1. [Farahyan?], “Nubdha mukhtasara fi hawadith Lubnan wa al-Sham,” p. 808.

2. Fawaz, An Occasion for War, p. 164.

3. In her study of the war of 1860, Fawaz asserts that Shahin’s provocations and attacks on Druzes were one of the leading causes of violence; An Occasion for War, p. 50. Porath (“The Peasant Revolt,” p. 123) also makes this claim. Even at the time of the events, a Catholic missionary writing a letter from Beirut on 1 July 1860 admitted that, “to be impartial, I must confess that on this day [22/23 May] the Christians began the war in the area around Nahr al-Kalb”; BOEO, November 1860, p. 19.

4. Iskandar ibn Ya‘qub Abkarius, Kitab nawadir al-zaman fi tarikh Jabal Lubnan, Princeton Third Series 309a, Garret Collection, Firestone Library, Princeton University. The version I consulted was in the process of being edited by Philip Hitti. There is a different version of this manuscript, edited and translated by J. F. Scheltema, entitled The Lebanon in Turmoil: Syria and the Great Powers in 1860 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1920), as well as a manuscript in AUB MS 956.9 A 15, which is titled “Kitab nawadir fi malahim Jabal Lubnan.” See also Iskandar ibn Ya‘qub Abkarius, Nawadir al-zaman fi waqa’i‘ Jabal Lubnan, ed. ‘Abd al-Karim Ibrahim al-Samak (London: Riyad el-Rayyes Books, 1987). Abkarius’s point is well taken. However, in the absence of any reliable testimony from the ordinary Druze protagonists, whose own accounts of the events remain elusive, the argument about vengeance will continue to be hypothetical at best.

5. Materialist historians such as Irena Smilianskaya and sociologists like Samir Khalaf have argued that the violence in 1860 was in essence a corruption and a “diversion” of class struggle into sectarian strife. See, for more details, Khalaf, “Abortive Class Conflict,” in his Lebanon’s Predicament, p. 40, and Smilianskaya, “Peasant Uprisings in Lebanon, 1840s–1850s,” in The Fertile Crescent 1800–1914, ed. Charles Issawi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 48–51. This interpretation was first put forward by the Austrian envoy to the international tribunal sent to investigate the violence of 1860; he claimed that the “social” struggle in the north between Shahin and the Khazins took on a “sectarian” coloring when it spread to the south but that the “cause for the unrest was the same in both Kaymakamates.” See the transcript of the 22nd Sitting of the International Tribunal, 27 March 1861; records were compiled and translated into Arabic by Antoine Daw under the title Hawadith 1860 fi Lubnan wa Dimashq: Lajnat Beirut al-dawaliyya, al-mahadir al-kamila 1860–1862 (Beirut: Mukhtarat, 1996), 1, pp. 228–229. For a classic critique of the overly materialist arguments in the context of early modern France, see Natalie Zemon Davis’s seminal piece “Rites of Violence,” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 152–189. Davis was one of the first historians to refocus the debate on religious violence in early modern France away from pure materialist explanations to an explanation that endeavors to take seriously the meanings embedded within religious discourse during religious riots.

6. Historians such as Tibawi explicitly reject the causes given by local chroniclers for the outbreaks of violence as “trivial.” See A. L. Tibawi, A Modern History of Syria Including Lebanon and Palestine (London: Macmillan, 1969), p. 123.

7. In this respect, many accounts by historians rely far too uncritically on “primary” sources such as the Mishaqa narrative or indeed those of Abkarius, Hattuni, or ‘Aqiqi. The point is not to dismiss the value or relevance of these retrospective local accounts of violence but to frame their contributions toward our understanding of 1860 within a context of competing ideologies and identities struggling for hegemony in post-1860 Syria. Another point, which I will elaborate on in the Epilogue, is how the narrative framework provided by the retrospective local historians distorts the fear and confusion and sheer uncertainty of the episodes of violence in favor of advancing the idea of a diabolical Turkish plot to subjugate the freedom of the local inhabitants. See Guha’s “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Guha and Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies.

8. See James B. Rule’s Theories of Civil Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) for a more detailed appraisal of how violence has been interpreted and of how all theories explain, in part, the nature of violence in particular contexts. I do not propose here to explain all facets of the violence of 1860 or to propose a theory of violence that is substantially different from a number of theories already elaborated; rather I want to point out that for too long the emphasis in historical research has been to find some “originary” moment for the violence, be it in the tribalism theory favored by Lord Dufferin, the Turkish divide-and-rule thesis advocated by Churchill, the modernization hypothesis put forward by Hitti and Salibi, or the economic arguments developed by Boutros Labaki, Introduction à l’histoire economique du Liban: Soie et commerce extérieur en fin de période Ottomane, 1840–1914 (Beirut: Publications de l’Université Libanaise, 1984), and by others. In all cases, the violence itself is interpreted as sudden, devastating, and irrational. My point is that violence in 1860 as in 1859 was part of a process of the redefinition of social boundaries that began in 1840, and far from indicating the degeneration of Mount Lebanon it in fact forced open the contested political domain that Wood, partition, and Şekib Efendi’s Organic Regulations had sought to bring to a close.

9. The literature on the war of 1860 is not only voluminous but constitutes an ever-expanding field plied by historians and ideologues alike. Contemporary European accounts include Churchill’s The Druzes and the Maronites under the Turkish Rule. Fawaz provides a comprehensive account of the 1860 war, while Kerr’s translation of ‘Aqiqi’s manuscript as well as Scheltema’s introduction to and translation of Abkarius’s chronicle provide important information about the Kisrawan uprising. As far as the Damascus events are concerned, Fawaz’s detailed account sums up the literature in the field, while Kamal Salibi and ‘Abdallah Abu Habib have translated selections of Muhammad Abul al-Su‘ud Hasibi’s manuscript relating to the Damacus massacre, “Lamahat min tarkih Dimashq fi ‘ahd al-tanzimat” (Al-Abhath 21 [1968]: 57–78, 227–253, and 22 [1969]: 51–69.)

10. To be sure, the “class” fault lines of this struggle were not impermeable; Shahin, after all, was already being addressed as a shaykh by the time of the intercommunal conflagration that occurred toward the end of May of 1860. The religiosity of the intercommunal conflict and the sectarian discourse deployed by Shahin and his partisans further complicated the struggle over the meaning of sectarianism. From the outset it should be stressed that 1860 was not simply a social war that took on a religious coloring as the popular revolt spread into Druze-dominated districts, just as it was not an essentially religious conflict that was preceded by class warfare. Religious mobilization and class warfare were not mutually exclusive categories—Shahin never chose between one and the other. In any case, the material basis for the conflict, the question of control of land, the faltering economy, and unequal social relations do not in and of themselves explain violence that was so dramatic, localized, and intense and that was articulated in a religious discourse.

11. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 24 May 1860. In [Farahyan?], “Nubdha mukhtasara fi hawadith Lubnan wa al-Sham,” p. 812, the author recounts how when the mixed districts came under threat from the Druzes, Bishop Tubiyya ‘Awn wrote two letters (the author does not mention the date but states that it was after the first siege of Dayr al-Qamar, at the end of May and the beginning of June), one to Shahin and one to the Patriarch pleading for immediate aid for the Christians.

12. The author (Farahyan?) of “Nubdha mukhtasara fi hawadith Lubnan wa al-Sham,” pp. 811–813, asserts that because of the “divisions” within the Christian community and the corruption of the notables, as well as the cautious attitude adopted by the Patriarch, which was aimed at not provoking the Druzes, it was only the ahali of Kisrawan, Zahla, and Dayr al-Qamar who were committed to a united front against the Druzes.

13. The gathering at Nahr al-Kalb, furthermore, was not an isolated incident. Christian villagers near Chikka in northern Lebanon staged attacks on Muslim villages in March and defied orders of the Christian kaymakam to cease their actions. In the same month, the Patriarch was warned by a Christian notable that several hundred Kisrawanites were marching on Jbayl. “Our fear is not from the wise ones [al-‘uqqal] but from the lunatics [al-majanin],” he said, adding that it was commonly known that the ahali of Kisrawan had made the roads unsafe and it was rumored “from all directions” that the Patriarch had given orders that all the kaymakam’s men be expelled from Kisrawan. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 16 March 1860, and AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 26 and 27 March 1860.

14. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 23 May 1860.

15. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 20 April 1860.

16. AE CPC/B, vol. 12, no.18, Bentivoglio to Thouvenel, 7 January 1860.

17. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 12 January 1860.

18. FO 78/1454, memorial from the Khazin shaykhs to Moore, 25 December 1859. The flurry of diplomatic activity in both the French Foreign Ministry archives and the British Foreign Office papers indicates the extent to which consuls and government authorities were seized with panic immediately before the massacres in June of 1860. See, for example, AE CPC/B, vol. 12, no.10, Bentivoglio to Thouvenel, 28 March 1860; and AE CPC/B, vol. 12, no.15, Bentivoglio to Thouvenel, 24 May 1860.

19. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 23 May 1860.

20. Ibid.

21. This anxiety is manifestly evident in the letters sent from Bishops ‘Awn and Butrus al-Bustani to the Patriarch and his responses to them; these documents are preserved in Bkirke. See also Lubbus, Tawajjuhat al-ikliros al-maruni al-siyasiyya fi Jabal Lubnan, pp. 169–171.

22. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, May 1860.

23. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 23 May 1860.

24. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 22 June 1860 (emphasis my own).

25. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 19 May 1860.

26. Ibid. One of the many controversies of local history is the exact role of the Maronite Church in provoking the 1860 conflict. Bishop ‘Awn was accused at the time by the Ottoman authorities and by the British of heading a committee in Beirut that encouraged a military showdown with the Druzes. No evidence, however, suggests that a “plot” actually existed. More likely, as ‘Awn’s own dispatches to Mas‘ad indicate, once he was convinced that war was inevitable, ‘Awn did what he could to prepare for the conflict. The author (Farahyan?) of “Nubdha mukhtasara fi hawadith Lubnan wa al-Sham,” p. 812, denies that ‘Awn provoked sectarian hostilities, stating flatly that he wrote only after hostilities began in Dayr al-Qamar. Although this assertion is wrong in that ‘Awn wrote letters before the siege of Dayr al-Qamar, nothing in ‘Awn’s letters indicates an active conspiracy of “fanatical prelates,” as Richard Wood described the Maronite involvement in a letter to Lord Dufferin; PRONI D 1071/H/C/3/49/3,Wood to Dufferin, 30 May 1861.

27. ‘Aqiqi, Thawra wa fitna, pp. 210–211.

28. Ibid., p. 212.

29. ALSI, 16 May 1860.

30. ALSI, 19, 20, 22 May 1860. These letters from Beirut may have been sent by the infamous “Beirut committee” (the Maronite Young Men’s League), set up by Christians and supposedly headed by ‘Awn, bishop of Beirut; the Ottoman authorities vehemently denounced the League as being among the major causes for war. For more details, see Fawaz, An Occasion for War, p. 56.

31. ALSI, 23 May 1860.

32. ALSI, 1 June 1860.

33. ALSI, 30 May 1860.

34. ALSI, 6 June 1860.

35. Ibid.

36. Hurşid Pasha confessed as much when he told the Maronite Patriarch in a letter dated 12 June 1860 that as long as the “other” side was mobilized, the Druze notables insisted that they could not ask their own partisans to disband. See AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 12 June 1860.

37. ALSI, 26 June 1860. It should be noted however that intensive lobbying by certain elements of the Maronite clergy to control the situation and pressure from the Ottoman authorities to prevent further provocations by the Christians also contributed to the lack of an effective Christian mobilization. See AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 12 June 1860, when Yuhanna al-As‘ad wrote to the Maronite Patriarch asking him to use his influence to prevent Yusuf Karam from advancing on the Druzes.

38. Fawaz, An Occasion for War, pp. 52–53.

39. Porath, “The Peasant Revolt,” p. 122. The author (Farahyan?) of “Nubdha mukhtasara fi hawadith Lubnan wa al-Sham,” p. 811, states that Shahin was poisoned and nearly died, and hence he was unable to carry on with the expedition.

40. ‘Aqiqi, Thawra wa fitna, p. 214.

41. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 31 May 1860.

42. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 8 June 1860.

43. [Farahyan?], “Nubdha mukhtasara fi hawadith Lubnan wa al-Sham,” pp. 812–813.

44. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 20 June 1860.

45. Hurşid Pasha deployed troops and cannon on 26 May at Hazmiyya on the Beirut-Damascus highway in an effort to separate the combatants. The Ottoman soldiers opened fire with cannon to disperse the Druzes and protect the Christians, but this incident was later interpreted by the Christians as a “signal” for the Druzes to commence their attack. See Fawaz, An Occasion for War, p. 50. Conspiracy theory, of course, was not the preserve of the Maronite clergy. The most obvious example of non-Maronite conspiracy theorizing may be found in Churchill’s The Druzes and the Maronites under the Turkish Rule.

46. MS, 2, pp. 9–10.

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

48. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 27 May 1860.

49. Abu-Shaqra, Husayn Ghadban (narrator), and Yusuf Khattar Abu-Shaqra (writer), Al-Harakat fi Lubnan ila ‘ahd al-Mutasarrifiyya, ed. ‘Arif Abu-Shaqra (Beirut: Matba‘at al-ittihad, 1952), p. 103.

50. BBA BEO A.MKT.UM 4215-406/14, 29 L 1276 [21 May 1860].

51. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 12 June 1860.

52. Ibid.

53. See Fawaz, An Occasion for War, pp. 48–49, for an account of the increasing number of incidents and individual murders that occurred in the spring of 1860. The Druze chronicle recorded by Abu-Shaqra, Al-Harakat fi Lubnan, p. 102, recounts an episode of a Christian monk who desired to control the monastery of Dayr ‘Amiq in Manasif, a district traditionally controlled by the Druze Nakad shaykhs; he plotted and killed the head of the monastery (according to the account of a priest quoted by Abu-Shaqra), but no sooner had he done so than word spread among the Christian communities that Bashir Nakad had committed the murder, and disturbances soon followed. Mishaqa, by way of comparison, insists that in fact the Druzes killed the clergyman; Al-Jawab, p. 238.

54. Abu-Shaqra, Al-Harakat fi Lubnan, p. 106. Mishaqa, Al-Jawab, p. 240.

55. Abu-Shaqra, Al-Harakat fi Lubnan, p. 105.

56. Ibid., p. 103. See also Butrus al-Bustani’s Muhit al-muhit (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1987), p. 123, and R. Dozy’s Supplément aux dictionnaires arabes (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1991 [1881]), 1, p. 229, as well as Edward William Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1980), 2, p. 477.

57. Abu-Shaqra, Al-Harakat fi Lubnan, p. 104.

58. Michael Gilsenan, Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 206–208.

59. Abi-Sa‘b, Tarikh al-Kfur Kisrawan, p. 299.

60. “Translation of a Memorial from the Christians of the Mixed Districts to Khorsheed [Hurşid] Pasha, Wali of Saida [Sayda],” 20 May 1860, incl. in FO 78/1519, Moore to Bulwer, 23 May 1860.

61. BBA IRADE MM 864/3, Leff.12, 25 Ca 1277 [8 December 1860].

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

63. “Druze Chiefs letter to 5 Consuls” (translated), FO/78/1557, 3 July 1860.

64. Evidence of Khalil al-Basha (translated), PRONI D 1071/H/C/1/1/24, n.d.

65. BBA IRADE MM 864/3, Leff. 38, 24 Ra 1277 [10 October 1860]. See also Mishaqa, Al-Jawab, p. 241.

66. AE CPC/B, vol. 12, no. 27, 26 June 1860. See also Abkarius, Kitab nawadir al-zaman fi tarikh Jabal Lubnan, p. 32.

67. ABCFM, Thomson to Anderson, 23 May 1860.

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

69. PRONI D 1071/H/C/1/1/12, 26 May 1860.

70. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 27 May 1860.

71. Abu-Shaqra, Al-Harakat fi Lubnan, p. 113.

72. The battle of ‘Ayn Dara in 1711 was the last great occasion on which so many princes were killed, but ‘Ayn Dara was not a communal struggle but an unsuccessful challenge to the Shihabs by rival emirs and their followers. See Shidyaq, Kitab akhbar al-a‘yan, 2, pp. 314–315, and Salibi, The Modern History of Lebanon, pp. 8–9.

73. Abu-Shaqra, Al-Harakat if Lubnan, p. 119; Shahin Makarius, Hasr al-litham ‘an nakabat al-Sham (Beirut: Li ajl al-ma‘rifa, 1983 [1895]), p. 149; Fawaz, An Occasion for War, p. 62.

74. A point elaborated by René Girard in his study of the violence of persecution in the The Scapegoat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) and in his emphasis both on the “scapegoat,” on whom the guilt of murder is transferred and against whom violence is rationalized, and on the fact that the victim is physically unable to respond to the accusations made.

75. Abkarius, Kitab nawadir al-zaman fi tarikh Jabal Lubnan, p. 129.

76. Abu-Shaqra, Al-Harakat fi Lubnan, p. 113. See also the letter of P. Chenavas from Bikfayya (undated but before 21 June 1860), Lettres de Fourvière, 1860–1869, BO.

77. AE CPC/B, vol. 12, no. 17, Bentivoglio to Thouvenel, 3 June 1860.

78. Abu-Shaqra, Al-Harakat fi Lubnan, pp. 99–108.

79. Ibid., p. 115. See also the testimony of Christian survivors in BBA IRADE MM 864/3, Leff. 38, 24 Ra 1277 [10 October 1860].

80. [Farahyan?], “Nubdha mukhtasara fi hawadith Lubnan wa al-Sham,” p. 818. Of course, one could dispute the historical veracity of such an accusation and say that indeed the Druzes did not commit this particular crime, but the point to be made here is not so much that such an incident occurred as that people could in 1860 and after 1860 believe that such a killing could take place.

81. Abu-Shaqra, Al-Harakat if Lubnan, p. 115.

82. René Girard has written extensively on his theory of the “surrogate victim” in Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), in which he comments that “when a community succeeds in convincing itself that one alone of its number is responsible for the violent mimesis besetting it; when it is able to view this member as the single ‘polluted’ enemy who is contaminating the rest; and when the citizens are truly unanimous in this conviction—then the belief becomes a reality, for there will no longer exist elsewhere in the community a form of violence to be followed or opposed, which is to say, imitated and propagated. In destroying the surrogate victim, men believe that they are ridding themselves of some present ill. And indeed they are, for they are effectively doing away with those forms of violence that beguile the imagination and provoke emulation” (p. 81–82). In the case of Mount Lebanon, communal violence followed this pattern because the object of the violence was to utterly destroy the perceived ill in intercommunal society, namely coexistence; the terrible fear of coexistence gives rise to the desire to destroy completely that which potentially and actually is bringing harm on the community. Nirenberg has also written extensively on the relationship between fear of the plague in medieval imagination and the persecution of minorities, although his view is opposite to Girard’s as he rejects the theory that all violence aims at the “[literation of difference” and rather sees the role of violence on a more complex level—torn between what he calls the “two faces of sacred violence”: the ritualized violence that defines social boundaries of coexistence and emphasizes the compromises of the sacred and the profane as opposed to the cataclysmic violence which occurs only at particular junctures and within specific cultural and material contexts; Communities of Violence, pp. 228–243.

83. Fawaz, An Occasion for War, p. 164.

84. See the diary of Loanza Goulding Benton for more information; “The Diaries, Reminiscences and Letters of Loanza Goulding Benton,” unpublished manuscript kindly put at my disposal by Mrs. Marjorie Benton.

85. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 23 June 1860.

86. Evidence of Salim Shawish (translated), PRONI D 1071/H/C/1/1/21, n.d.

87. Makarius, Hasr al-litham ‘an nakabat al-Sham, p. 150.

88. BBA CL 140, Leff. 5, 25 Z 1276 [15 July 1860]. Chronic lateness in the payment of troops as well as a transfer of troops that had occurred just before the outbreak of hostilities compounded Hurşid’s predicament. He warned Istanbul that, “during these times, the transfer of troops of the Arabistan Army from their posts to Istanbul has given rise to rumors and lies, notably among the seditious and rebellious Kisrawanites whose hearts have been boldened by the fact that they have till now remained unpunished”; BBA BEO A.MKT.UM 4215-406/14, 29 L 1276 [21 May 1860].

89. BBA IRADE MM 872/1, Leffs. 31,33, 41, 21 S 1277 [7 September 1860].

90. BBA CL 140, Leff. 5, 25 Z 1276 [15 July 1860].

91. Ibid.

92. BBA CL 140, Leff. 7, 25 Z 1276 [15 July 1860].

93. BBA CL 140, Leff. 3, n.d.

94. AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 19 Z 1276 [9 July 1860].

95. See the copy of the peace treaty signed by Druze notables on 7 July 1860, AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, and BBA CL 140, Leff. 1, n.d. See Fawaz, An Occasion for War, pp. 229–230, for an English translation of the treaty signed by the Christian notables.

96. The Maronite Patriarch received numerous criticisms of the principle of mada ma mada. See AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, 16 June 1860.

97. See the peace treaty preserved in AB, drawer of Bulus Mas‘ad, dated 7 July 1860; BBA CL 140, Leff. 1, n.d.; Fawaz, An Occasion for War, pp. 229–230; and MS, 2, pp. 109–111.