Modern or Age-Old "Culture of Sectarianism?": the Ottomans in Mount Lebanon, 1860

Samuel Dolbee, New York University

Deir al-Qamar c1919
Image Source: Image Source: Pierre Fournié and
Jean-Louis Riccioli, La France et le Proche-Orient : 1916-1946

The documents here concern Ottoman efforts to quell the violence that occurred between Christians and Druze in Mount Lebanon in 1859 and 1860.  These events are treated by Ussama Makdisi in The Culture of Sectarianism, in which he argues that Ottoman, European , and missionary notions of religion and identity contributed to the rise of sectarian politics in Lebanon.  This confluence of forces meant sectarianism, according to Makdisi, was distinctly a product of a modernizing moment in the mid 19^th-century.  Nevertheless, the Ottoman response to the horrors of 1860 involved the presentation of sectarianism as a timeless thing of the past.  Only Ottoman justice (and an Ottoman monopoly on violence) carried the promise of modernity. 

Makdisi uses these documents to make part of this argument (147-148).  Above, we see Halim Pasha, the commander of the Ottoman military in Syria, talk of the “age-old enmity and spitefulness” between Maronites and Druze in Mount Lebanon that threatens to ignite the fire of war. Below, we see Mehmed Fuad Pasha, the famous Ottoman statesman who served as special envoy to Syria in the wake of the violence, writing of, among other things, how during two of his travels in the Mount the Christian residents expressed their gratitude for delivering the region from the customs of revenge that mean bloodshed can only lead to further bloodshed.      

Of course, the Ottomans, like almost all states, did respond to this bloodshed with more bloodshed.  The presence of violence did not change, then, so much as who could legitimately wield it, or so the Ottomans hoped.   

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Source: BOA A-MKT-UM 415/56 (1 M 1277); 480/28 (22 Z 1277)

Lebanon

Lebanese