The Shiite Hamadas of Mt Lebanon were never invested with a sancak-beğlik, nor were they referred to as ‘emirs’ in contemporary local sources. Yet for a time in the later seventeenth century, the family controlled a territory that stretched from Safita in modern-day Syria to the Futuh district in the mountains above Jubayl, south-east of Tripoli. They retained some of their tax farms until 1763, when they were evicted by the Druze emirs of Sidon, the Shihabis, and went with their affiliated clans into exile on the other side of Mt Lebanon in the Bekaa Valley. The Imami community has all but disappeared from the region of Tripoli today, and the Hamadas never became as renowned as the Harfush emirs of Baalbek or the scholar families of Jabal ‘Amil. Yet the archival and literary records of their rise to power, their regular contact with the state authorities and their turbulent rapport with their local subjects and rivals mark the history of the Hamada ‘emirate’ as the best documented of any Shiite group in the Ottoman Empire.

The Hamadas were probably the single most important feudal power in the coastal highlands between the demise of Fakhr al-Din ibn Ma‘n in 1633 and the rise of the Shihabis in 1697.