The Lebanese Identity

Bibliographic Data

ID10073218
AuthorsKamal S Salibi (corresponding author)
Year1971
Volume6
Issue1
Pages76-86
Publication date1971-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Contemporary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-0094 • E-ISSN: 1461-7250
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/002200947100600104
OpenAlexW2041032778
LanguageEN
Citations received7

The earliest evidence of a sense of Lebanese identity is to be found in the writings of some Lebanese historians of the first half of the nineteenth century. By that time the Shihabs, a Sunnite Moslem family from the southern Anti-Lebanon who had inherited the emirate over the Druzes and Christians of the southern Lebanon in 1697, and had become converted to Christianity according to the Maronite (Uniate Catholic) rite in the second half of the eighteenth century, had succeeded in extending their sway, de facto, over the whole of Mount Lebanon, from the mainly Christian hinterland of Tripoli in the north to the Druze-Christian hinterland of Sidon in the south. A Lebanese entity had thus emerged, separate and distinct from the rest of Syria, bringing the Maronites and Druzes of the country, along with its other Christian and Moslem sects, under one government. The emirate inherited and expanded by the Shihabs had a long history behind it. It had developed in earlier Ottoman times out of feudal privileges enjoyed by the Druze chieftains of the southern Lebanon since the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the Mamluk rulers of Egypt and Syria, to secure the loyalty of the warlike Druzes, recognized hereditary feudal tenure in the Druze mountain (feudalism in the Islamic states was not, as a rule, hereditary). The Ottomans, who conquered Syria from the Mamluks in I5I6, permitted the Druze chieftains to maintain their privileges under a paramount emir (first recognized in 1591) who was charged with the maintenance of order, the dispensation of justice, and the collection and remittance of the revenue. This gave the southern Lebanon a relative security; and, in time, Christians (mainly Maronites) from the northern Lebanon came to settle there under the protection of the Druze emirs. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the emirate of the southern Lebanon, while it continued to enjoy its political privileges, became further differentiated from its surroundings as a result of

Aesthetics · Genealogy · Identity (music · Political science · History · Islamic Studies and History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Middle East Politics and Society · Philosophy

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