that, “unlike many other nationalisms on the rise in the non-Western world . . . was not an intellectual construct alone, but was rooted in fifty-odd years of political experience.”8 Finally, Trabulsi presents a more nuanced picture, warning his readers at the beginning of the book that “the reduction of identity of the Lebanese to one unique form of identity—their sectarian affiliation—is too simplistic and reductionist an approach to an extremely complex situation,” and that politicized religious sects should be seen as “historical products rather than historical essences.”9 He also acknowledges the existence of different national currents within the Maronite community in the crucial 1915-20 period, but his general history of modern Lebanon does not dwell much on the earlier development of these different national orientations.10
In sum, the general sense one gets from the literature on Lebanon is the existence of a well-articulated, widespread, and popular Lebanese nationalism, at the very least within the Maronite community, by the time of the establishment of the Lebanese state. Evidence of this fact can be adduced, for instance, from the seemingly unanimous claim by the Maronites for the establishment of a Greater Lebanon in the 1918–20 years. However, the emergence of nationalist claims in Mount Lebanon and some adjoining districts in the period preceding the establishment of the Lebanese state needs to be accounted for and elucidated. It needs to be historicized and contextualized with a view to determining the origin, nature, and salience of nationalist inclinations among the population of Mount Lebanon. Similarly, the conventional representation of the development of Lebanese nationalism as a linear and gradual process, dating back a few centuries or less, needs to be probed and assessed. This book addresses some of these issues and questions. It critically reassesses the existence, nature, and scope of a Lebanese national movement before the establishment of the Lebanese state in 1920. In doing so, it addresses two separate issues. On the one hand, it seeks to probe and revise previous assumptions and perspectives that have characterized the study of the early history of Lebanese nationalism; on the other hand, it engages the more general debate on the rise of nationalism in the Syrian provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
Nationalism is an especially complex and fraught concept that has generated countless and endless debates among historians and social scientists. Some aspects of these debates that are particularly relevant to this study have centered on the nature and origins of nationalism. In contrast to nationalists who claim that nations are ancient, natural, immutable, and enduring entities, most scholars today are agreed that nationalism is a relatively modern phenomenon that first emerged in western Europe by the end of the eighteenth century in conjunction with the rise of the modern state and the expansion of market relations, and then spread in successive waves, and in several modular forms, across the globe until the nation-state model became the accepted and mandatory international norm for the political organization of societies.11 Furthermore, recent scholarship has moved away from the notion that nations are the natural development of communities based on abstract criteria such as language or religion and tend to view nations as contingent historical constructs or in line with the seminal metaphor of Benedict Anderson as “imagined communities.” However, historians differ on the significance of premodern formations, memories, and solidarities for the development of nationalism. For some, modern nations are not totally rootless and arbitrary entities, and some elements of continuity can be discerned between premodern groups and modern nations as the latter derive some of their features and vigor from ancient solidarities, traditions, and myths.12 Others assert that modern nations are fundamentally different entities from premodern formations and that apparent continuities between both should not be seen as evidence of historical continuity and evolution as much as an illusive effect of nationalist ideology and history that “secures for the contested and contingent nation the false unity of a self-same, national subject evolving through time.”13 Hence, nationalists draw on previous histories, traditions, myths, and symbols, but they do so very selectively and thoroughly transform them, obscuring or disregarding parts of their past and traditions that might be at odds with their ideal visions of the nation, and constructing or reconstructing new myths and traditions to weave new, seamless, and epic histories tracing the evolution of their nation from the origins of time to the present in line with their nationalist objectives. In sum, “beneath a supposed continuity,” nationalism “involves not the reproduction of a given identity or tradition so much as the selection, reformulation and, if necessary, invention of symbols and narratives to suit present purposes.”14 This study concurs with this latter view; it gives special attention to the formulation of an idealized history by several Maronite authors since the mid-nineteenth century to support particular schemes and agendas, and it illustrates instances when myths and legendary historical episodes were interwoven into an emerging nationalist narrative to fit contemporary concerns as well as the different emphases of these histories in relation to the inclinations of their authors and their particular context.
Scholars of nationalism have also stressed the importance of socioeconomic, cultural, and political transformations brought about by capitalism and the emergence of the modern state for the rise and development of nationalism. Hence, the expansion of market relations and the consolidation of the modern state contribute to the breakdown of premodern social structures and the dissolution of ancient ties and values, and their reconstitution along new and more uniform lines favoring the appearance and spread of nationalism. Scholars have tended, however, to place different emphases on cultural, socioeconomic, and political transformations. This might be attributed partly to the fact that these scholars have tried to explain different moments and aspects of the nationalist dynamic, from the structural and historical factors that underlay the development of nationalism to the cultural reconstructions that have accompanied them.15 In any event, similar transformations underlay the emergence of nationalist representations and agendas in the Arab world in the nineteenth century following the incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the world economy and the vast movement of reforms initiated by the Ottoman government, which concurrently contributed to strengthen the authority of the central state, to integrate, albeit unevenly, the various provinces of the empire, and to bring more closely together the diverse communities of the Empire. All these transformations “prompted the transition from a social system that was not conductive to nationalism to one that was apposite to the ideology.”16 And indeed, the first stirrings of nationalism began to show in the Lebanese and Syrian provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century, as several parallel and overlapping strands of nationalist representations and agendas ranging from Ottomanism, to Arabism, to Syrianism, to Lebanism began to appear.
The appearance of fledging national representations and agendas did not, however, presage their subsequent development in an orderly, linear, and predictable fashion. As a matter of fact, nationalism in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire did not evolve in a neat, staged way, in line with contemporary developments in certain parts of eastern Europe and the Balkans, from a preliminary national revival phase during which historians, linguists, and other members of the intelligentsia formulated and propagated studies on the history, language, and culture of the prospective nation, to an intermediate phase that saw the formation of nationalist movements that started to organize and agitate, to a final stage during which the national movement succeeded in mobilizing the rest of the population and turned into a mass national movement.17 In the Syrian provinces of the Empire, no large-scale nationalist movements emerged before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I—if we take a national movement to mean one that develops a clear and coherent agenda and aims to mobilize the population in view of the establishment of its own particular state. Elements of nationalist thinking, identifications, and projects appeared every so often, but they never crystallized into coherent ideologies or movements. As argued in the following chapters, nationalist agendas for the most part remained articulated around the necessity of the reform of the Empire, not its dismemberment or demise, and the different strands of nationalism that emerged in the Empire remained closely connected to the fortunes of the various reform movements and the differing visions of reform that emerged in the Lebanese and Syrian provinces. Nationalist agendas aimed mostly at informing and complementing the general movement of reform implemented by the Ottoman state and at inflecting its development in a direction more in line with the aspirations and interests of local forces in the Arab
