Mount Lebanon Emirate

The Emirate of Mount Lebanon was an autonomous subdivision in the Ottoman Empire. The Emirate is considered to be an historical precursor of the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate established in 1861, which was, in turn, the precursor of the Lebanese Republic of today. Historians have given different names to this entity: Shuf Emirate, Emirate of Jabal Druze, Emirate of Mount Lebanon, as well as Ma'an Emirate. The boundaries were not well defined. The town of Baakleen was the capital of the emirate during the Ma'an period until Fakhr-al-Din II chose to live in Dar El Qamar (nowadays Deir el Qamar) due to a water shortage in Baakleen. Dar El Kamar remained the capital until Bashir Shihab II ascended to the throne and made Beiteddine the capital. Beiteddine remains the capital of the Chouf District today.

Fakhr-al-Din II, the Druze prince and Lebanon's most prominent leader, was a strongman who was given leeway by the Ottomans to subdue and destroy other provincial leaderships in Ottoman Syria on their behalf, and who was himself destroyed in the end, to make way for a firmer control by the Ottoman state over the Syrian eyalets. The 'emir' was thus the dominant warlord in the Lebanese mountains.

Fakhr al-Din established a subtle symbiosis between the Maronites of Kisrawan and the Druzes of the Shuf mountains. After his downfall, the Ottomans tried different ways to break up this symbiosis, but all efforts failed. In the end, they returned power to the Maans in the person of Ahmad al-Maani, the grandnephew of Fakhr al-Din, in 1667.

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