Lebanon’s mountain refuge sustained autonomous identity through centuries of Ottoman rule

Evidence

The Republic of Lebanon was quite different. It continued an established and living tradition of autonomy and separate identity, maintained, often under con­ ditions of great difficulty, through the centuries of Ottoman rule. The Lebanese heartland consisted of the Mountain, with a very rough rectangle of territory extending from just south of Tripoli to just north of Sidon on the coast and slanting inland, northward and southward, to a line running from north to south through Zahle. It was inhabited primarily by Christians, most of them Maronites, and by Druze and Shi‘ites, followers of what were seen as heterodox Muslim sects. With its difficult terrain and its nonconformist population, it had long been a refuge of social, intellectual and, in some measure, even of political in­ dependence within the Ottoman world. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1397

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

Related

• Lebanon’s identity was rooted in mountaineer Christian and heterodox refuge before 1920. (similarity 0.96)