze districts asking for his help in liberating them, indicated a profound crisis in traditional order. The crisis became a catastrophe in the spring of 1860, when the social unrest spread to the so-called mixed districts. “Christian zeal [al-ghira al-masihiyya]” was not simply a religious slogan bandied about by the ahali as they prepared to defend themselves from (or to attack, depending on one’s perspective) non-Christians. It marked for them a coming of age—not a return to a primordial kinship with other Christians but a new geography that enabled them to come to the aid of “brothers” in distress in Shi‘a and Druze regions of Mount Lebanon. It was intertwined with a vocabulary of rights and an understanding of the Tanzimat that legitimated the entrance of the mobilized general population (jumhur) into formal politics. In the final analysis, it was the proclamation—if not fulfillment—of a subversive sectarian history and geography.

Shahin’s populism was not more authentic or somehow historically more progressive than the Khazins’ conservative vision of the Tanzimat; nor was his discourse of the mobilized jumhur any more accurate a reflection of social reality than the Khazins’ descriptions of a quiescent ahali. Shahin was not a pure class warrior, nor was the struggle in Kisrawan a purely social struggle. As is so often the case with popular insurgencies, Shahin began to conflate his own personal vision and interests with that of the jumhur. His rise was meteoric, from an impoverished muleteer who had traveled the width and breadth of Kisrawan to a legend whose fame brought him accolades and appeals from across Mount Lebanon. He was described as the “father of the sharpened sword” in a popular ballad, the man who had provided the “peasant” with food and shelter while the Khazin shaykhs “in Bikfayya of hunger died.”^[68] He was addressed as a bek, which he quickly adopted as a title, and he provided himself with a seal that rivaled those of the shaykhs. And as their efforts to vanquish him and the juhhal by force failed, the elites began to address him as a shaykh. With his unheard-of leap up the social ladder came the expected responsibilities of the traditional notables against whom he was in rebellion: to control the juhhal, to offer protection, to dictate morals, to reclaim debts, to disperse crowds, and to be a za‘im [to be and, more important, to pose as a leader], all of which he did with “Christian” faithfulness once his position in Kisrawan was secure.^[69]

The evident disjuncture between a homogenizing discourse and a heterogeneous reality—be it at the level of Bishop Murad’s Notice historique or Tanyus Shahin’s jumhur—constituted the fundamental crisis in communal identity and representation. This contradiction did not prevent men like Shahin and, as we shall soon see, members of the Druze community from acting to reconcile the contradictions of reform in Mount Lebanon, from forcing reality, as it were, to conform to narrative. Just as the Khazins had tried to physically end the rebellion and redefine the geography of Kisrawan on the basis of loyalty to their family—for example when they kidnapped and severely humiliated and beat two muleteers in a monastery until blood “ran down their bodies as if it were water” and warned them to “take heed that we do not want, and will not accept anyone who crosses from Bilad Kisrawan to our bilad, Bilad Jbayl, or else we will do [as we have done here]”^[70]—some among the commoners of Kisrawan, flush with an inflated sense of their own power, were not averse to redefining the boundaries of loyalty and treachery and to imposing new geographies of liberation and fear. In December of 1859, they marched on Baskinta to settle some local affair; in April of 1860, the Patriarch received reports that Shahin was spreading “rumors” to the ahali of Bilad Jbayl that Zahla, Dayr al-Qamar, and the Matn were “united with him” and were “waiting for his orders”;^[71] and in May of 1860 villagers from Kisrawan marched further south still. “We have no idea” of what tomorrow will bring, read one report to the authorities. They were soon to find out.

Notes