Using the Past

Far from being passive objects of the search for a political solution, the local elites deftly took advantage of imperial concern to cling to what they considered their birthright: property, prestige, and a monopoly on politics. As they outmaneuvered one another, they gave credence to the narratives reverberating in London, Paris, and Istanbul. Both Druze and Maronite elites found that their desire for power, and their equally tenacious conviction that only one of them deserved to wield it, could best be served by representing themselves as the guardians of tradition and social order and their rivals as the instigators of perennial perfidy. Druze notables declared themselves at once to be ardent Muslims loyal to the Sultan and faithful allies of Great Britain.^[26] Maronite leaders proclaimed that they were, in fact, the dutiful supporters of the House of Osman at the same time as they appealed to France in the name of Christian solidarity.^[27] Both laid claim to the mantle of loyalty, and both deployed any number of languages of legitimacy, particularly those of faith and loyalty, to bolster their respective causes.

Following the fighting at Dayr al-Qamar in 1841, the Maronite Patriarch “reminded” the Sublime Porte that Bashir Shihab and the Christians of Mount Lebanon had always been loyal to the Ottoman state and that it was the Druzes who had betrayed the Sultan and sided with the Egyptians; it was only when the Druzes realized that Ibrahim Pasha’s army was doomed that they switched sides, but in Dayr al-Qamar their true colors were revealed.^[28] For his part, the Druze shaykh Khattar al-‘Imad submitted a petition to the Ottoman government in which he outlined his understanding of the same events. The Druze leader framed his discussion as an epic battle between “the sword of Islam,” which he claimed the Druzes wielded with great pride on behalf of the Sublime Sultanate, and the enemies of Islam, represented by the European-supported Maronites. He stated that “abandoning the law of Islam, the heretics intended to weaken Islam and [replace it] with the ways of the infidels, and to hand over the country to the brigands.” The prospect of such corruption, of heresy replacing faith, “depressed our souls and filled our hearts with disgust,” and so the battle commenced between the Druzes and the ahali of Dayr al-Qamar.^[29]

What matters here is not the truth of these claims but their underlying similarity and their mutual commitment to and dependence on a hierarchical social order to explain events. ‘Imad’s citing of categorical religious difference should not obscure his awareness of an essentially social struggle. He freely admitted that the conflict began when the Druze muqata‘jis attempted to collect the miri tax from the recalcitrant villagers, whom he contemptuously described as “all along being our lowly and abject [Christian] subjects.” And he wondered, given this history, “in what conceivable manner could such behaviour from wretched villagers be endured.”^[30] It was not the Christianity of the villagers that worried him; it was their inversion of social order at the behest of the Shihab emirs and foreign agents.

‘Imad’s concern and his repeated references to foreign agents indicated that the rituals of old-regime politics were now being played on a new stage—“a theatre of intrigue,” as an American missionary put it—erected after 1840.^[31] The flurry of appeals to different powers marked the attempt by the local elites to appreciate and adjust to its contours. The tempo of politics had changed; so too had its stakes. In an era of progressive time, the elites were terrified of being outmaneuvered and left behind in an avowedly modern world. Hospitality was extended to foreigners—to consuls, to merchants, and to missionaries—not simply as a courtesy to strangers from distant lands but as an imperative for survival. Both Druze and Maronite leaders realized that European power could be profitably and decisively turned to their own advantage. They had seen Ibrahim Pasha’s modern army destroy several Ottoman armies, only to be crushed by still greater and more modern European forces.^[32] They were well aware that European ships had liberated Syria; European agents had supplied an estimated forty thousand muskets to the region; and European (and American) missionaries provided much-sought-after modern medicine.^[33] Trade opportunities also increased, and notables provided land and labor for newly established silk factories. In return, Europeans and Americans showered both groups with such attention that it deluded them into “thinking that they were something important in this world,” in the words of the French consul Bourée.^[34] They were given vistas into a much wider world and the illusion that they were major players in it.

Above all, however, the local elites knew that in the post-Tanzimat world this power was to be had only along sectarian lines. The objective of Druze and Maronite elites was not to confirm European or Ottoman attitudes toward them but to manipulate the concern for a reestablishment of order by presenting themselves as the only genuine interlocutors of the so-called primordial sectarian communities that inhabited Mount Lebanon. They sought to transform their religious communities into political communities and to harness invented traditions to their respective causes. The construction of a political sectarian identity did not come naturally; it entailed petitions, meetings, and the incessant application of moral as well as physical pressure by the leaders in each community to overcome local rivalries, regional differences, and family loyalties.^[35] Maronite and Druze elites each strove to present a unified front to the Ottoman state and the European powers, effectively ignoring a long history of nonsectarian leadership.^[36] The Maronite Patriarch was well aware of the difficulty of marshaling the Maronites into an organized political community, especially when an Ottoman commissioner, Selim Bey, was sent to Mount Lebanon in 1842 to determine whether the local population was in favor of direct Ottoman administration. The Patriarch made it clear that “we will not accept, do not desire and will not be content” with any ruler except a Christian Shihab. Although he insisted that such rule over Lebanon followed “our custom and ancient regulations,” the Patriarch also requested a delay in the fact-finding mission. He admitted that he needed time to gather the respectable faces (awjuh) of the people before the opinions of the ahali were ascertained. The Patriarch conceded that several Christian notables had already submitted or were about to submit petitions that opposed the return of a Shihab ruler. These, he told Selim Bey, must be ignored; only a Shihab emir must be in overall command. The other shaykhs should be confirmed in their traditional prerogatives but not as rulers over Mount Lebanon.^[37]

The process of sectarianizing identity was immensely complex. New sectarian fears and possibilities still had to contend with old-regime solidarities and geographies. Knowledge in prereform society had always been deployed in the service of power, but it had been hegemonic knowledge. The secular division between the söz sahibleri and the ahali, the rule of a Shihab emir, the respect for social rank, and the total obedience to the Sultan were the accepted bases of nonsectarian politics. They accommodated religious and regional differences and gave expression to, as well as found expression in, a genealogical geography of Mount Lebanon. For a sectarian politics to cohere, for it to become hegemonic in a Gramscian sense, it would have to become an expression of everyday life; it would have to stamp itself indelibly on geography and history. In this task, as with so much else in this era of reform, the interplay between local and foreign played an immeasurable role.