Writing the History of Mount Lebanon

Church Historians and Maronite Identity

Mouannes Hojairi

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781649031266
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

A meticulous deconstruction of Maronite history writing and the ways in which Lebanese nationalist myths have been invented and perpetuated by historians As a frequently contested territory, Mount Lebanon has an equally contested history, one that is produced, shaped, and revised by as many players as those who molded the Lebanese state since its inception in 1920. The Lebanese Maronite Church has had more at stake in the process of history writing than any other group or institution. It is arguably one of the most influential institutions in Lebanese history and definitely the most influential institution in the country at the moment of the state's birth. Writing the History of Mount Lebanon traces the genealogy of Maronite identity by examining the historical traditions that shaped its contemporary manifestation. It explores the presence of a tradition in Maronite Church historiography that was maintained by the historians of the Church, whose claims and hypotheses ultimately defined the communal identity of the Maronites in Mount Lebanon and deeply influenced subsequent Lebanese national identity. Rooted in a reexamination of the existing literature and bringing evidence to bear on this particular aspect of history-writing in Lebanon, it shows how early Maronite ecclesiastic historiography's plea for inclusion as a part of Catholic orthodoxy was transformed and recast in subsequent centuries by lay and secular historians into a demand for exclusion and exclusivity, which in turn led to the rise of exclusivist political identities based on sectarian belonging in Mount Lebanon.Ultimately, Mouannes Hojairi shows how history-writing is one of the main instruments in generating and perpetuating nationalist ideologies and how historians are central agents of nationality.

1

Lebanon, the Mountain Refuge

While reexamining the modern concept of the nation, Anthony Smith underlines the main prerequisites and components of the ideal nation, defined as a form of human association:

In so far as the nation is a form that is never finally achieved, but is always being developed, its features are the outcome of incremental cultural, social and political processes. Typically, these processes involve the following … Territorialization—the possession of particular historic lands, or ancestral homelands, within recognized borders, and the development of collective attachments to them.¹

Despite the fact that his theories on nationalism represent the opposite end of the spectrum, Hans Kohn similarly writes, “The most important outward factor in the formation of nationalities is a common territory.”² Such is the importance of territory in the formation of national identity according to varying theories of nationalism.

As is often the case, the nature of the terrain and the shape and outline of the landscape are significant in shaping the identity of a community and are essential components of the image that the nation creates for itself. As the main geographic feature of the land and in fact the element that constitutes most of the national landmass, Mount Lebanon is one of the foremost symbols if not the embodiment of Lebanese nationalism. Within the boundaries of the nation-state, the mountain range is such an imposing and dominant physical characteristic of the terrain that various districts of the country are associated with specific sections and mountain peaks of the Mount Lebanon range, such as Jabal Kisrawan, Jabal al-Shuf, and Jabal ‘Amil.

In retracing the origins of the idea that Mount Lebanon was a home for a community of Christians who were distinct and isolated from their surrounding environment, one finds several roots and numerous advocates for the notion of Lebanon, the Mountain Refuge.³ As Ussama Makdisi states, “Perceived by European powers as a mountain refuge in which they had a historical, religious, and increasingly strategic stake, nineteenth century Mount Lebanon became the location of a host of competing armies and ideologies.”⁴ The idea that the mountainous terrain acted as a shield or a fortress that guarded the Maronites from hostile, alien, and oppressive Muslim surroundings features in the works of countless Maronite clergymen and in many works that capitalize on the notion of insularity. This idea is present in the histories of clergymen such as Butrus Daw in his 1972 Tarikh al-Mawarina al-dini wa-l-siyasi wa-l-hadari (The Religious, Political, and Civilizational History of the Maronites) as well as in the works of secular Lebanese historians such as Yusuf al-Sawda in his 1924 Fi sabil Lubnan. One of the earliest and staunchest advocates of the notion was the Maronite bishop Nicolas Murad (1796–1862).⁵ The fact that he died more than one hundred years before the publication of Daw’s Tarikh al-Mawarina al-dini wa-l-siyyasi wa-l-hadari demonstrates the resilience of the idea over the passage of time.

The notion of the Mountain Refuge is not, however, restricted to the works of the Maronite clergy and Lebanese historians; it is also found in the works of secular Orientalists as well as Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries who wrote about the region.⁶ Those missionaries, in certain cases, were intimately involved in the workings of the Maronite Church, and thus the works that they produced complemented and sometimes overlapped with those produced by their Maronite counterparts.⁷

This complicated web of interaction and influence raises numerous questions concerning the origin of the Mountain Refuge idea as well as the motives of its originators. We need to look back at some of the earliest Maronite historiographies, such as Patriarch Istifan al-Duwayhi in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, to find the first traces of the idea that Mount Lebanon acted as a shield or refuge. The events that preceded this era cast a shadow on the writings of al-Duwayhi. The Roman Catholic Church had failed in its reconciliation attempts with the Eastern Orthodox Church and was pushing for the further integration of the Maronite Church of Lebanon within the realm of Catholicism and under the influence of the pope. The “Maronite College” in Rome had already been established.⁸ Inaugurated by Pope Gregory in 1584, its missionary activity was already in full swing in Mount Lebanon. This atmosphere and the interaction it entailed brought forth the need to propagate ideas of insularity from the Muslim and Orthodox Christian surroundings. Thus, a physical barrier that would precede and produce a psychological one had to be found; Mount Lebanon was portrayed as a shield as well as an island of Western Christendom in a sea of Islam and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. This notion is also to be found in the writings of European travelers as well as the more recent histories of the Maronite Church and of Mount Lebanon.⁹

While advancing the idea of insularity, the advocates of the Mountain Refuge theory had to deal with contradictory facts on the ground. The claim of constant oppression had to be substantiated, and proof needed to be found or fabricated in order to demonstrate the state of insularity of the Maronite community. Numerous arguments emerged to validate the claims of the Orientalists, the missionaries, and the Maronite clergy; all had to face substantial obstacles. Paramount among those obstacles was the presence of the Druze community in Mount Lebanon in large numbers, living side by side with the Maronites.¹⁰ The proximity and similarity in custom and appearance ran against the notion of insularity. The relatively long and peaceful coexistence of the two religious communities and the ties they both maintained with the centers of power in the region indicated a reality that was contrary to any claims of insularity, hostility, or isolation of the inhabitants of Mount Lebanon.

Another main issue that had to be dealt with in order to validate the Mountain Refuge theory was the presence of a large Shi‘a community in the northern part of Mount Lebanon, in proximity to the most ancient and most important Maronite religious centers and sites. This situation was rendered more significant by the fact that Shi‘a communities, prior to the fourteenth century, occupied much of what was to be considered later the core of Maronite Lebanon.¹¹

The birth and early development of the Maronite Church also play a significant role in directing the historical writings and shaping the arguments of those who formulated and propagated the Mountain Refuge theory. The concern over the heretical teachings of the fathers of the Maronite Church constitutes a point of disagreement among the different advocates of the theory and plays a significant role in determining the motives, influence, and agency of the parties involved.

What is most significant about the theory of the Mountain Refuge is the frequency of its occurrence in the history books and chronicles and its widespread use by Lebanese nationalist writers.¹² Examining the need for such a notion casts light on the agendas of both those who use the idea and also those who brought it into existence. Their motives are revealed in the different ways each party took up and advanced the Mountain Refuge argument. The way every obstacle to the theory was dismantled by different parties reveals much about the interaction between these parties and the influence they exerted on one another.

In documenting the events and upheavals that the community went through during different phases of its history, differences emerge among Church historians when identifying the Maronites and the territory they occupied. I will next address how the notion of insularity or the lack thereof was advanced, how the geography of the land was represented in the different histories of Maronite clergymen, and what changed in the nature and perception of the interaction between the community and its non-Maronite surroundings from the time of Istifan al-Duwayhi (1630–1704) through the time of Nicolas Murad (1796–1862) and up to our current period.

Maronite Church Historians: Origins and Development of Clerical Historiography

Discussing the historiography of Istifan al-Duwayhi, Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi states:

Duwayhi was the first Maronite to attempt a complete history of his people. A man of keen intelligence and a graduate of the Maronite College of Rome, he was well-fitted by natural ability and training to deal with the semi-legendary fragments of historical information which lay in the various monasteries of Lebanon.¹³

Such a description of the man’s abilities and education is significant in this case, because the exact abilities mentioned by Salibi—dealing with semilegendary fragments of information and discerning between accurate historical facts and popular fiction—are the ones that govern the historiography of al-Duwayhi. The tension apparent in his writings often resulted from the different sources he relied on, sources that ranged from books by medieval historians like al-Tabari and Ibn al-‘Amid to the fifteenth-century popular folk epic of Ibn al-Qila‘i. The insertion of elements from folk epics and popular myths in al-Duwayhi’s works alongside the information from preceding historians left a mark not only on his own production but also on that of Maronite historians who followed in his footsteps. Thus, one can trace back the early roots of a tradition in historiography with constant and repeated ideas, one of which is that of Mount Lebanon as a Mountain Refuge; the idea is there in al-Duwayhi’s histories even if he never took it as far as the historians who came after him did.

Al-Duwayhi lived at a time when sectarian conflict was not a part of political life in Mount Lebanon, and he wrote his history long before the emergence of nationalism, in a period when the Ottoman Empire was still relatively safe from foreign intervention. Any political project behind the writings of al-Duwayhi has to be understood in light of these facts. He was surely committed to proving and defending the unbroken orthodoxy of the Maronite Church, and he did include Ibn al-Qila‘i as a source and thus subscribed to Ibn al-Qila‘i’s notions of the insularity of Mount Lebanon and of its purity from foreign influence, but that is as far as al-Duwayhi took these ideas.

In the centuries to come these ideas were redeployed by subsequent historians who had different political projects. Historians like Maronite bishop Nicolas Murad, writing in the 1840s at the height of sectarian tension, had a completely different purpose and project in mind when he employed the same notions that al-Duwayhi did. Yusuf al-Dibs, writing after the civil war of 1860, when sectarian politics dominated Mount Lebanon and when foreign military intervention had occurred, held different views, and his history carried a different purpose.

And certainly, Christian nationalist Lebanese historians and intellectuals writing in the twentieth century redeployed these same notions of purity and insularity for nationalistic reasons that were the product of their own day and age. But the one thing that links all these historians together is the fact that they use al-Duwayhi as the main source, the authority on the history of Mount Lebanon, and they deploy the notions he inherited from Ibn al-Qila‘i for whatever purposes their histories hold.

Ibn al-Qila‘i (1450–1516) himself was a Maronite priest who lived in the last days of the Mamluk sultanate and received his education in Rome from 1470 until his return to Mount Lebanon in 1493. He lived at a time when integration with the Roman Catholic Church was underway and when the Jacobite Church in Syria still posed a threat to the Maronite clergy. He composed what is referred to as zajaliya, a poem in the vernacular Arabic, which celebrated the heroics of the Maronites in defending their freedom and gave an account of the tragedies they suffered when they failed to unite around their church. Through Istifan al-Duwayhi, this zajaliya would be known to subsequent generations, since he used it as a primary source on the history of the Maronites.

Born in the village of Ihdin in Jibbat Bsharri in 1629, Istifan al-Duwayhi was enrolled in the Maronite College of Rome between 1641 and 1655 when he graduated and was selected as a missionary for the College of Propaganda. After several years spent between Mount Lebanon, Aleppo, and Cyprus, preaching and working mostly in education, in 1670 the Maronite bishops and notables elected Istifan al-Duwayhi as Maronite patriarch of Antioch, and he received the confirmation of Pope Clement X in 1672.¹⁴

The three main histories written by al-Duwayhi are Tarikh al-ta’ifa al-maruniya, which is a history of the Maronite Church and the Maronite community; Silsilat batarikat al-ta’ifa al-maruniya (A Chronology of Maronite Patriarchs); and Tarikh al-azmina (History of Times), a general chronicle of the period from the rise of Islam to al-Duwayhi’s own time.¹⁵ Although Tarikh al-azmina is a general chronicle narrating events year by year and not specifically focusing on the Maronite community, it is of the utmost importance as a source of information on the Maronites and on Mount Lebanon, since no work of its kind had dealt with the community and its lands with the attention given by al-Duwayhi. In Tarikh al-azmina, al-Duwayhi does not comment on events but rather states them in chronological order; it is from his selection of which events to narrate and from what sources that one can grasp his views on the matters at hand.

As someone who lived in Jibbat Bsharri at a time when the Shi‘a Hamade clan held sway over it, it would have been difficult for Istifan al-Duwayhi to endorse or advocate the idea that Mount Lebanon was a refuge for the Maronites from their hostile Muslim surroundings, especially since he himself was forced to leave the patriarchal seat at Qannubin because of the hardship he endured.¹⁶ One does find elements of the notion of the refuge when al-Duwayhi chronicles the origin of the Maronite community; he comments on the founding fathers of the Maronite Church in their place of origin at the monastery of Mar Marun in the valley of the Orontes River and how there came to be a Maronite community in Mount Lebanon. These events are placed within the context of inter-Christian religious violence between adherents of orthodoxy and heretics. Al-Duwayhi defends the orthodoxy of the Maronites while claiming that they took refuge in Mount Lebanon to shelter themselves from the oppression of the heterodox Christian sects that were present in the area.¹⁷ The “Other” from whom Mount Lebanon was supposed to shelter the Maronites was not the Muslim, according to al-Duwayhi; rather, a Christian heterodox Other sought to corrupt the unbroken orthodoxy of the Maronite community. Thus, while narrating events relating to Mount Lebanon and specifically to Jibbat Bsharri, al-Duwayhi—who was relying on the histories of al-Tabari and Ibn al-‘Amid—did not portray a state of isolation, insularity, sovereignty, or even hostility toward the surrounding region. Mount Lebanon is rather a part of the whole, its status and its fate no different from other constituencies in Bilad al-Sham.

Al-Duwayhi does, however, include in his chronicle sections of Jibra’il Ibn al-Qila‘i’s folk e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Lebanon, the Mountain Refuge
• 2. The Mardaites: The Church-Adopted Myth of Origin
• 3. Integration into Roman Catholicism: The Quest for Orthodoxy
• 4. Moments of Change in History and Historiography
• 5. The Phoenician Hypothesis: Secular Historiography and Greater Lebanon’s Pre-Christian Past
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index