1. A whole host of studies on “modernity” in the Middle East—especially as it pertains to the construction of the category “woman”—have come out. The publication of Abu-Lughod's edited book Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, with eight contributors, is a sign of the maturing of this area of studies. For specific examples, see Najmabadi's The Story of the Daughters of Quchan, or Pollard's dissertation, “Nurturing the Nation.”

2. Sangari and Vaid, Recasting Women, 10–11.

3. National Archives, dispatches from the U.S. Consuls in Beirut, U.S./143, Ravndal, “Naturalized Americans of Syrian Origin,” 14 October 1903.

4. Ibid., U.S/256, Ravndal, “Report on Emigration,” 12 September 1903.

5. This hypothetical number was arrived at in the following manner. If we assume a constant rate of return of 12,000 individuals every five years (an unsubstantiated guess, to be sure), then between 1894 and 1914 we can calculate that 48,000 individuals returned to the Mountain. (Although emigration started around 1887, it would have been at least seven years before any appreciable numbers started the journey back.) In this same time period about 106,715 emigrants arrived in the United States. This estimate leads us (by dividing 48,000 by 106,715) to 45 percent.

6. Immigration Commission, Reports of the Immigration Commission: Statistical Review of Immigration, 1820–1910, 61st Cong., 3rd sess., 1911, S. Doc. 756.

7. Rapport du Commandant Pechkoff, Archives du Ministère des Affaires Ētrangères, vol. 410, p. 59, 19 May 1927; quoted in Hashimoto's “Lebanese Population Movement,” 66.

8. Arthur Ruppin, Syrien als Wirtschaftsgebiet (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1917), 19.

9. Nabil Harfush, al-Hūdūr al-Lubnani fi al-‘alam, vol. 1 (Beirut: Matabi‘ al-Karim al-Hadithah, 1974), 49.

10. Our only solace is that this is a fairly common state of affairs for all studies of returning emigrants. Gabaccia discusses the problem with official Italian and American statistics in her study Militants and Migrants, 177–179. A finnish scholar concluded his survey of Finland's official statistics on return migration by describing them as “incontrovertibly extremely deficient”; Kero, “The Return of Emigrants from America to Finland,” 11–13. On the problems of German statistics for the pre-1880 era, see Kamphoefner, “The Volume and Composition of German-American Return Migration,” 296–299. Even the editor of a volume of papers from a European conference on international return migration (mainly since World War II) could conclude only that “returns are quite difficult to assess with any statistical accuracy”; Daniel Kubat, ed., The Politics of Return: International Return Migration in Europe; Proceedings of the First European Conference on International Return Migration (Rome, November 11–14, 1981) (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1983), 4.

11. The calculations for this number were based on the fact that, by 1914, 136,060 Lebanese had emigrated to Argentina, another 55,954 had arrived in Brazil, and 106,424 had come to the United States. Sources for Argentina: La Siria nueva: Obra historica, estadistica y comercial de la colectividad Sirio-Otomana en las Republicas Argentina y Uruguay (Buenos Aires: Empressa Assalam, 1917), 19; for Brazil: Revista de Imigraçaxo e Colonizaçao (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério das Relaçes Exteriores, July 1940); for the United States: Immigration and Naturalization Service, Annual Report 1914, 63rd Cong., 3rd sess., 1915.

12. Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 4.

13. Edward Steiner, On the Trail of the Immigrant (New York: Revell, 1906), 334–335.

14. Quoted in Jabbour, Ētude sur la poésie dialectale au Liban, 159.

15. Quoted in ibid., 176.

16. Forverts, 24 November 1902, quoted in Zosa Szajkowski, “Deportation of Jewish Immigrants and Returnees before World War I,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 67 (June 1978): 305.

17. Lubnan, 1 October 1906.

18. Lubnan, 13 September 1906.

19. See Khatir's ‘Ahd al-mutasarri fi n fi Lubnan and Rustum's Lubnan fi ‘ahd al-Mutasarrifiyya.

20. See Salim Hassan Hashi, Yawmiyyāt lubnani fi ayām al-Mutasarrifiyya (Beirut: Lahad Khater, 1983).

21. See Jouplain's La Question du Liban for a treatise on an independent Christian Lebanon.

22. Yusuf As‘ad Daghir, Qamus al-sahafa al-lubnaniyya (1858–1974) (Beirut: al-Jami‘ ah al-Lubnaniyya: al-Tawz‘i, al-Maktabah al-Sharqiyah, 1978), 5.

23. Haqqi, Lubnan, 2: 222.

24. By the end of the nineteenth century, new Cairo had expanded north of the old city and then west to include the “modern” quarters of Zamalek. Damascus was also expanding into new urbanized areas for the middle classes up the slopes of Jabal Qasiyun. For Heliopolis, a modern, middle-class neighborhood of Cairo, see Robert Ilbert, Héliopolis: le Caire, 1905–1922: Genèse d'un ville (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1981), or Trevor Mostyn, Egypt's Belle Ēpoque: Cairo: 1827–1952 (New York: Quartet, 1989). One of the best studies of Istanbul which documents the demographic growth of the city as well as the changing habits of its emerging middle class is Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family, and Fertility, 1880–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 87–121, 148–158, 194–248.

25. May Davie, “Beyrouth et ses faubourgs: 1840–1940,” in Les Cahiers du Centre d'Etude et de Recherche sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain, no. 15 (Beirut: Centre d'Etude et de Recherche sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain, 1996), chs. 1, 2. This same phenomenon was taking place in Algiers, Rabat, and Tunis, where the new villes were growing outside the boundaries of the old ones and where the middle-class merchants, bankers, clerks, doctors, lawyers, journalists, and government employees lived along with a sizable foreign community.

26. This phenomenon was not limited to Lebanon. “The American house” was a common sight across the European landscape. As Italy's statesman Francesco Saverio Nitti observed, “In tiny villages, the pick-axe strikes down the filthy hovels ... and the new homes of 'Americani' began to rise.” Quoted in Francesco Paolo Cerase, “From Italy to the United States and Back: Returned Migrants, Conservative or Innovative?” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1971), 111–112. One finds similar observations in Julianna Puskás, From Hungary to the United States (1880–1914), tr. Eva Palmai (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1982), 79–80; Cinel, The National Integration of Italian Return Migration, 163–164; Immigration Commission, Reports of the Immigration Commission: Statistical Review of Immigration, 61st Cong., 3rd sess., 1911, S. Doc. 747.

27. For a detailed description of this house, see Michel Feghali, “Notes sur la maison libanaise,” in Mélanges René Basset (Paris: Publications de l'Institut des Hautes-Ētudes Marocaines, 1923), 1: 163–186.

28. A tannour is a half-domed metallic surface where thin, pizzalike crusts of dough are placed to cook. It sits on top of a ring of stones and is heated from underneath with wood.

29. Most notable of those with clouded notions was Alphonse de Lamartine, whose book, A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land; Comprising Recollections, Sketches, and Reflections, Made during a Tour in the East (New York: D. Appleton, 1848), was naive in its observations to say the least, full of preconceived romantic images that had little to do with reality. Even contemporaries were aware of that bias. Another French romantic observer was the Vicomtesse d'Aviau de Piolant, who recorded her highly impressionistic recollections about Mount Lebanon in a book entitled Au pays des Maronites (Paris: Librairie H. Oudin, 1882). Lebanese folklorists provided equally romantic images of the Lebanese house and of village life in general, but for more political reasons. Most of these writers tended to be Maronite Christians, who were loathe to admit any relationship between the surrounding Arab culture and that of the Maronite community. Thus they argued, with a great stretch of the imagination at times, that the Maronites had safeguarded their Aramaic, Syriac, Phoenician, marada, or even European heritage. For example, Feghali, in his article “Notes sur la maison libanaise,” wrote, “The conclusion which we can reach is that on this point in particular, as with many others, the Arab and Turkish civilization did not succeed, at any moment, to impose itself in Lebanon. The Lebanese, in addition to having kept their vocabulary in large part Syriac, still exist in the same way as their ancestors from the early Christian centuries.. . . It is for this that we still find today a striking similarity between the actual inhabitants of Lebanon and the ancient peoples of Syria: Arameans, Canaanites and Hebrews” (185–186).

30. Urquhart, The Lebanon, 1: 233–234.

31. F. Bart, Scènes et tableaux de la vie actuelle en Orient— Mont Liban (Paris, 1883), 42.

32. Wood was becoming a rare commodity in Lebanon as early as the 1860s and 1870s. “Because of the unchecked logging and herding of goats in the mountains Lebanon has lost the great majority of its wood resources.” Haqqi, Lubnan, 2: 94.

33. A nice house of this type with six pillars would have measured about eighty-eight square meters.

34. For a list of the household possessions of one of the Khazin shuyukh, see Dominique Chevallier's “Que possédait un cheikh Maronite en 1859? Un document de la famille al-Khazin,” Arabica 7 (1960): 80–84.

35. Polk, The Opening of South Lebanon, 184.

36. Gulick notes that “none of the existing examples of it [this new style of house] in Munsif is probably more than a hundred and fifty years old [1800], and some are probably as little as sixty years old [1890].” Social Structure and Cultural Change in a Lebanese Village, 34. In the village of Lehfed, local informants indicated the late 1800s as the time when this new style of house appeared in the village (personal interviews with the priest and the mayor of the village).

37. Friedrich Ragette, Architecture in Lebanon: The Lebanese House during the 18th and 19th Centuries (Delmar, N.Y.: Caravan Books, 1980), 45.

38. des Villettes, La Vie des femmes dans un village Maronite libanais, 9.

39. See, for example, Soraya Antonius's Architecture in Lebanon (Beirut: Khayat's, 1965) and Ragette's Architecture in Lebanon.

40. See, for example, Robert Saliba's Beirut 1920–1940: Domestic Architecture between Tradition and Modernity (Beirut: Order of Engineers and Architects, 1998), esp. ch. 4.

41. Zeynep Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986), 137.

42. Ragette, Architecture in Lebanon, 92.

43. Feghali, “Notes sur la maison libanaise,” 178.

44. Ibid., 169.

45. Gulick, Social and Cultural Change in a Lebanese Village, 34.

46. AE CC, Correspondance commerciale, Beyrouth, July 29, 1890.

47. Ibid.

48. Ernest Weakley, “Report on the Condition and Prospects of British Trade in Syria,” Parliamentary Accounts & Papers, Cd. 5707 (1911).

49. AE CC, Correspondance commerciale, Beyrouth, vol. 10, report entitled “Situation de l'industrie et du commerce de Beyrouth en 1892,” April 7, 1888; and vol. 13, May 13, 1905. Weakley, “Report on the Condition and Prospects of British Trade in Syria.”

50. Weakley, “Report on the Condition and Prospects of British Trade in Syria,” 157.

51. National Archives, dispatches from the U.S. consul in Beirut, U.S./256, Ravndal, “Report on Emigration,” 12 September 1903.

52. AE CC, Correspondance commerciale, Beyrouth, February 1890, and dispatch no. 135, 1892.

53. Ibid., vol. 9, 1868; vol. 11, 1895; and vol. 13, 1905. The number of chairs is calculated on the basis of the statistics supplied by the French consulate general in its annual report, which stated that 200,000 francs worth of wooden furniture was imported, with a dozen costing between 25 and 35 francs. The number of imported iron beds is based on statistics supplied by the French consulate general in its commercial correspondence of April 1888 (vol. 10). According to the French consul, the British shipped about 5,178 metric tons worth of iron products to Beirut. Of this, 1,250 tons were steel bars intended for construction, and there were 500 more tons of miscellaneous items. The other 3,428 tons were primarily “English beds that cost about 660 piasters each.” Assuming an average weight of 250 kilograms per bed, we arrive at an approximate number of 13,172 sold in one year.

54. Weakley, “Report on the Condition and Prospects of British Trade in Syria,” 169.

55. Lubnan, 10 June 1907, 1.

56. Khatir, Al-‘Adāt wal-taqālid al-lubnaniyya, 26, 96.

57. Elias Masabki, “Imitation and Us, Where Is the End,” al-Mashriq (1913): 636-637.

58. Lubnan, 10 June 1907, 4

59. Shukri al-Bustani, Dayr al-Qamar fi akhir al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashar (Beirut: Lebanese University Press, 1969), 78–113. Also, interview with author's father with regard to father's childhood.

60. Shakir al-Khuri, Majma‘ al-masarrat (Beirut: Al-Ijtihad Press, 1908), 43.

61. During the summer, the blending of the two spaces achieved its epitome when the family constructed on its plot an ‘arzal, which is a hut made of dried tree branches. Many of the family, especially the men, stayed in their ‘arzal throughout most of the summer.

62. al-Bustani, Dayr al-Qamar fi akhir al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashar, 67.

63. Ibrahim Bayk al-Aswad, Daleel Lubnan (Ba‘abda: al-Matba‘ al-‘Uthmaniya, 1906), 359.

64. Ibid., 357.

65. Guys, Rélation d'un séjour de plusieurs années a Beyrout et dans le Liban, 98, 102.

66. al-Muhazab, 21 December 1907, 1.

67. al-Aswad, Daleel Lubnan, 336.

68. Ibid., 329–330.

69. For example, al-Hasna’ had two articles, in one year, on the proper manner of breastfeeding (vol. 1, 1907, 187 and 191). Another magazine, Fatat Lubnan, also dedicated regular space on its pages to this subject. However, being more of a feminist journal, it advocated that girls be breastfed as long as boys.

70. Among peasants the task of caring for an infant was not as complex. Generally, a baby was swaddled tightly and placed in a crib for the first few months of life. More relevantly, the task of breastfeeding the child was considered communal. The tradition was for nursing mothers of the village to visit a new mother shortly after the arrival of her baby and for each of them to suckle the baby at her breast. This was a symbolic gesture of their willingness to be responsible for the baby, but in fact the practice of exchanging nursing continued until the baby was weaned a year later.

71. al-Hasna’ 1 (January 1910): 380.

72. Rifa‘a Tahtawi, Murshid al-amin lil-banat wal-banin, vol. 2 of al-‘Amal al-kamila li-Rifa‘a R afi‘ al-Tahtawi/ Dirasāt wa-tahqīq Muhammad Imarah (Beirut: al-Muassasa al-‘Arabiyya lil-Dirasāt wa-al-Nashr, 1973), 369–378.

73. al-Hasna’ 1 (June 1909): 26.

74. al-Hasna’ 2 (March 1911): 381; 1 (January 1910): 214; 1 (September 1909): 123–125.

75. al-Hasna’ 1 (January 1910): 381.

76. Fatat Lubnan 1 (January 1914): 15.

77. Aswad, Daleel Lubnan, 360, 358.

78. Elias Tweyni, “The Woman,” Lubnan, 1 October 1895.

79. Ester Muyal, “The Woman's Kingdom: A Discourse on Domestic Politics,” al-Hasna’ 1 (July 1909): 52–55.

80. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother, 17–18.

81. Quoted in ibid., 358.

82. Fatat Lubnan 1 (January 1914): 10.

83. al-Hasna’ 1 (20 June 1909): 20.

84. H. J. Turtle, Quaker Service in the Middle East: With a History of the Brummana High School, 1876–1975 (London: Friends Service Council, 1975), 37.

85. This kind of argument was common among early advocates of female education in most areas. For instance, in Egypt, Qasim Amin wrote in his Tahrir al-marء’a (Cairo: Maktabat al-Taraqqi, 1899) that educating women was an essential part of improving society and providing suitable partners for educated middle-class men.

86. Ibid., 358.

87. al-Aswad, Daleel Lubnan, 362.

88. A list of women's journals that were published in the first decade of the twentieth century includes the following magazines:

• Title of Magazine Editor
• al-Fatat (The Young Woman) Hind Nawfal
• Mirīat al-Hasna’ (Mirror of the Beautiful) Miriam Mazhar
• al-‘Aila (The Family) Ester Muyal
• al-Mar’a (The Woman) Anisa ‘Atallah
• al-Sa‘ada (Happiness) Rogina ‘Awad
• al-Zahra (The flower) Mariam Mas‘ad
• Majalat al-Saydat wal-Banat (Magazine for the Ladies and the Girls) Rosa Antoun
• al-Moda (The Fashion) Salim Khalil Farah
• al-Hasna’ (The Beautiful) Jurji Nqula Baz
• al-‘Arus (The Bride) Mary ‘Ajmi
• al-‘alam al-Jadid (The New World) ‘Afifa Karam
• Fatat Lubnan (Lebanon's Girl) Salima Abi Rashed

89. Fatat Lubnan 1 (December 1914): 15–17.

90. Ibid., 17.

91. Quoted in Tani Barlow, “Theorizing Woman: Funu, Guojia, Jiating (Chinese Women, Chinese State, Chinese Family),” in Feminism and History, ed. Joan Wallach Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 204.

92. “An Essay Devoted to Education of Girls (Maqalah-‘i makhsus dar ta‘lim-i ‘awrat),” Habl al-matin 9, no. 12 (6 January 1902): 16. Quoted in Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Crafting an Educated Housewife in Iran,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 104.

93. This intertwining of a strong “nation” and the new “woman” derived in part from the similarity in the nature of European imperial and colonial projects across the globe. Whether in South Asia, China, Egypt, West Africa, or North Africa, colonialists underscored the “need” for their occupation and domination through the argument of cultural superiority and the notion of “lifting the lesser peoples.” This need was no where more “evident” to the Europeans than when it came to the position of women in these colonized societies. Thus sati, purdah, foot-binding, and harem became signifiers of the supposed backwardness of the colonized and—in reverse—of the superiority of the colonizer.

94. Turtle, Quaker Service in the Middle East, 42.

95. H. Jalabert, Un montagnard contre le pouvoir: Liban 1866 (Beirut: al-Machreq, 1978), 134.

96. Les Pères Jesuits à Ghazir 1844–1944 (Jounieh: Kaslik University Press, 1944), 56.

97. Khatir, Al-‘Adāt wal-taqālid al-lubnaniyya, 371.

98. Papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Houghton Library, Harvard University, series ABC: 16.6, vol. iii, document 217, “Schedule of Schools in Syria 1826.”

99. Ibid., series ABC: 16.8.1, vol. iv, report on the Syrian Mission dated 31 December 1835.

100. Haqqi, Lubnan, 2: 192.

101. AE CC, Correspondance commerciale, Beyrouth, vol. 8, annex to dispatch no. 39, March 22, 1870.

102. Ibid.

103. Petkovich, Lubnan wal-Lubnaniyun, 150.

104. Ibid., 135–137.

105. Haqqi, Lubnan, 2: 200.

106. Ibid., 2: 572.

107. J. D. Maitland-Kirwan, Sunrise in Syria: A Short History of the British Syrian Mission, from 1860–1930 (London: British Syrian Mission, 1930), 40–44.

108. Cited in Vital Cuinet, Syrie, Liban et Palestine: Géographie administrative, statistique, descriptive, et raisonnée (Paris: Lerous, 1896), 72–73.

109. Ibid., 83.

110. Jaber, “Pouvoir et société au Jabal ‘Amil de 1749 à 1920,” 184.

111. All the preceding comparative figures were collated from Kemal H. Karpat's Ottoman Population, 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), Tables IV.3 (Population Distribution) and IV.12 (Pupils Attending Schools), 211 and 219, respectively.

112. Ibid., Table IV.12 (Pupils Attending Schools), 219.

113. Tannous, “Trends of Social and Cultural Change,” 178.

114. Ibid.

115. Report of the Presbyterian Mission at Tripoli, Lebanon, in Presbyterian Church in the United States, Board of Foreign Missions, Fifty-fifth Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States (New York, 1898).

116. AE CC, Correspondance commerciale, Beyrouth, vol. 12, “Rapport sur l'état économique, sociale et politique du Mont Liban,” 1901.

117. Rates for the United States: Miller, Our Syrian Population, 23; for Brazil: Knowlton, “The Social and Spatial Mobility of the Syrian and Lebanese Community in Sao Paulo, Brazil,” 298; for Argentina: Klich, “Criollos and Arabic Speakers in Argentina,” 264.

118. Pharès, Les Maronites du Liban, 28.

119. Quoted in Tannous, “Social Change in an Arab Village,” 657.

120. Ibid. To marry a boy off at such an early age guaranteed two things. First, his economic dependence and young age made him more susceptible to his parents' will. Second, and perhaps more important, was the issue of sexuality. In a close living environment—within the tiny houses as well as within the small village sexuality—had to be tightly controlled in order to safeguard the social structure from the upheaval that might be set loose by premarital sex.

121. This term was quite common in the villages during the nineteenth century, but its use has lapsed to the point that today not many would understand the reference. See Furayha, Hadara fi tarīq al-zawāl, 152.

122. See Robert Creswell, “Lineage Endogamy among Maronite Mountaineers,” in Mediterranean Family Structures (London: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 101.

123. Polk, The Opening of South Lebanon, 175–189.

124. Abu-Najm, “Recherche ethnologique sur le mariage dans un village libanais,” 122.

125. al-Bustani, Dayr el-Qamar fi akhir al-qarn al-tasi‘ ‘ashar, 118.

126. Khatir, Al-‘Adāt wal-taqālid al-lubnaniyya, 246.

127. Anis Furayha, A Dictionary of Modern Lebanese Proverbs (Beirut: Libraire du Liban, [1974]), 196,

128. Abu-Najm, “Recherche ethnologique sur le mariage dans un village libanais,” 147.

129. Polk, The Opening of South Lebanon, 175–189.

130. Gulick, Social Structure and Culture Change in a Lebanese Village, 130.

131. Jane Schneider, “Of Vigilance and Virgins: Honor, Shame, and Access to Resources in Mediterranean Societies,” Ethnology 10, no. 1 (January 1971): 1–24.

132. Creswell, “Lineage Endogamy among Maronite Mountaineers,” 111.

133. A. Cheikho, “Lubnan: Nathra,” al-Mashriq 10, no. 9 (1907): 398.

134. Toufic Touma, Un village de Montagne au Liban, 107, 110.

135. Personal interview with Najibé Ghanem, daughter of Assaf Khater, 1998.

136. Pharès, Les Maronites du Liban, 27.

137. Abu-Najm, “Recherche ethnologique sur le mariage dans un village libanais,” 176.

138. Gulick, Social Structure and Culture Change in a Lebanese Village, 130.

139. Touma, Un village de Montagne au Liban, 83, 87.

140. Williams, The Youth of Haouch el-Harimi, 96.

141. Joseph Chamie, Religion and Fertility: Arab-Christian-Muslim Differentials (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 33.

142. Elias Tweyni, “The Philosophy of Marriage,” Lubnan,26 September 1895, 3.

143. Ibid., 1.

144. Elias Tweyni, “The Philosophy of Marriage,” Lubnan,3 October 1896, 1.