The Ottoman Cities of Lebanon

Historical Legacy and Identity in the Modern Middle East

James A. Reilly

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784535544
• eBook ISBN: 9781786720368
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Whether defined as essentially 'Turkish', and therefore alien to the Lebanese experience, or remembered in its final years as a tyrannical and brutal dictatorship, the period has not been thought of fondly in most Lebanese historiography. In a far-reaching and much-needed analysis of this complex legacy, James A. Reilly looks at Arabic-language history writing emanating from Lebanon in the post-1975 period, focusing on the three main Ottoman administrative centres of Saida, Beirut and Tripoli. This examination highlights key aspects of Lebanon's current political and cultural climate, and emphasises important points of agreement and conflict in contemporary historical discourse. The 1989 Ta'if Accords, for example, which ended the Lebanese Civil War, were accompanied by calls for reinterpretation of how the country's history could assist in creating a sense of national cohesion. The Ottoman Cities of Lebanon is invaluable to all historians and researchers working on Lebanese history and politics, and wider issues of identity, post-imperialist discourse and nationhood in the Middle East.

CHAPTER 1

OTTOMAN SAIDA – ‘ISLAMIC CITY’, MODERN STATE?

Recently published accounts of Ottoman Saida have emphasised the significance of its contributions to Lebanese people's heritage and legacy (turath). The old city benefitted from renewed attention in the 1990s and 2000s, partly as a consequence of the emergence in Lebanon's political and economic life of a native son of the city, Rafik Hariri (Rafiq al-Hariri, d. 2005). A man of humble origins who made his fortune in Saudi Arabia and then mixed business, politics and personal and public interests in post-Ta'if Lebanon, Hariri was a member of parliament and recurrent prime minister who, along with his parliamentarian sister, patronised efforts to refurbish and to highlight old Saida's architectural and material heritage. So whereas in the pre-civil war years a glossy coffee-table book about Saida published in Lebanon gave short shrift to old Saida's extant characteristics, and focused only on ancient and early medieval legacies up to the time of the Crusades, Saida's extant Ottoman-era heritage predominated in a glossy post-Ta'if coffee-table book whose publication was supported by the Hariri Foundation.¹ The trilingual book was presented as part of an effort to revive interest in the fortunes of old Saida. These same efforts resulted in the publication in 2003 of a scholarly study by Lebanese anthropologist Maha Kayyal on the craft industries of Saida.² Co-sponsored by the Hariri Foundation, the Lebanese office of UNESCO, the National Heritage Association and the Foundation for the Development of Arts & Culture, Kayyal's anthropological study began with a historical chapter written by Saida public historian Talal al-Majdhub, on whom more later. Justifying or explaining the book's focus on crafts, the president of the Lebanese office of UNESCO, Fadia Kiwan, wrote in the foreword that crafts are a significant element in local self-identification, and that knowing about and encouraging craft production is a way of holding on to a sense of self in the face of dangers posed by cultural and economic attacks or challenges (apparently a reference to the homogenising tendencies of globalisation).³ In a second foreword Muna Hrawi, head of the National Heritage Association (formed during her husband's presidential term in 1996) wrote that the Association's motto is: ‘A nation without heritage is a nation without identity.’ She added that the Association has a comprehensive understanding of the word ‘heritage’. It does not only mean museums and old buildings, but also the arts. Therefore the craft worker is a basic part of Lebanon's social heritage. The preservation and revival of craft work is part of the country's present-day revival (Nahda) and national project.⁴ The comments in these two forewords, and the preservation efforts to which they refer, date from the decade when Lebanon was emerging from its 15 years of civil and regional war, and when hopes for a recovery were being promoted by Rafik Hariri and those around him. Saida's heritage of crafts and architecture would necessarily encourage a focus on the Ottoman era and its legacies – understood, in the context of ‘heritage preservation’, in a mostly positive if not nostalgic light.

Before embarking on a study of post-Ottoman historical retrospectives and reflections, it is worth pausing to consider how Ottoman Saida was portrayed in Arabic writing at the time, towards the close of the Ottoman era. A valuable source on this score is a report prepard by two Ottoman Arab civil servants for the Ottoman Turkish governor of Beirut province in 1916–17. The authors, Rafiq Tamimi and Muhammad Bahjat, were civil servants. Thus they were part of the Ottoman system, and when they wrote this system was a given, likely to endure in Syria for the rest of their lives as it already had (in one form or another) for four centuries. There was therefore no nationally inflected hindsight in their remarks, unlike later writers who had to take into account the creation of the Lebanese Republic in the 1920s.

Tamimi and Bahjat began by remarking on Saida's green and pleasant setting, but they went on to say that the city in their day would not remind visitors of the fabled Saida of antiquity.⁵ Its best houses were in the Beirut style (multistorey, arched windows and peaked tiled roofs), but the authors depicted the bulk of Saida's housing stock negatively: ‘walls covered with smoke, dark inside, putrid courtyards cut off from fresh air’. They advocated clearing away the old housing stock that could not be improved.⁶ Nevertheless the authors were impressed with Saida's legacy of old public and commercial buildings, and then they proceeded to mention some of the newer additions. Interestingly, all of these newer buildings were either foreign or Christian in character, and taken together they created ‘a constructive, civilizational spirit’ in Saida.⁷ In their historical summary of the city, Tamimi and Bahjat note its contestation between Muslims and Christians at the time of the Crusades, a contestation that ended not with the Mamluks (whom they do not mention) but with the arrival of Ottoman rule. Saida remained in a ruined condition until the Druze prince Fakhr al-Din II revived its commerce and gave it new buildings. Saida slumped again afterwards, was marginalised by Ahmad al-Jazzar (who moved the provincial seat to Acre) and then lost its commercial pre-eminence to Beirut.⁸ However, according to Tamimi and Bahjat Saida's revival in recent decades (i.e., prior to World War I) could be measured by the growth of its modern schools. As modernist-minded government officials, the authors offered statistics to measure Saida's economic and educational attainments. They decried the absence of a civic spirit among the city's Muslim majority, and opined that Christians were more interested than Muslims in attaining formal education. Muslims suffer from general backwardness, they said, a failing that is especially pronounced among that community's girls and women. A rare bright spot in their cultural survey of Saida was the periodical al-‘Irfan, whose publisher they described as a Mutawalli (=Shi‘i) who wished to raise his community's cultural level. Publication had recently ceased because of wartime paper shortages, but Tamimi and Bahjat hoped that it would be able to resume.⁹

It is worth unpacking a few elements of the Tamimi and Bahjat narrative, to compare and contrast it with accounts that would be written later. First, their writing reflects no awareness of Lebanese or Arab ‘nationhood’. Their subjects in this section are Muslim and Christian Sidonians who are citizens of the Ottoman Empire. Second, though acknowledging the ‘glorious ancient past’, their historical awareness focuses on the Crusades and afterwards, with the arrival of the Ottomans presented as the resolution of a conflict that had brought Saida's fortunes low. Third, the ‘Druze prince’ Fakhr al-Din II is a figure whose career had a beneficial impact on Saida, but he is not presented as the harbinger or founder of a national entity. Fourth, the word umma (community, nation) is reserved for religious communities (Muslims and Christians), as well as for Mutawallis. This was an acknowledgement of religious diversity in the Ottoman city, without attempting to give Saida a particular sectarian or ethnic flavour. (The term Mutawalli, common in its day and not used pejoratively by Tamimi and Bahjat, would in later decades cease to be used in polite discourse, much as ‘coloured’ as a reference to African-Americans faded from polite North American discourse between the early and later parts of the twentieth century.) Finally, as employees and officials in the Committe of Union and Progress provincial administration, Tamimi and Bahjat had no qualms or hesitation about advocating ‘modernity’ even if this meant appropriating foreign or Christian tools to socialise an allegedly ‘backward’ Muslim community. There was, as yet, no nostalgia for Old Saida; to the authors’ utilitarian minds, the old city's infrastructure and housing stock were reminders of backwardness, not touchstones of nostalgia, turath, or identity.

Let us now jump ahead 50 years. In the decade before the outbreak of the country's civil war in 1975, Saida was the subject of two widely circulated textbook-like histories published in Lebanon. They traced Saida's story from ancient times, through the medieval Islamic, Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman periods. One was a Lebanese nationalist account and the other appeared in an Arab nationalist context. Despite their different political orientations, their renditions of Ottoman-era Saida shared much in common.

In 1966 education official Munir al-Khuri published his Sayda ‘abra hiqab al-tarikh. It is a popular history in the sense that it was intended for a general readership and it was not encumbered with the usual scholarly apparatus of footnotes and references. Its tone is dispassionate and serious. This sober tone, paired with Khuri's responsibilities for teacher training, would likely have communicated to his readership that his is a scholarly account. Khuri's assumptions fit within the Lebanese nationalist framework prevalent at the time, viz., a political entity called Lebanon had emerged by the sixteenth century, vested in the dynasty of Ma‘n emirs and their Shihab successors. There was a ‘national spirit’ reflected in sectarian plurality including the creation of a ‘national army’.¹⁰ Saida was part of this Lebanon, and Khuri periodises the city's history within the context of the Ma‘ni emirate.¹¹ Saida reached the apex of its early Lebanese history during the reign of Ma‘ni emir Fakhr al-Din II (d. 1635), whose era represented a golden age.¹² Khuri attributes the Ottomans’ creation of a province or wilaya of Saida in 1660 to their wish to thwart the Lebanese struggle for freedom.¹³ In discussing the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Khuri conflates the interests and sentiments of Emir Bashir II Shihab (r. 1788–1840) with those of the population of Saida and its province, disregarding his own text's evidence that Bashir was a factional figure rather than a ‘national’ one.¹⁴ When Khuri arrives at the Ottoman reform period of the 1840s onward, he asserts that the returning Ottomans wanted to end the ‘independence’ of Mount Lebanon and so they lit the fires of sectarian conflict, assisted by European powers. As part of this destructive programme, Lebanese leaders were stripped of their power and the ‘Lebanese army’ was disbanded. Thus the Ottoman rulers sought to make themselves indispensable, and foreign powers found pretexts to intervene whilst working to foment a bloodbath.¹⁵ The specific history of Saida is little discussed in all of this, except to demonstrate that Saida was touched by the developing violence even as its local leaders sought to protect vulnerable Christians in 1860.¹⁶ Khuri avers that Turkish (Ottoman) rule in the post-bloodbath years (1861–1914) was characterised by injustices.¹⁷ Nonetheless, despite Ottoman oppression Saida maintained its cultural life in the final Ottoman decades. Missionary schools played an important role in this cultural life, and Saida personalities and luminaries contributed to the Arabic literary Nahda (Renaissance).¹⁸ People in Saida greeted joyfully the restoration of the Ottoman parliament and constitution in 1908 at the hands of the Young Turks (Committee of Union and Progress or CUP). Yet Sidonians, like other Arabs, were resolute in their opposition to both the Sultan's oppression and the Turkification policies of the CUP leadership (the Unionists).¹⁹ Thus whatever Saida and its people achieved in the Ottoman period they did despite Ottoman rule, and despite the Ottomans’ efforts to sever Saida from its Lebanese political identity.

A few years after Khuri's book appeared, the Beirut Arab University (BAU) published an Arab nationalist inflected history of Saida written by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Salim, Professor of Islamic History at BAU as well as at the University of Alexandria, Egypt. The BAU had been established through the cooperation of two Islamic charitable associations (one Egyptian, the other Lebanese) in association with the University of Alexandria.²⁰ In the 1960s the BAU represented an intellectual beachhead for Islamically inflected Nasserite pan-Arabism in the Lebanese higher education scene. The author, Salim, was likely Egyptian and he published prolifically in that era on Arab and Islamic history. This book was an effort to insert Saida into an Arab nationalist historical outline. In his introduction, Salim argues that the Arab-Islamic history of Saida had been obscured, so he was seeking to restore these aspects to the city's narrative.²¹ In contrast to later Islamically oriented writers in the 1980s and 1990s, though, Salim deals with the Ottoman period only in a cursory way, and then only to highlight the career of Emir Fakhr al-Din II as a shining moment in Saida's Arab-Islamic record. Salim's narrative trajectory is of Fatimid and Mamluk glory (eleventh to sixteenth centuries) followed by Ottoman or Turkish-induced decline, a decline that the period of Fakhr al-Din's rule reversed only briefly. The book's final section is entitled ‘Revival of Saida in the Era of Fakhr al-Din II’. To judge by the evidence in Salim's book, the apparent stagnation and decline of Saida after the Mamluk era was (ironically?) a by-product of Ottoman ‘security’. This conclusion suggests itself because Salim's glorification of the Mamluks focuses on their military construction projects designed to ward off hostile Christian fleets. In the wake of the Crusades (eleventh to thirteenth centuries) Saida became a Mamluk fortress on the maritime frontier. Salim goes on to argue that Fakhr al-Din temporarily reversed Saida's decline by initiating a programme of infrastructure and military construction and by encouraging commerce and trade.²² But, Salim concludes, Saida steadily declined once again after Fakhr al-Din's deportation and death, a centuries-long slump that lasted until Lebanese independence.²³ Unlike Khuri, Salim does provide references and footnotes for his material.

So these two 1960s accounts – Khuri's Lebanese nationalist rendition and Salim's Arab nationalist one – share an admiration for Emir Fakhr al-Din II, but otherwise they offer a gloomy and dismissive portrait of the Ottoman period. Unlike the Ottoman-era officials Tamimi and Bahjat, both of the later writers insist or assume that Saida had been part of a national entity (whether Lebanese or Arab-Islamic) that endured suppression in Ottoman times. Khuri insists that Lebanon had an early modern historical existence, and that in their opposition to Lebanese national aspirations the Ottomans stirred up sectarian animosities to hang on to power. Salim's assumption is that Ottoman rule resulted in a decline linked to the absence of national independence.

On the eve of the 1975–90 Lebanese war a graduate student at the Lebanese University wrote an MA thesis on the trade of Ottoman Saida that took a decidedly different tack. Published posthumously in 1987, the study by Antoine Abdel Nour [Antun ‘Abd al-Nur]²⁴ offered a different understanding of Saida in the eighteenth century, seen not through the lens of national or nationalist history but rather focusing on Saida as a locus of regional and international trade. Abdel Nour's book is less a product of original, primary source based research than it is a synthesis and reinterpretation of secondary materials available to him in the early 1970s. He notes that the history of Saida between 1660 and 1770 is almost entirely obscure. There are no local histories, and historians of Mount Lebanon mentioned Saida only incidentally. But Saida during this epoch was the most important of Lebanon's coastal cities. It was the centre and entrepôt of of trade between West and East in the eastern Mediterranean, and between the coast and the Syrian interior. Moreover, as the seat of a governor, it was a political centre as well.²⁵ Without explicitly saying so, therefore, Abdel Nour was staking out a position that flew in the face of the by-then received wisdom, namely, that nothing particularly noteworthy or interesting could be obtained from an examination of Saida's history in the period between the death of Fakhr al-Din II and the stirrings of the nineteenth-century Arabic Nahda. Because in the early 1970s Saida's Islamic sharia law court records were not accessible to scholars (Abdel Nour would examine them only later, when working on his French PhD dissertation), he focused on accounts of Saida's foreign trade, especially its trade with France, and accounts of Saida written on the basis of French sources. In his comments on methodology and historiography, Abdel Nour cites the Annales school as an influence, explaining that the Annales approach prioritises economic and social history as being central to understanding the underlying historical trajectory. Histories of events are marginal compared to the history of social and economic structures. He continues by noting that although Lebanon has a copious historiography, second only to that of Egypt in the Arab East, it mainly focuses on Mount Lebanon. Lebanon's historiography has taken only a cursory glance at coastal cities, and there is no study of the economic and social history of coastal cities. Therefore, within the context of his MA thesis...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Transliteration
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Ottoman Saida – ‘Islamic City’, Modern State?
• 2. Ottoman Beirut – Liberal Cosmopolis or Islamic Fortress?
• 3. Ottoman Tripoli – A Fragmented Mirror
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back cover