The written record of Lebanon's Shi‘a under Ottoman rule presents a twofold paradox. Where imperial documents and chronicles identify Shiites as such, they are labelled as Revafız and Kızılbaş, legally assimilated to heresy and rhetorically excluded from Ottoman society. And yet these same sources also make clear to what extent leading Shiite families were in fact co-opted by the early modern Ottoman state, integrated into the provincial administration and assigned wide-ranging fiscal and police powers in the area. Similarly, Arabic-language sources almost universally condemn the Shiites as particularly lawless and inimical to local society, as religious and social pariahs and ultimately as alien to ‘Lebanon’. And yet the narrative of Lebanese nationhood is predicated on the universal embrace of Ma‘nid and Shihabi rule, as if the rise of the Druze emirate somehow also benefited those who were its main victims. The Shiites’ place in both Ottoman and Lebanese history remains unresolved: their sectarian identity did not prevent their success within the nominally Sunni context of imperial rule, but in the end it conditioned their failure within the nominally non- or pan-confessional feudal system of modern Lebanon.

The present study has aimed at resolving some of these contradictions by examining the ‘rise and fall’ of the Hamadas, Harfushes and other Shiite families from a long-term, Ottoman administrative perspective. Its main findings can be summarized as follows.