Download PDF | Stefan Winter - The Shiites of Lebanon under Ottoman Rule, 1516-1788-Cambridge University Press (2010).
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The Shiites of Lebanon under Ottoman Rule, 1516–1788 The Shiites of Lebanon under Ottoman Rule, 1516–1788 provides a new perspective on the previously ignored history of the Shiites as a constituent of Lebanese society. Winter presents a history of the community before the nineteenth century, based primarily on unpublished Ottoman Turkish documents. From these, he shows how local Shiites were well integrated in the Ottoman system of rule, and that Lebanon as an autonomous entity only developed in the course of the eighteenth century through the marginalization and then violent elimination of the indigenous Shiite leaderships by an increasingly powerful Druze– Maronite emirate. As such the book recovers the Ottoman-era history of a group which has always been neglected in chronicle-based works, and, in doing so, fundamentally calls into question the historic place within ‘Lebanon’ of what has today become the country’s largest and most activist sectarian community.
Stefan Winter is Professeur régulier at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM). His previous publications have included a number of articles for various journals including Oriente Moderno and the Journal of Near Eastern Studies.
Introduction
This book is a history of the Shiite community of what is today Lebanon in the early modern period. It traces the rise and fall of the Hamadas, Harfushes and other Shiite notable families as mukataacıs, agents invested by the Ottoman state to tax and police the rural highland districts of Tripoli, Damascus and Sidon that were not otherwise amenable to government control. Their co-optation by the authorities of the nominally Sunni empire beginning in the sixteenth century, and their displacement through other sectarian groups by the late eighteenth century, raise a number of important questions about Shiism in both Ottoman and Lebanese history. From the standpoint of Ottoman Islamic law, Shiites were seen as Rafızis or heretics.
The consolidation of imperial rule and the systematization of both shari‘a and imperial administrative (kanun) jurisprudence in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the revolt by heterodox Kızılbaş tribesmen in Anatolia against this same process of state centralization, resulted in a legal position on Shiism that legitimized the killing of sectarians as Rafızis or Kızılbaş and thereby provided an official basis for the proscription of non-Sunni enemies both within and outside the Empire. The Ottoman chancery would in fact apply this vocabulary against refractory Shiites in Lebanon and elsewhere into the nineteenth century, denouncing them as ‘accursed Kızılbaş whose elimination is a religious duty’ whenever they ran foul of the state authorities. The campaigns against Anatolian and other ‘Kızılbaş’ and the persecution of individual scholars and deviant sufis are well documented and provide a dramatic, but essentially one-sided picture of heterodoxy in the Ottoman Empire. The following attempts to complement and nuance this picture with a more longterm, socio-political examination of a Shiite community under Ottoman rule.
Historians of the state’s central institutions have tended to ignore the day-to-day experience of Ottoman administrative practice – especially in the Arab provinces which are often apposed to the so-called ‘core provinces’ of the Empire. Yet the Shi‘a of Lebanon, abundantly cited not only in state archival sources but also in a wealth of local chronicles and foreign reports, was probably the best documented of any heterodox population in Ottoman history.
The fact that these Shiites, in particular their tribal leaderships, could be integrated into the structures of Ottoman provincial government, but became progressively marginalized in the competition with other feudal lords in an era of imperial administrative reforms, suggests that long-term processes of state rationalization and modernization were more central to the fate of heterodox minorities in the Ottoman Empire than timeless religious or legal ideologies. If tax farming, tribal control and administrative reform set the general parameters of the Shiites’ range of action under Ottoman rule, how families such as the Hamadas and Harfushes managed to establish themselves and exercise authority within these parameters must ultimately be explained in terms of local society and politics.
The principal aim of this study is therefore to resituate the Shiites with respect to the emerging polity of Lebanon. Nationalist historians have traditionally traced Lebanon’s origins back to the ‘Druze emirate’, the feudal rule of the Ma‘n and Shihabi families in the province of Sidon which gradually also encompassed the Maronite community in Tripoli and which has therefore stood as a model of inter-confessional cooperation in the face of Ottoman Turkish tyranny. This romanticized vision of the country’s roots, however, ignores the fact that the expansion and consolidation of the Druze emirs’ power by the end of the eighteenth century occurred primarily at the expense of the region’s Shiite feudatories; these have in effect been written out of the national narrative. The problem this study attempts to address is thus not one of simply reinserting a community that has always been a little under-represented into the overall story of Lebanese nationhood, but of using its specific evolution to question the very foundations on which this story has been written.
Sources
The basic premise of this book is that the conventional sources for the history of ‘Lebanon’ in the Ottoman period (for the most part Maronite narrative chronicles and nineteenth-century positivist histories that project Lebanese autonomy back into earlier times) inherently served to legitimize the rule of Druze feudal lords and must therefore be supplemented with other sources in order to gain a more complete understanding of the local realities of Ottoman rule. The principal source used in the following study are Ottoman administrative documents pertaining to the provinces of Syria (Tripoli, Damascus, Sidon) between the late sixteenth and the late eighteenth century. These records can be divided into three broad categories: executive, fiscal and judicial. The first consists of extraordinary decrees (sing. hüküm) issued by the Sublime Porte to the provincial authorities in reaction to specific petitions or reports of fiscal abuse, banditry or rebellion.
The largest corpus of these decrees is that comprised in the Mühimme Defterleri (MD; ‘registers of important state affairs’) at the Başbakanlık Archives in Istanbul, which on account of the insight they afford into both local conditions in the provinces and the central government’s response are among the best known and most popular Ottoman archival materials. Several collections of selected Mühimme documents pertaining to heterodox Shiism in the Empire and to the Ottoman administration of Syria have already been edited or translated.1 However, as the choice of documents that were included or not included in these collections already betrays a certain editorial position (and as the translations are not always entirely correct), we have referred only to the original registers for this study.
A unique Mühimme register found to contain the earliest known Ottoman reference to the Hamadas (see chapter 3) was consulted at the Sächsische Landesbibliothek in Dresden. Further collections of executive decrees, most notably the Cevdet and Ali Emiri classifications, were researched using the Başbakanlık’s printed and computer catalogues; the extraordinarily rich series of Şikayet Defterleri (ŞD; ‘complaints registers’) remains uncatalogued and only a small sample has been used here.
Individual decrees in Ottoman Turkish are also interspersed between the Arabic-language proceedings of the Islamic court in Tripoli or Sidon (see below). Interestingly, none of these match exactly the orders copied in the imperial chancery registers. While executive decrees can provide important and sometimes colourful detail on salient political events, the fiscal records preserved by the accountancy division (Maliyeden Müdevver; MM) offer a more structural, long-term picture of revenue raising in the provinces. Ottoman tax cadastres (Tahrir Defterleri; TD), which exist mainly for the sixteenth century, have been taken in the past as comprehensive economic and demographic statistics; both types of document, however, are closely tied to specific revenue sources and in fact provide little usable information on actual government or local society. Individual documents and registers from these collections have been used here only when they make explicit reference to villages or persons relevant to the Shi‘a.
The third category of documents to be used are shari‘a court records from the provincial capitals Tripoli and Sidon. Court documents constitute one of the premier sources for Ottoman social history and have proved particularly useful for recovering individual stories of peasants, women, non-Muslims and other reputedly voiceless minorities. Their value for our purposes lies in their presentation not of contingent government directives or of anonymous fiscal structures, but of regular, institutionalized contacts and negotiations between local Shiite notables and the Ottoman state. Copies of Tripoli’s court records, which are extant from 1666 onward, are preserved at the Lebanese University as well as by the Municipality of Tripoli and have been used in numerous studies of the province’s history in the Ottoman period.2 The following draws especially on iltizam (tax concession) contracts awarded to the Hamada family in Mt Lebanon as well as on sales deeds, lawsuits and other notarial documents. For the province of Sidon, a single original register from 1699–1703 as well as a fragment from 1763, only recently discovered and salvaged by Talal Majdhub,3 were consulted at the city’s Sunni Shari‘a Court.
This material does not appear to have been used elsewhere and still awaits a thorough examination. Several single documents from the court registers of Damascus and Hama, preserved at the Centre for Historic Documents in Damascus, have also been used where they pertain to the Lebanese Shiites. Ottoman administrative documents of course present an ideal, normative picture of the state’s government and are not inherently more ‘objective’ than the local narrative chronicles. Every effort has therefore been made to understand both types of text in the historical context in which they were written and to cross and compare them with other available sources, including a number of imperial histories, Ottoman religious treatises, oriental and European travel accounts, and published Maronite Church documents. In particular, this study draws heavily on French consular reports sent from Tripoli and Sidon in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, which despite France’s stated interest in protecting the Maronite Catholic community provide detailed and surprisingly equitable appreciations of different aspects of local society. Selections from this correspondence were published in the 1970s (see chapter 5); the documents used in the present work were researched at the Archives Nationales (Affaires Étrangères; AE) in Paris.
This study cannot pretend to have exhausted all the possible sources on Lebanon’s Shiites in the Ottoman period; future ones may profit especially from British or other European consular correspondence and Vatican and Roman Catholic missionary sources, neither of which we were able to examine in the scope of the present work. A key source which has not been used here but which likely contains numerous references to Shiite feudal lords are the private archives of Maronite churches or monasteries preserved both in Lebanon and abroad. A number of such documents are looked at in Sa‘dun Hamada’s recent contribution to the History of the Shi‘a in Lebanon; 4 many more may still come to light in private collections. If the present work has focused especially on previously untapped archival sources, it is hoped that this will also significantly help widen the documentary basis for future discussion and debate on the subject.
Argument This book comprises six chapters. The first examines the Ottoman state’s ‘policy’ on Shiism, contrasting the legal position defined by jurists such as Ebu’s-Suud Efendi with the pragmatism of Ottoman rule in Shiite-inhabited regions. The second looks at the Ottoman administration of western Syria beginning in the sixteenth century, and shows that Shiite notables such as the Harfush emirs of Baalbek were among the most sought-after local intermediaries of the state. Chapter 3 traces the rise of the Hamadas, who exercised control over multiple tax farms in the rural hinterland of Tripoli in the seventeenth century through a complex matrix of rapports with both the Ottoman state authorities and the local non-Shiite communities. The fourth chapter shows how this system began to break down in the social and political crisis that engulfed the Empire at the end of the seventeenth century, leading to an unprecedented punitive campaign against the Hamadas and the Harfushes and leaving them increasingly dependent on the Druze emirs of Sidon and on their own Maronite subjects.
Chapter 5 turns the focus on the Shiite community of Jabal ‘Amil, as they struggle to maintain their autonomy visà-vis the burgeoning Shihabi emirate in the new context of decentralized rule in the eighteenth century. The final chapter returns to the Hamadas and Harfushes, the former being eliminated by the Shihabi-Maronite condominium and the latter being reduced to a mere subsidiary of what by the end of the eighteenth century has indeed taken on the form of a single pan-Lebanese feudal regime.
The main arguments of this study can be summarized as follows: that the Ottoman state, contrary to conventional assumptions, was ideologically too heterogeneous and politically too pragmatic to follow an actual policy against Shiism; that instances of persecution by state authorities must be seen in their specific temporal and political context rather than assumed to be part of a universal antiShiite impulse; that the designation of individual Druze or Shiite tribal leaders in the Syrian coastal highlands as ‘emirs’ must be seen in the context of sixteenthcentury imperial reforms, primarily the monetarization of the provincial administration, rather than as an expression of timeless Lebanese particularism; that the sectarian, tribal and mercenary character of certain Shiites not only posed no obstacle, but virtually recommended them as government tax farmers over the local population; that the very unfavourable picture of Shiites in contemporary historiography and popular lore reflects not an objective truth, but derives in part from their status as taxlords over the central institutions of the Maronite Church and their embroilment in secular conflicts within the powerful Lebanese Order of monks; that French sponsorship of the Maronite Church and a rising Maronite landed elite in the eighteenth century, allied with the Druze ‘princes’ of southern Lebanon, caused the more traditional Shiite leaderships to become less viable as state tax agents; that Ottoman social engineering measures, in particular a major tribal settlement initiative around the turn of the eighteenth century, further reduced the autonomy once enjoyed by Shiite feudalists; and that the elimination of the Shiite tax concessionaries in the north and the subjugation of those in the south and the Bekaa Valley under the Druze emirate in the late eighteenth century can hardly be made the starting moment of a single, pan-confessional Lebanese national identity in the modern period.
The story of the Shiites of Lebanon under Ottoman rule is not one of essential religious or national characteristics but on the contrary one of co-optation, social process, political struggle, reform and adaptation over nearly three centuries of profound change throughout the region. It challenges the linear view that the expansion of Shihabi-Maronite rule over what would only be defined retrospectively as ‘Lebanon’somehow corresponded to the aspirations of the victims of this expansion, and it suggests, in taking not only the documents but also the institutions and practices of Ottoman government seriously, a new reading of Lebanese history per se. The Shiites form the largest and in many ways the most activist sectarian community in Lebanon today, yet their rapport with the myths and emblems of Lebanese nationhood has always been problematic. Serious reflection on modern-day questions of identity, sovereignty, political confessionalism or communitarianism in Lebanon cannot begin without also coming to terms more seriously with the Shiites’ place in this history.
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