The Allegory of 1860

The meaning of the events of 1860 altered after the decolonization of the Arab world, when nationalist discourse emerged as the dominant political and cultural expression of the region. Nationalist historiography in all its shades has inherited both the distant European and Ottoman perspectives of sectarian violence and the immediacy and tragedy evident in local descriptions. Determined to justify the existence of Lebanon as an independent state and with a vision of Lebanon “in” history, as the title of Philip Hitti’s book put it, early nationalist scholars, like their peers in South Asia and Africa, were unable to contemplate nationalism as anything but the natural evolution of a people long under the domination of others. These early scholars—from George Antonious to Philip Hitti to Asad Rustum to Kamal Salibi— were convinced that modernity came only in the image of a secular West, that 1860 was most clearly scripted as the dark point in the nationalist narrative before an “Arab” or “Lebanese” awakening.^[24] Despite the abundance of documentation available to them, few scholars comprehended the violence as anything more than a byproduct of elitist rivalries in which, at set points, the dutiful ahali were marshaled in and out of the nation’s history, maiming and plundering as they went.

I do not want to suggest that nationalist historians such as Hitti merely replicated what came before them, because they did not. They exhibited a fundamental belief in the naturalness of nationhood and in the inevitability of the end of Ottoman rule. But when Lebanese and Arab nationalism entered a period of sustained crisis in the 1970s, first with the failure to liberate Palestine and then with the collapse of the Lebanese state, they and their readers were suddenly left, in Albert Hourani’s words, with the feeling “that something had been left out.”^[25] The outbreak of civil war in 1975 came as a rude shock given the optimism and confidence of the earlier nationalist histories. Salibi, for example, undertook a revisionist history of Lebanon by criticizing various nationalist and sectarian mythologies in his A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered, in which he urged the Lebanese and Arabs to unthink many misconceptions and to “start from a clean slate.”^[26] Adding to the disenchantment with nationalist discourse, many authors watching the Lebanese predicament unfold singled out sectarianism and religious fanaticism as “premodern” vestiges that have precluded the development of a modern, democratic, and liberal state in the Middle East.^[27] Others, such as Georges Corm, however, understood the civil war as the revenge of an Ottoman past and the consequence of geopolitical rivalries over which the Lebanese people had no control.^[28] Perhaps most symptomatic of this reappraisal, which aims at drawing a national lesson, is Leila Fawaz’s An Occasion for War, which concludes with a comparison of the two civil wars. The recent Lebanese conflict also gave rise to a flood of partisan histories, to resurrected “memories” of 1860 that warned of the allegedly treacherous nature of the “Druze,” the “Maronite,” or the “Muslim.” And, in the aftermath of conflict, the Lebanese government has turned its back on the past, just as the Ottomans did. Curiously, however, it has paradoxically abolished and criminalized the memory of conflict, at once taking refuge in the myths of historical tolerance and coexistence while signifying its own profound skepticism of these myths.^[29]