1. Buheiry, Porath, and Chevallier have made important contributions in an effort to explain the reasons behind the uprising. They point to a downturn in the French economy, on which Lebanese silk growers had become increasingly dependent, to bad harvests in 1857, and to the Khazins’ oppression of the villagers under their control as well as to an elite rivalry between the kaymakam and the notables which was exploited by the ahali to further their own cause. Chevallier, “Aspects sociaux”; Marwan R. Buheiry, “The Peasant Revolt of 1858 in Mount Lebanon: Rising Expectations, Economic Malaise, and the Incentive to Arm,” in The Formation and Perception of the Modern Arab World: Studies by Marwan R. Buheiry, ed. Lawrence I. Conrad (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1989); Yehoshua Porath, “The Peasant Revolt of 1858–1861 in Kisrawan,” Asian and African Studies 2 (1966): 77–157. For more on the elite rivalry between Bashir Ahmad, the kaymakam, and Bashir ‘Assaf, his British-supported rival, see Salibi, The Modern History of Lebanon, pp. 82–84. See also MS, 1, pp. 363–371. In addition, see Thompson’s criticism of historians who conflate a deteriorating economic situation (often described as such in retrospect) with spasmodic “rebellions of the belly” rather than seeing uprisings as “self-conscious or self-activating” affairs, in which the “moral economy of the crowd”—that is, popular beliefs about what constitutes the limits of justice and the boundaries of legitimate practice—can be discerned; Thompson formulated his idea of the “moral economy of the crowd” through an analysis of popular claims during bread riots in eighteenth-century England. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the Crowd,” in his Customs in Common (London: Penguin Books, 1993 [1991]), pp. 185–189. In a later essay, “The Moral Eonomy Reviewed,” Thompson insisted that the “riot is usually a rational response, and it takes place, not among helpless or hopeless people, but among those groups who sense that they have a little power to help themselves, as prices soar, employment fails, and they can see their staple food supply being exported from the district”; Customs in Common, p. 265.

2. Van Leeuwen is right to insist that Khazin hegemony had declined precipitously by the mid-nineteenth century, in part because of the reforms of the Maronite Church, in part because of the revival of Lebanese monasticism, and in part because of the divisions within the different households of the Khazin family. See Van Leeuwen, Notables and Clergy in Mount Lebanon, pp. 238–239.

3. Promulgated on 18 February 1856, the Imperial Rescript was an elaborate restatement of the 1839 Gülhane decree, except that Reşid Pasha, who was instrumental in shaping the Gülhane decree, had been eclipsed by other reformers, namely Âli Pasha and Fuad Pasha. For more details, see Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, pp. 115–117.

4. Tanyus Shahin was said to have been born in 1815 and to have died in 1894. His initial occupation was that of blacksmith, but by the time of the Kisrawan uprising he had become a muleteer. He was also reported to have been employed by the Lazarist monastery in Rayfun as a messenger; one author, Yusuf Ibrahim Yazbak—Al-Judhur al-tarikhiyya lil-harb al-lubnaniyya (Beirut: Nawfal, 1993)—alleges that the Lazarist priests, including one Father Leroy, may have instructed Shahin in the principles of 1789. Such instruction, however, is extremely unlikely both because there is no evidence in Shahin’s proclamations of any such orientation and, more important, because of the remote possibility that the Lazarists, who were persecuted by Revolutionary France, would have been inclined to say anything positive about such a calamitous era. Moreover, Shahin, according to several sources, was dismissed from the service of the Lazarists when the revolt began. For more information about Shahin, see Henri Jalabert, Un Montagnard contre le pouvoir: Liban 1866 (Beirut: El-Machreq, 1975), p. 213, and Philippe, Comte de Paris, Damas et le Liban: Extraits du journal d’un voyage en Syrie au printemps de 1860 (London: W. Jeffs, 1860), p. 102; see also Yazbak, Al-Judhur. Shahin was not the original leader of the uprising, but he took over on Christmas eve of 1858, according to Mansur Tannus Hattuni, Nubdha tarikhiyya fi al-muqata‘a al-Kisrawaniyya, ed. Nazir ‘Abbud (Beirut: Marun ‘Abbud, 1987), p. 286. Churchill, The Druzes and the Maronites under the Turkish Rule, p. 127, describes Shahin as a “dictator” who was “elected” by the peasants. Also see MS, 1, pp. 388–390, for more information about other figures who played important roles in the early phases of the revolt; and Porath, “The Peasant Revolt,” pp. 93–94.

5. Despite the considerable literature on the Kisrawan revolt, the historiography of the period tends to frame it as a prelude to the supposedly irrational intercommunal violence of 1860. Chroniclers such as Hattuni and ‘Aqiqi cryptically refer to an Ottoman conspiracy to stir up trouble. See Hattuni, Nubdha tarikhiyya, p. 290; Antun Dahir al-‘Aqiqi, Thawra wa fitna fi Lubnan: Safha majhula min tarikh al-jabal min 1841 ila 1873, ed. Yusuf Ibrahim Yazbak (Beirut: Matba‘at al-Ittihad, 1938), p. 86. The anonymous author (whom the editors of Al-Machriq guess to be the a Greek Catholic priest, Yusuf Farahyan) of the manuscript “Nubdha mukhtasara fi hawadith Lubnan wa al-Sham, 1840–1862,” published in Al-Machriq 24 (1926): 802–824, 915–938, makes the same accusation of Ottoman duplicity but asserts that Shahin was not taken in by it. The accusation of a Turkish divide-and-rule strategy with regard to the Kisrawan revolt is also found in Philippe, Comte de Paris, Damas et le Liban, p. 101, as well as in Churchill, The Druzes and the Maronites under the Turkish Rule, p. 129. Historians such as Hitti and Salibi echo these views, while Fawaz briefly discusses Kisrawan as a prelude to the sectarian violence of 1860. Hitti refers to a “peasant commonwealth” and adds that the “Turkish authorities beheld with thinly veiled satisfaction developments calculated to end in their favour,” which not only reveals Hitti’s overreliance on the European consular perspective but an ignorance of the Ottoman government viewpoint; Hitti, Lebanon in History, pp. 436–437. Salibi, The Modern History of Lebanon, p. 86, states that Shahin had the “moral backing” of the Ottoman authorities. Fawaz restates this perspective, albeit in a more muted form, when she writes that “the Ottoman authorities stood by” during the rebellion; An Occasion for War, p. 45.

6. AE CPC/B, vol. 12, Bentivoglio to Walewski, 7 January 1860; MS, 1, p. 372.

7. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 13 December 1858.

8. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 10 May 1860.

9. Yusuf Abi-Sa‘b, Tarikh al-Kfur Kisrawan (Beirut,1985), p. 297.

10. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 15 June 1859.

11. Porath, “The Peasant Revolt,” p. 110.

12. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 9 May 1860.

13. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 21 January 1860.

14. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 14 July 1859. See also MS, 1, p. 366. The British consul’s report of 14 August 1859 suggests that the rebels, allegedly led by Shahin, were looking for male Khazins, but when they found that these men had fled ‘Ajaltun, they set fire to a few Khazin homes and killed the wife and daughter of one of the shaykhs. The author of “Nubdha mukhtasara fi hawadith Lubnan wa al-Sham” (Farahyan?), p. 807, mentions a third death of an elderly shaykh who was beaten so severely at roughly the same time as the other two killings that he died two days later.

15. See Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé’s work on the “crowd”—Captain Swing (London: Pimlico, 1969)—is worth noting here because the few attempts in the historiography of the Kisrawan revolt have been mired in the fruitless question of whether to see in it a “traditional” rebellion or a Marxist insurrection (c.f. Porath, “The Peasant Revolt”), as if indeed “traditional” rebellions can be lumped together as one form of resistance to authority. See also Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the Crowd,” in his Customs in Common, p. 212. More relevant is James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985). Although the revolt in Kisrawan would seem to be exactly the opposite of Scott’s “everyday” forms of resistance (as opposed to the dramatic moments of violence that have preoccupied scholars for so long), the fact remains that Shahin and his followers never saw themselves or described themselves as rebels. Moreover, much of the resistance to Khazin domination even before the expulsions came not just in mass expulsions or murders but in refusing to attend to the fields, noncompliance with government demands, and, if the complaints often made to the Patriarch by the Khazins are to be accepted, the recurrent use or (possibility of use) of insulting language. In their own petitions to the Patriarch, the ahali consistently used deferential language when describing the Khazins—even when denouncing their “oppressions” or when demanding equality.

16. ‘Aqiqi, Thawra wa fitna, p. 53. Guha has elaborated on this form of “rebel violence” in his Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, p. 145.

17. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 4 May 1860.

18. Dominique Chevallier, “Que possédait un cheikh Maronite en 1859? Un document de la famille al-Khazen,” Arabica 7 (1960), p. 79.

19. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 15 January 1860.

20. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 22 R 1276 [17 November 1859].

21. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 19 January 1860.

22. Porath, “The Peasant Revolt,” pp. 100–101.

23. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, n.d., but in 1859; AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 7 February 1859; ‘Aqiqi, Thawra wa fitna, pp. 180–181.

24. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 14 March 1859.

25. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, n.d., but in 1859; AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 7 February 1859; ‘Aqiqi, Thawra wa fitna, pp. 180–181.

26. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 14 March 1859.

27. ‘Aqiqi, Thawra wa fitna, pp. 162–163.

28. AE CPC/B, vol. 12, no.18, Bentivoglio to Thouvenel, 7 January 1860. It has often been assumed that the French presence in Mount Lebanon inculcated the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Not only is there no evidence to support such an assertion, but it also assumes that the French monks and consuls disseminated revolutionary doctrines and misses the point that, for most French travelers and missionaries, Mount Lebanon was a haven from revolution. For one contemporary negative Christian understanding of the French Revolution, see Shihabi, Lubnan fi ‘ahd al-umara’, 3, p. 551.

29. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 4 May 1860.

30. MS, 1, p. 384.

31. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 4 August 1859.

32. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, n.d., but from 1859 and definitely following the Mdayrij meeting (discussed later in this chapter), which took place in August 1859.

33. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 11 March 1859.

34. Those assembled at Bkirke enumerated the obstacles that stood in the way of a distinctly Maronite modernity. They quickly agreed that they must censor all books in an effort to ward off the “satanic deviations” represented by the American Protestants, and, at the same time, they committed themselves to actively stamping out signs of backwardness; they rebuked priests who did not clean their churches and who dressed in unmended clothing. They also enjoined respect for superiors and urged the Maronite clergy to limit the extent of their involvement with temporal affairs. They reminded the clergy that they were first and always servants of God and that they were to be Christian in their deeds and speech. They were to avoid drunkenness, pride, feasts, gambling, dancing, joking, jesting, and singing among the laity at weddings and in all public places. They were to also avoid hunting, trading, renting lands, and serving the rulers— the emirs, the shaykhs, and the notables—as agents, and they were to avoid entangling themselves in public affairs which did not concern them. The bishops, furthermore, thought that it was imperative to suppress the “disgraceful” practice of wailing and crying at funerals because it was making the Maronites an object of ridicule to the “strangers.” They enjoined priests to do everything to put an end to the “horrid habit” of extreme joy and exuberance at weddings—the noise and other “inappropriate songs” which brought to the revelers the “shame” of those who gazed on them. Bishops were authorized to take disciplinary action against such revolting habits with whatever punishment they deemed fit. Patriarch Mas‘ad and the bishops who joined him at the council were determined to abolish signs of the premodern, which they equated with the “ignorants” who indulged in popular culture. Mas‘ad, Al-Majma‘ al-baladi.

35. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad,14 May 1860.

36. See Porath, “The Peasant Revolt,” pp. 133–147, for a detailed discussion of the role of the clergy in the Kisrawan rebellion.

37. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 18 May 1860. One of the most commonly repeated myths is that the Patriarch was sympathetic to the insurgents because he was himself from “peasant-stock,” a phrase that was first mentioned by Churchill in The Druzes and the Maronites under the Turkish Rule and that has been accepted by almost every historian (from Hitti to Fawaz) since despite the fact that there is no indication from the documents of the Maronite Patriarchate that Mas‘ad was in fact openly sympathetic to Tanyus Shahin. It is abundantly clear, however, from the myriad of private letters and public declarations authorized by the Patriarch that the Maronite Church establishment was vehemently opposed to any popular mobilization that threatened the social order. See ‘Issam Khalifa, Abhath fi tarikh Lubnan al-mu‘asir (Beirut: Al-jil, 1985), which refutes the unsubstantiated allegations in the historiography of the rebellion. Moreover, such a reductionist statement implies, of course, that being a peasant is a primordial condition, as if years in training in the priesthood, education in Rome, contact with rulers and missionaries, and the position of Patriarch, with all its accompanying pomp and prestige (in the nineteenth-century at least), did not play an equally important role in Mas‘ad’s dim view of popular mobilization.

38. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, n.d., but presumably in 1859.

39. MS, 1, p. 385.

40. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 4 March 1859.

41. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 9 May 1860.

42. The British consul, Noel Moore, had met with Hurşid Pasha, the governor of Sayda, in December of 1859 to urge him to crush the “anarchy” in Kisrawan; Hurşid complained of lack of troops but promised that he would launch an expedition as soon as the spring arrived. No sooner had he made this promise than the French consul went out of his way to warn the Patriarch to bring the Maronites to heel because he could prevent the Ottomans from launching a military force only if the Patriarch restored order. From all available evidence, it seems certain that the Ottomans were not involved either with planning the Kisrawan rebellion or in prolonging it, and they did not crush it immediately only because they were prevented from doing so for logistical as well as political reasons. See FO 78/1454, Moore to Russell, 23 December 1859. See also AE CPC/B, vol. 12, Bentivoglio to Thouvenel, 1 March 1860.

43. Statements by the British consul in Beirut to the effect that “there is now a persecution inspired it cannot be doubted by the Authorities directed against the Sheiks by the people” were frequently made without any substantiation. See FO 78/1454, Moore to Bulwer, 28 January 1859. Moreover, they were contradicted not just by the governor’s own statements but also by those of the French consul, who confessed that he was working to prevent the governor from sending troops to Kisrawan; AE CPC/B, vol. 12, Bentivoglio to Thouvenel, 1 March 1860.

44. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 17 N 1276 [9 April 1860].

45. MS, 1, p. 384.

46. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 2 April 1860. Hattuni, Nubdha tarikhiyya, p. 286, refers to an earlier attempt by Emir Yusuf Ali Murad to pacify Shahin in January 1859. Two popular sayings that the letter draws on are “People will not respect him who does not respect himself” and “For a young man to die in his glorious prime is his wedding, and for him to live in scarcity and humiliation is his funeral.” See Anis Freyha, A Dictionary of Modern Lebanese Proverbs (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1995 [1974]).

47. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 2 April 1860.

48. For such a perspective, see Samir Khalaf, “Abortive Class Conflict: The Failure of Peasant Uprisings in the Nineteenth Century,” in his Lebanon’s Predicament, pp. 22–44. See also Irena Smilianskaya, “The Disintegration of Feudal Relations in Syria and Lebanon in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Economic History of the Middle East, 1800–1914, ed. Charles Issawi (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1966), and Dahir’s Al-Intifadat al-lubnaniyya. Smilianskaya sees the problem as one of insufficient class consciousness due to lack of the right economic conditions, a lack which led more or less inevitably to a sectarian false consciousness. Khalaf speaks of how “what seemed like genuine class movements, sparked by collective consciousness and a concern for public welfare, were deflected into confessional conflict” (p. 23). He blames the Druze notables for this “deflection,” whereas Porath insists that Shahin’s attempts to rally anti-Druze sentiment must be interpreted as a confessional rather than a social revolt; “The Peasant Revolt,” p. 119. All three authors make an artificial distinction between confessional and social revolt, without seeming to link one with the other.

49. ‘Aqiqi, Thawra wa fitna, p. 164; MS, 1, p. 385.

50. PRONI D 1071/H/C/1/1/13. This is an English translation found in the private papers of Lord Dufferin at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. The reference to the “Seven Sovereigns” is not clear, although it may be an allusion to the Treaty of Paris and the 1856 Hatt-i Hümayun. See also Richard Edwards, La Syrie 1840–1862 (Paris: Amyot, 1862), p. 144.

51. Yazbak, Al-Judhur, p. 268.

52. Kerr described Shahin as a “self-appointed Robin Hood, half-literate dictator of the village proletariat.” Malcolm H. Kerr, Lebanon in the Last Years of Feudalism, 1840–1860: A Contemporary Account by Antun Dahir al-‘Aqiqi and Other Documents, edited and translated version of Antun Dahir al-‘Aqiqi, Thawra wa fitna fi Lubnan: Safha majhula min tarikh al-jabal min 1841 ila 1873 (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1959), p. 22. Yazbak claims that through his connection with the priest Yuhanna Habib, Shahin picked up a few words of Italian; Al-Judhur, p. 268.

53. This information—tentative at best—comes from Yazbak; he quotes another writer, Yusuf Mubarak, who collected testimony on Shahin’s life from a variety of unnamed local sources, including older villagers who remembered Shahin from their youth; Al-Judhur, p. 267.

54. Kerr’s translation in Lebanon in the Last Years of Feudalism, p. 139.

55. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 23 May 1859.

56. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 12 May 1859.

57. Kerr’s translation in Lebanon in the Last Years of Feudalism, p. 136.

58. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 11 June 1859. The word jumhuriyya in this context refers to the mobilization of, authority of, and rule by commoners in Kisrawan.

59. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 10 June 1859.

60. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 17 August 1859.

61. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 17 August 1859 (2nd dispatch).

62. Thomson to Anderson, 25 August 1859, MH, 55 (1859): 349 (emphasis my own).

63. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 15 August 1859.

64. In this regard, see Lubbus’s study of the Maronite clergy for their reactions to the Bayt Miri incident. Ayyub Trabulsi, speaking on behalf of the villagers of Dayr al-Qamar, warned the Patriarch that unless he acted quickly and organized the Christians for war, disaster would follow. “If the Christians are defeated this time, they will not rise again till the day of Judgment.” Antoine Lubbus, Tawajjuhat al-ikliros al-maruni al-siyasiyya fi Jabal Lubnan 1842–1867 (Beirut, 1991), p. 164.

65. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, n.d., but probably written in late August or early September 1859.

66. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 29 August 1859.

67. Ibid.

68. These lines are quoted by Yazbak, Al-Judhur, p. 133.

69. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 12 June 1859.

70. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, n.d., but probably in 1859 after the Khazins had been expelled from most of Kisrawan.

71. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 6 April 1860.