How a Sectarian Territory was Made: (Re) Mapping the Dual Kaimakamate of Mount Lebanon (1842–1860)

While the origins of Lebanese sectarianism have been deconstructed as a modern and, to much extent, colonial politico-cultural discourse (Hakim 2013; Makdisi 2000), less research has been conducted on sectarianism as a geographical project. Moreover, research on the origins of political sectarianism in late-Ottoman Lebanon and its role in the formation of the Lebanese nation state is predominantly concentrated on the administrative period of the Mutasarrifiyya (or Petit Liban) post 1860 (Charon 1905; Fawaz 1994; Ismail 2002).

Studies of the pre-1860 territorial and administrative configuration of the area, i.e. the dual kaimakamate (lieutenancy) of Mount Lebanon (in Ottoman Turkish: Cebel-i Lübnan Da İki Kaymakamlığı) are rare and mostly descriptive of its bureaucratic structure (Kisirwani 1964). Currently, the spatial extent of the dual kaimakamate, and even more importantly of how its territory was conceived, constituted and represented, is understudied.

The political unrest and power vacuum left by the Egyptian-Ottoman wars of the 1830s in the Levant and Mount Lebanon was one of the crucial factors that led to the reorganizing of the previous fiscal and land- ownership order of the muqata‘at and the institution of a new territorial regime based on religious belonging— the dual kaimakamate—in 1842, as a product of diplomatic negotiations between the Porte and the European ‘five powers’: Great Britain, France, Russia, Prussia and Austria.

A precise note on the spatial extent of the dual kaimakamate was reported by historian Cyrille Charon in 1910, according to whom the division was between ‘Druze Lebanon south of Dohr [sic] el Baidar and Christian Lebanon north of this [mountain] pass. To each section was assigned a distinct Caimacam, druse for the supposed druse part, Christian for the other’ (Charon 1905). Between 1840 and 1842, a chain of negotiation meetings and written correspondences aimed to decide the ‘type’ of Mount Lebanon as presented in two possible options: a ‘geographical’ division, or a ‘religious’ one. The first suggested a territorial separation via a boundary, on the basis of the pre-existing muqata‘at, and could have implied, however, problematic population transfers. The second option, more complicated to implement (especially in the most mixed muqata‘at) implied instead a unified Mount Lebanon, where members of the Druse and Maronite communities would refer to different Kaimakam for legal and administrative issues, regardless of their location.

A decision took years and, in the meantime, communitarian tension in Mount Lebanon increased, revealing the complexity of this political and spatial project, which attempted to produce a coherent map of what was instead a religiously mixed territory. It was only in May 1845 that an official ruling on the dual kaimakamate—the Reglement (düzeni) of Şekib Effendi (named after the Ottoman Foreign Minister)— was proclaimed. It was written in ‘Ten Articles of Peace between the Christians and Druses of Mount Lebanon, signed at Beyrout [sic] the 3lst May, 1845’. This recognized the two geographical kaimakamates (druse and maronite), headed by two Kaimakams, but at the same time assigned to each of the two territories an administrative council to resolve confessional disputes.

The aim of the pilot study has been to shed some light on the geography of the dual kaimakamate as the cradle of Lebanon’s political sectarianism. It has done so by exploring the spatial extent of the historic dual kaimakamate through archival search into the maps of the time; by exploring what were the different European and Ottoman perspectives on the political geography of the territory; and by attempting to retrace the boundary between the southern and northern territories in relation to the contemporary landscape. Research at the British Library and The National Archives provided the first (unpublished) map records of the Kaimakamate showing the boundary between the two territories and a clear indication of the division on the basis of confessional belonging. These maps constituted the basis to structure the fieldwork in Lebanon and the archive search in Istanbul. In Lebanon, the library of the humanities campus and the texts in the Bibliothèque Orientale of the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut, as well as the National Library in Baaqleen provided further historical context and maps. Further research, some of which, reinforcing Lebanon’s findings, took place in the Prime Minister’s Archives in Kagithane, north of Istanbul, with the help of a research assistant fluent in Ottoman Turkish. Besides the archive research, fieldwork in Lebanon aimed to use the historical maps to interpret the sites where the north-south border between the Maronite and Druze kaimakamate once was. A confrontation between historical and current maps was conducted with the help of a professional cartographer and the remaining infrastructure of the Beirut-Damascus railway provided reference points for starting to reconstruct the borderland geography between the two kaimakamates.

From simple lines traced on paper, to reports of surveys, as well as the detailed work of European cartographers, the research so far has started to show just how, in practice, confessional belonging was projected onto territory, translated into a spatial fact and made into a dispositive for representing and governing the territory and population of Mount Lebanon. The research so far has shown that the dual kaimakamate was not a finished and coherent spatial and political project, but the fruit of an almost-experimental modern diplomatic, representational and geographical process mirroring the slow and often contradictory geopolitical mechanisms of proposals and counter-proposals surrounding the Orient Question.

The border between the two kaimakamates, in the meantime, had become an infrastructural border from 1857, when the old road between Beirut to Damascus, then ‘a path served, above all, by mules and camels’ (Eleftériadès 1944: 37) connecting the two towns in four days, was upgraded to a carriageway.

The processual, unfinished and contested nature of the dual kaimakamate was a result of the continuous necessity to intercede diplomatically to quell the frequent escalations of violence between Druses and Maronites, especially at the border between the Druse and Maronite Kaimakamate. This culminated with the complex Effendi edict. The sectarian violence continued until 1860, when it reached well beyond the mountain to Damascus. The Kaimakamate was then disbanded, giving way to the proclamation of the Mutasarrifiyya under one (Christian) ruler, the Mutasarrif.

What the research has shown so far is how the years between 1840 and 1845 were crucial in the proliferation of practices (diplomatic, military, but most importantly for this project spatial and cartographic) that worked to interlock religious belonging and territorial authority. The ongoing research aims to reconstruct a detailed spatial history of the dual kaimakamate using the maps and the archive texts available from the UK, Lebanon and Turkey, to show just how confessional belonging and territoriality were the fruit of painstaking mapping and visual geographical work.