the years in more ways than I can mention. Most of all, friends and many others in Beirut, too numerous to be mentioned by name, have taught me more than I can ever recount here. This book is dedicated to them.
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
Arabic words and names have been transliterated according to a simplified system based on that used in the International Journal of Middle East Studies. All diacritical marks have been omitted, except for the letter ayn. Names adopted by authors who write either in French or English have not been changed. Names of prominent personalities, as well as place names and Arabic words commonly found in Western literature, appear in their familiar forms.
Introduction
Of all the ideologies that have marked the modern era, none has left a deeper imprint on the Arab world than nationalism. No other ideology has aroused as much emotion, passion, and devotion, engendered as much hope and exhilaration, despair and bitterness, and no other ideology has inspired, enthralled, and animated as many people. All the major events that have marked the history of the Arab world in the twentieth century—the wars and the revolutions, the bitter rivalry and antagonism among Arab states, the infighting among ruling elites within the same state, down to the quarrels that have at times divided one same family—have been underpinned by nationalist ideals and sentiments and at times fiery rhetoric.
Yet, in spite all the clamor and fervor that nationalism has aroused in the Arab world, the history of nationalism in the region has been marked by inconsistency, fluidity, contingency, and multiplicity. Several strands of nationalism, running the full gamut from local, regional, linguistic, communal, religious, and state based to nation based, have surfaced since the beginning of the twentieth century, vying and clashing with each other at times or overlapping and combining at other times. The national dreams and grand schemes devised by the leaders and peoples in the region, however, dashed against recalcitrant and intractable realities and their promise of freedom, unity, and better futures, remained ever more elusive. As the high hopes raised by nationalism faded, some sank in disillusionment and apathy; others cast around for alternative ventures and ideals; still others, seemingly impervious to adverse conditions, strove to keep the illusion alive. National allegiances and agendas in the Arab Middle East have hence remained tangled and ambivalent, and they have shifted and fluctuated over the course of the century according to changing contexts and circumstances.
The historiography of nationalism in the Arab Middle East has witnessed similar shifts and turns. Like the nationalists of the region, the historians and scholars who have studied the evolution and import of nationalism in the Arab Middle East have been influenced by contemporary conditions, dominant views, ideologies, and paradigms. For the most part, scholars have focused their attention on Arab nationalism, which dominated political discourse and rhetoric in the postindependence period. Scholars hence tried to trace the genesis of Arab nationalism, to determine its basic tenets and features, and to follow its evolution and its gradual dissemination. They initially scrutinized and analyzed the texts produced by Arab nationalist writers and then wove grand narratives that retraced the march of Arab nationalism from its earliest formulation to its ultimate political ascendancy through a long chain of publicists, activists, heroes, and martyrs. Thereafter, as the glow of Arab nationalism seemed to fade, historians sought to reexamine and revise their earlier narratives. Arab nationalism still captured their attention, but they sought to devise more critical approaches to its rise and development, giving further consideration to the social profile of the nationalist activists and publicists, to the differing experiences of the core Arab countries, to the political and socio-economic transformations underlying the emergence of Arab nationalism, and to the nationalization of the masses.1
The focus of scholars and historians on Arab nationalism has generally overlooked other national and communal representations, allegiances, and identities. Admittedly, the perception of historians has been clouded by the hustle and bustle of political developments in the region. The early postindependence period was characterized by political instability, social mobilization and polarization, and sharp conflicts over the nature, and indeed the very existence, of Arab states and regimes. Local and state nationalisms were written off as inconsequential, illegitimate, or transient phenomena that would inevitably be wiped away by the spirit of the time—and as such little worthy of scholarly attention. Thereafter, the fading of Arab nationalism in the latter part of the twentieth century paradoxically coincided with the withering of most rival territorial strands of nationalisms in the region as the consolidation of authoritarian regimes dashed altogether earlier hopes of freedom and self-determination raised by nationalism.
This book attempts to fill in a gap in the literature on alternative local nationalist strands. It focuses on the early history of Lebanese nationalism, which has only been partly and indirectly addressed by studies on the history of Lebanon and the region. These have conventionally perceived and presented the establishment of a separate Lebanese entity as a special case in which a small Christian minority, the Maronites, living in compact territory, Mount Lebanon, gradually developed a nationalism of their own, an ideal that might be called “Lebanism.” Historians may disagree on the significance of this development, on the nature of Lebanese nationalism, and on its authenticity and legitimacy, but, by and large, most agree that a Lebanist ideal had crystallized in Mount Lebanon by the nineteenth century at the latest. The Maronite Lebanists, we are told, had by then developed clear nationalist inclination and were therefore striving to establish an independent state. Serious problems arose when, in the post—World War I period, they strove to include in their projected patria territories inhabited by a Muslim majority that refused to be incorporated in the separate Lebanon of the Maronites, dreaming instead to unite with their fellow Arab Muslim brothers within the framework of an independent Arab state. But in the end, due to the Maronite Lebanist determination, and French help, a Greater Lebanon fitting the ambitions of the former was established.
Recent studies on Lebanese history have provided new details and perspectives that have significantly enriched this traditional narrative.2 Nevertheless, basic assumptions have not changed, and the general impression one gets from recent books on Lebanese history in this period is still by and large the same. In the first two chapters of Zamir's book, covering the pre-1920 period, for instance, the Maronites are rarely mentioned without their traditional adjunct, Lebanist—that is, Maronite Lebanist. The establishment of a Lebanese state is portrayed as the fulfillment, for the Lebanese Christians, of “their centuries-old dream of a state of their own.”3 This aim, Zamir goes on, was achieved thanks to the efforts of the Maronite Patriarchate and the Administrative Council of the Lebanese mutasarrifiyya, who “steadfastly pursued their objective,” in accordance with the “genuine aspirations” of the Maronites.4 For his part, Salibi begins his account of the establishment of Lebanon by warning us that among the Arab subjects of the Ottoman Empire, by the end of World War I, a “national consciousness, to the extent that it existed, was blurred and confounded by traditional loyalties of other kinds which were often in conflict with one another.”5 Nevertheless, further on in the text, Salibi seems to single out the Maronites as the only exception to this pervasive confusion in national sentiment among the rest of the population of the Arab lands of the Ottoman Empire: “In Mount Lebanon and the adjacent parts of the old Vilayet of Beirut, the Maronites . . . were one party whose demands the French were prepared to listen to. Of all the Arabs, barring only individuals or politically experienced princely dynasties, they appeared to be the only people who knew precisely [my italics] what they wanted: in their case, as they put it, a ‘Greater Lebanon’ under their paramount control, separate, distinct and independent from the rest of Syria.”6
In the end, Salibi continues, the Maronites who had “willed it [Greater Lebanon] into existence were fully satisfied with what they got and wanted the country to remain forever exactly as it had been finally constituted.”7 Akarli's book is limited to the history of the mutasarrifyya period. Nevertheless, in the concluding parts of his book, which deals with the last years of this regime until the creation of the state of Lebanon, he asserts that a sense of “Lebanese-ness had emerged among the residents of the Mutasarrifiyya,"
