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Shihab dynasty
The Shihab dynasty (alternatively spelled Chehab; Arabic: الشهابيون, ALA-LC: al-Shihābiyūn) is an Arab family whose members served as the paramount tax farmers and Emirs of Mount Lebanon from the early 18th to mid-19th century, during Ottoman rule (1517–1918). Before then, the family had been in control of the Wadi al-Taym region, purportedly as early as the 12th century. During early Ottoman rule, they maintained an alliance and marital ties with the Ma'n dynasty, the Chouf-based, paramount Druze emirs and tax farmers of Mount Lebanon. When the last Ma'nid emir died without male progeny in 1697, the chiefs of the Druze in Mount Lebanon appointed the Shihab emir, Bashir, whose mother belonged to the Ma'n, as his successor. Bashir was succeeded by another Shihab emir with a Ma'nid mother, Haydar, after his death.
Under Haydar, the Shihabs crushed their main rivals for paramountcy amongst the Druze at the Battle of Ain Dara in 1711, consolidating their dominance of Mount Lebanon through the mid-19th century. The family's most prominent emir, Bashir II, centralized control in the region, destroying the feudal power of the mostly Druze lords and cultivating the Maronite clergy as an alternative power base in their emirate. In 1831, he allied with Muhammad Ali of Egypt during his occupation of Syria, but was deposed in 1840 when the Egyptians were driven out by an Ottoman-European alliance, leading soon after to the dissolution of the Shihab emirate. Despite losing territorial control, the family remains influential in modern Lebanon, with some members having reached high political office.
The Banu Shihab were purportedly an Arab tribe originally from the Hejaz. According to the 19th-century historian Mikhail Mishaqa, they were descendants of the Banu Makhzum clan of the Quraysh tribe to which the leader of the 7th-century Muslim conquest of Syria, Khalid ibn al-Walid, belonged. Mishaqa held the family's ancestor was a commander in the conquest, Harith, who fell in battle at the Bab Sharqi gate of Damascus during the Muslim siege of that city in 634. At some later point, the tribe settled in the Hauran region south of Damascus. In 1172, the Banu Shihab migrated from their home village of Shahba in Jabal Hauran westward to Wadi al-Taym, a plain at the foot of Mount Hermon (Jabal al-Sheikh).
The 19th-century family histories of the Shihabs by Haydar al-Shihabi and his assistant Tannus al-Shidyaq note that the clan's leader during its migration to Wadi al-Taym was Munqidh ibn Amr (d. 1193), who defeated the Crusaders in an engagement there the following year. The same sources note that he was appointed governor of Wadi al-Taym in 1174 by the Zengid ruler of Damascus, Nur al-Din. Munqidh was succeeded by his son Najm (d. 1224), who was in turn succeeded by his son Amir (d. 1260). The latter allied with the Ma'n family, a Druze clan based in the Chouf region of Mount Lebanon, and defeated the Crusaders in an engagement in 1244. Amir's son and successor, Qurqumaz, took refuge with the Ma'ns in the Chouf during a Mongol invasion in 1280. After his death in 1284, his son Sa'd succeeded him as governor of Wadi al-Taym. The Shihabs continued to govern Wadi al-Taym throughout Mamluk rule (1260–1516), according to the family histories. Their chief, Ali ibn Ahmad, was mentioned by the local Druze chronicler Ibn Sibat (d. 1520) as the governor of Wadi al-Taym in 1478. Ali's son Yunus was mentioned by the contemporary Damascene chroniclers al-Busrawi and Ibn al-Himsi as being involved in a rebellion in Damascus in the late 1490s.
The Ottoman Empire conquered the Mamluk Levant in 1516 and an Ottoman government record from August 1574 directs the governor of Damascus to confiscate the rifle stockpiles of Qasim Shihab, identified by the Shihab family histories as Qasim ibn Mulhim ibn Mansur, a great-grandson of the above-mentioned Yunus ibn Ali. Qasim's son Ahmad was the multazim (limited-term tax farmer) of Wadi al-Taym and neighboring Arqoub in 1592–1600, 1602, 1606, 1610–1615, 1618–1621 and 1628–1630. Ahmad fought alongside his cousin Fakhr al-Din II in a revolt against the Ottomans in the Levant in 1606, which was stamped out the following year. When the forces of the Ottoman governor of Damascus Hafiz Ahmed Pasha moved against Ahmad in Wadi al-Taym in 1612, Fakhr al-Din's forces repulsed them. When, in the following year, Hafiz Ahmed Pasha launched an imperial-backed campaign against Fakhr al-Din, Ahmad, his brother Ali and many other local allies of the Ma'ns joined the Ottoman forces. He held the fort of Hasbaya and later that year attacked his brother Ali in the latter's fort of Rashaya. Fakhr al-Din escaped to Europe and returned to Mount Lebanon in 1618, after which Ahmad sent his son Sulayman to welcome his return. By then the Ma'ns had been restored to their tax farms and the governorships of Sidon-Beirut and Safad. Fakhr al-Din reconciled Ahmad and Ali in 1619. Ahmad and his men fought in Fakhr al-Din's army against the governor of Damascus Mustafa Pasha in the decisive Battle of Anjar in 1623, which sealed Fakhr al-Din's growing power in Mount Lebanon. In 1629, Husayn Shihab of Rashaya married the daughter of Emir Mulhim Ma'n. In 1650, the Ma'n and Shihab clans defeated a mercenary army of the Druze emir Ali Alam al-Din (Ali's troops were loaned to him by the Ottoman governor of Damascus, who was opposed to Fakhr al-Din).
In 1660, the Ottomans, created the Sidon Eyalet, which included Mount Lebanon and Wadi al-Taym, and under the command of Grand Vizier Koprulu Mehmed Pasha, launched an expedition targeting the Shihabs of Wadi al-Taym and the Shia Muslim Hamade clan of Keserwan. As Ottoman troops raided Wadi al-Taym, the Shihabs fled to the Keserwan region in northern Mount Lebanon seeking Hamade protection. Koprulu Mehmed Pasha issued orders to Emir Ahmad Ma'n to hand over the Shihab emirs, but Emir Ahmad rejected the demand and instead fled to the Keserwan, losing his tax farms in Mount Lebanon in the process. The peasantry of the abandoned regions suffered at the hands of Ottoman troops pursuing the Shihab and Ma'n leaders. The Shihabs fled further north into Syria, taking up shelter at Jabal A'la south of Aleppo until 1663. Four years later, the Ma'ns and their Qaysi coalition defeated the Yamani coalition led by the Alam al-Din family outside the port town of Beirut. Consequently, Emir Ahmad Ma'n regained control of the Mount Lebanon tax farms. The Shihabs further solidified their alliance with the Ma'ns when, in 1674, Musa Shihab married the daughter of Emir Ahmad Ma'n. In 1680, Emir Ahmad mediated a conflict between the Shihabs and the Shia Muslim Harfush clan of the Beqaa Valley, after the latter killed Faris Shihab in 1680 (Faris had recently displaced the Harfush from Baalbek), prompting an armed mobilization by the Shihabs.
In 1693, the Ottoman authorities launched a major military expedition, consisting of 18,500 troops, against Emir Ahmad when he declined a request to suppress the Hamade sheikhs after they raided Byblos, killing forty Ottoman soldiers, including the garrison commander, Ahmad Qalawun, a descendant of Mamluk sultan Qalawun. Emir Ahmad fled and had his tax farms confiscated and transferred to Musa Alam al-Din, who also commandeered the Ma'n palace in Deir al-Qamar. The following year, Emir Ahmad and his Shihab allies mobilized their forces in Wadi al-Taym and conquered the Chouf, forcing Musa Alam al-Din to flee to Sidon. Emir Ahmad was restored his tax farms in 1695.
When Emir Ahmad Ma'n died without a male heir in 1697, the sheikhs of the Qaysi Druze faction of Mount Lebanon convened in Semqaniyeh and declared their allegiances to Bashir Shihab I as emir of Mountain Lebanon and to the Shihab Dynasty. Bashir was related to the Ma'ns through his mother, who was the sister of Ahmad Ma'n and the wife of Bashir's father, Husayn Shihab. Due to the influence of Husayn Ma'n, the youngest of Fakhr ad-Din's sons, who was a high-ranking official in the Ottoman imperial government, the Ottoman authorities declined to confirm Bashir's authority over the tax farms of Mount Lebanon; Husayn Ma'n forsake his hereditary claim to the Ma'n emirate in favor of his career as the Ottoman ambassador to India. Instead, the Ottoman authorities appointed Husayn Ma'n's choice, Haydar Shihab, the son of Musa Shihab and Ahmad Ma'n's daughter. Haydar's appointment was confirmed by the governor of Sidon, and agreed upon by the Druze sheikhs, but because Haydar was still a minor, Bashir was kept on as regent.
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Shihab dynasty
The Shihab dynasty (alternatively spelled Chehab; Arabic: الشهابيون, ALA-LC: al-Shihābiyūn) is an Arab family whose members served as the paramount tax farmers and Emirs of Mount Lebanon from the early 18th to mid-19th century, during Ottoman rule (1517–1918). Before then, the family had been in control of the Wadi al-Taym region, purportedly as early as the 12th century. During early Ottoman rule, they maintained an alliance and marital ties with the Ma'n dynasty, the Chouf-based, paramount Druze emirs and tax farmers of Mount Lebanon. When the last Ma'nid emir died without male progeny in 1697, the chiefs of the Druze in Mount Lebanon appointed the Shihab emir, Bashir, whose mother belonged to the Ma'n, as his successor. Bashir was succeeded by another Shihab emir with a Ma'nid mother, Haydar, after his death.
Under Haydar, the Shihabs crushed their main rivals for paramountcy amongst the Druze at the Battle of Ain Dara in 1711, consolidating their dominance of Mount Lebanon through the mid-19th century. The family's most prominent emir, Bashir II, centralized control in the region, destroying the feudal power of the mostly Druze lords and cultivating the Maronite clergy as an alternative power base in their emirate. In 1831, he allied with Muhammad Ali of Egypt during his occupation of Syria, but was deposed in 1840 when the Egyptians were driven out by an Ottoman-European alliance, leading soon after to the dissolution of the Shihab emirate. Despite losing territorial control, the family remains influential in modern Lebanon, with some members having reached high political office.
The Banu Shihab were purportedly an Arab tribe originally from the Hejaz. According to the 19th-century historian Mikhail Mishaqa, they were descendants of the Banu Makhzum clan of the Quraysh tribe to which the leader of the 7th-century Muslim conquest of Syria, Khalid ibn al-Walid, belonged. Mishaqa held the family's ancestor was a commander in the conquest, Harith, who fell in battle at the Bab Sharqi gate of Damascus during the Muslim siege of that city in 634. At some later point, the tribe settled in the Hauran region south of Damascus. In 1172, the Banu Shihab migrated from their home village of Shahba in Jabal Hauran westward to Wadi al-Taym, a plain at the foot of Mount Hermon (Jabal al-Sheikh).
The 19th-century family histories of the Shihabs by Haydar al-Shihabi and his assistant Tannus al-Shidyaq note that the clan's leader during its migration to Wadi al-Taym was Munqidh ibn Amr (d. 1193), who defeated the Crusaders in an engagement there the following year. The same sources note that he was appointed governor of Wadi al-Taym in 1174 by the Zengid ruler of Damascus, Nur al-Din. Munqidh was succeeded by his son Najm (d. 1224), who was in turn succeeded by his son Amir (d. 1260). The latter allied with the Ma'n family, a Druze clan based in the Chouf region of Mount Lebanon, and defeated the Crusaders in an engagement in 1244. Amir's son and successor, Qurqumaz, took refuge with the Ma'ns in the Chouf during a Mongol invasion in 1280. After his death in 1284, his son Sa'd succeeded him as governor of Wadi al-Taym. The Shihabs continued to govern Wadi al-Taym throughout Mamluk rule (1260–1516), according to the family histories. Their chief, Ali ibn Ahmad, was mentioned by the local Druze chronicler Ibn Sibat (d. 1520) as the governor of Wadi al-Taym in 1478. Ali's son Yunus was mentioned by the contemporary Damascene chroniclers al-Busrawi and Ibn al-Himsi as being involved in a rebellion in Damascus in the late 1490s.
The Ottoman Empire conquered the Mamluk Levant in 1516 and an Ottoman government record from August 1574 directs the governor of Damascus to confiscate the rifle stockpiles of Qasim Shihab, identified by the Shihab family histories as Qasim ibn Mulhim ibn Mansur, a great-grandson of the above-mentioned Yunus ibn Ali. Qasim's son Ahmad was the multazim (limited-term tax farmer) of Wadi al-Taym and neighboring Arqoub in 1592–1600, 1602, 1606, 1610–1615, 1618–1621 and 1628–1630. Ahmad fought alongside his cousin Fakhr al-Din II in a revolt against the Ottomans in the Levant in 1606, which was stamped out the following year. When the forces of the Ottoman governor of Damascus Hafiz Ahmed Pasha moved against Ahmad in Wadi al-Taym in 1612, Fakhr al-Din's forces repulsed them. When, in the following year, Hafiz Ahmed Pasha launched an imperial-backed campaign against Fakhr al-Din, Ahmad, his brother Ali and many other local allies of the Ma'ns joined the Ottoman forces. He held the fort of Hasbaya and later that year attacked his brother Ali in the latter's fort of Rashaya. Fakhr al-Din escaped to Europe and returned to Mount Lebanon in 1618, after which Ahmad sent his son Sulayman to welcome his return. By then the Ma'ns had been restored to their tax farms and the governorships of Sidon-Beirut and Safad. Fakhr al-Din reconciled Ahmad and Ali in 1619. Ahmad and his men fought in Fakhr al-Din's army against the governor of Damascus Mustafa Pasha in the decisive Battle of Anjar in 1623, which sealed Fakhr al-Din's growing power in Mount Lebanon. In 1629, Husayn Shihab of Rashaya married the daughter of Emir Mulhim Ma'n. In 1650, the Ma'n and Shihab clans defeated a mercenary army of the Druze emir Ali Alam al-Din (Ali's troops were loaned to him by the Ottoman governor of Damascus, who was opposed to Fakhr al-Din).
In 1660, the Ottomans, created the Sidon Eyalet, which included Mount Lebanon and Wadi al-Taym, and under the command of Grand Vizier Koprulu Mehmed Pasha, launched an expedition targeting the Shihabs of Wadi al-Taym and the Shia Muslim Hamade clan of Keserwan. As Ottoman troops raided Wadi al-Taym, the Shihabs fled to the Keserwan region in northern Mount Lebanon seeking Hamade protection. Koprulu Mehmed Pasha issued orders to Emir Ahmad Ma'n to hand over the Shihab emirs, but Emir Ahmad rejected the demand and instead fled to the Keserwan, losing his tax farms in Mount Lebanon in the process. The peasantry of the abandoned regions suffered at the hands of Ottoman troops pursuing the Shihab and Ma'n leaders. The Shihabs fled further north into Syria, taking up shelter at Jabal A'la south of Aleppo until 1663. Four years later, the Ma'ns and their Qaysi coalition defeated the Yamani coalition led by the Alam al-Din family outside the port town of Beirut. Consequently, Emir Ahmad Ma'n regained control of the Mount Lebanon tax farms. The Shihabs further solidified their alliance with the Ma'ns when, in 1674, Musa Shihab married the daughter of Emir Ahmad Ma'n. In 1680, Emir Ahmad mediated a conflict between the Shihabs and the Shia Muslim Harfush clan of the Beqaa Valley, after the latter killed Faris Shihab in 1680 (Faris had recently displaced the Harfush from Baalbek), prompting an armed mobilization by the Shihabs.
In 1693, the Ottoman authorities launched a major military expedition, consisting of 18,500 troops, against Emir Ahmad when he declined a request to suppress the Hamade sheikhs after they raided Byblos, killing forty Ottoman soldiers, including the garrison commander, Ahmad Qalawun, a descendant of Mamluk sultan Qalawun. Emir Ahmad fled and had his tax farms confiscated and transferred to Musa Alam al-Din, who also commandeered the Ma'n palace in Deir al-Qamar. The following year, Emir Ahmad and his Shihab allies mobilized their forces in Wadi al-Taym and conquered the Chouf, forcing Musa Alam al-Din to flee to Sidon. Emir Ahmad was restored his tax farms in 1695.
When Emir Ahmad Ma'n died without a male heir in 1697, the sheikhs of the Qaysi Druze faction of Mount Lebanon convened in Semqaniyeh and declared their allegiances to Bashir Shihab I as emir of Mountain Lebanon and to the Shihab Dynasty. Bashir was related to the Ma'ns through his mother, who was the sister of Ahmad Ma'n and the wife of Bashir's father, Husayn Shihab. Due to the influence of Husayn Ma'n, the youngest of Fakhr ad-Din's sons, who was a high-ranking official in the Ottoman imperial government, the Ottoman authorities declined to confirm Bashir's authority over the tax farms of Mount Lebanon; Husayn Ma'n forsake his hereditary claim to the Ma'n emirate in favor of his career as the Ottoman ambassador to India. Instead, the Ottoman authorities appointed Husayn Ma'n's choice, Haydar Shihab, the son of Musa Shihab and Ahmad Ma'n's daughter. Haydar's appointment was confirmed by the governor of Sidon, and agreed upon by the Druze sheikhs, but because Haydar was still a minor, Bashir was kept on as regent.