Ma'ans

The Ma'n dynasty ( ar, ٱلْأُسْرَةُ ٱلْمَعْنِيَّةُ, Banū Maʿn, alternatively spelled ''Ma'an''), also known as the Ma'nids; ( ar, ٱلْمَعْنِيُّونَ), were a family of Druze chiefs of Arab stock based in the rugged Chouf area of southern Mount Lebanon who were politically prominent in the 15th–17th centuries. Traditional Lebanese histories date the family's arrival in the Chouf to the 12th century, when they were held to have struggled against the Crusader lords of Beirut and Sidon alongside their Druze allies, the Tanukh Buhturids. They may have been part of a wider movement by the Muslim rulers of Damascus to settle militarized Arab tribesmen in Mount Lebanon as a buffer against the Crusader strongholds along the Levantine coast. Fakhr al-Din Uthman ibn Yunus Ma'n (), the first member of the family whose historicity is certain, was the "emir of the Chouf", according to contemporary sources and, despite the non-use of mosques by the Druze, founded the Fakhreddine Mosque in the family's stronghold of Deir al-Qamar.

Two years following the advent of Ottoman rule in the Syrian region in 1516, three chiefs of the Ma'n dynasty were imprisoned for rebellion by the Damascus Eyalet governor Janbirdi al-Ghazali, but released by Sultan Selim I. The Ma'ns and their Druze coreligionists in the Chouf were continually targeted in punitive campaigns by the Ottomans related to their evasion and defiance of government tax collectors and their stockpiling of illegal firearms, which were often superior to those of the government troops. The particularly destructive campaign of 1585 prompted the Ma'nid emir Qurqumaz ibn Yunis to go into hiding in the neighboring Keserwan, where he died the following year.

His son, Fakhr al-Din II, emerged as the local chief and tax farmer of the Chouf and, in contrast to his Ma'nid predecessors, cultivated close ties with the authorities in Damascus and the imperial capital, Constantinople. In 1593, he was appointed the governor of the Sidon-Beirut Sanjak, spanning southern Mount Lebanon and the coastal towns of Beirut and Sidon, and in 1602 was additionally appointed to the Safed Sanjak, spanning the Jabal Amil, Galilee, and port of Acre. By 1613, he had amassed considerable power but lost his imperial patron, while his illicit takeover of strategic forts, hiring of outlawed musketeers, and government knowledge of his alliance with their Tuscan enemies prompted a major campaign against the Ma'ns. The dynasty lost its territories and forts and Fakhr al-Din escaped to Italy. Within two years, his brother Yunus and son Ali restored Ma'nid power in Sidon-Beirut and Safed, which was consolidated when Fakhr al-Din returned to lead the dynasty in 1618. After a few years, he defeated his major rival Yusuf Sayfa of Tripoli and extended Ma'nid dominion and tax farming rights to predominantly Maronite, northern Mount Lebanon. By 1630 he controlled much of Tripoli Eyalet and was poised against Damascus. The imperial government destroyed Ma'nid power in a second expedition in 1633, killing most of the dynasty's members and capturing and executing Fakhr al-Din in 1635.

A surviving son of Yunus, Mulhim Ma'n defeated the family's government-backed Druze
rival, Ali Alam al-Din, in 1636 and regained the ''iltizam'' of the Druze Mountain in 1642. His sons Ahmad and Qurqumaz succeeded him as paramount emirs of the Druze in 1658, but were challenged by the Alam al-Dins and other Ottoman-backed Druze from the start. Qurqumaz was killed by the Ottomans in 1662. Ahmad defeated the Alam al-Dins in 1667 and assumed the ''iltizam'' of the Druze Mountain and neighboring, Maronite-populated Kisrawan. He maintained control of the region despite government dismissals and campaigns against him throughout the 1690s for backing Shia rebels. Ma'nid rule came to an end when Ahmad died without male progeny in 1697. The Druze chiefs selected Bashir Shihab, whose mother was Mulhim's daughter, to succeed Ahmad. He held the ''iltizam'' of the Druze Mountain and Kisrawan until his death in 1706, after which Haydar Shihab, whose mother was a daughter of Ahmad, took his place. His descendants from the Shihab dynasty continued to hold the ''iltizam'' until the expulsion of Bashir II in 1841. The emirate and ''iltizam'' of the Ma'ns and Shihabs over much of Mount Lebanon is viewed by historians as an early precursor to the present-day Lebanese Republic.

Origins

According to the historian Kamal Salibi, the "origins of the house of Ma'n remains unclear, what is related about it by the traditional Lebanese historians being without foundation". The traditional account holds that the eponymous progenitor of the Banu Ma'n belonged to a clan of the Rabi'a, a large Arab tribal confederation with branches in the upper Euphrates River valley. Ma'n fought alongside the Artuqid leader Ilghazi against the Crusaders in northern Syria. He later moved to the Beqaa Valley until being transferred to the area of the Chouf (also transliterated as Shuf) in southern Mount Lebanon in 1120 by Ilghazi's ally, Toghtekin of Damascus, to reinforce the Tanukhid Druze emirs of the neighboring Gharb district around modern Aley against the Crusader lords of Beirut. According to Salibi's analysis of the 19th-century history of Tannus al-Shidyaq, the deployment of the Ma'n was part of the wider deployment of Arab military settlers to parts of Mount Lebanon and its environs by the Muslim rulers of Damascus to counter the Crusaders. The emirs of the Banu Shihab, an Arab family established in nearby Wadi al-Taym, collaborated with the Ma'nids against the Crusaders and from early on the two families established marital ties.

The Crusaders had captured Beirut in 1110 and during their subsequent raids against the Gharb the Tanukhid emir Adud al-Dawla and most of his kinsmen were slain. Ma'n had found the Chouf abandoned, though there is no evidence of its desolation at the time, according to the historian Robert Brendon Betts. The Tanukhid emir Buhtur, who was appointed commander of the Gharb by Damascus in 1147, supported the Ma'nid emir in constructing permanents dwellings for his clan in the Chouf. The Ma'n were joined in the settlement of the Chouf by their north Syrian associates, the Abu Nakad and Talhuq clans. Refugees from nearby areas taken over by the Crusaders migrated to the Chouf and numerous villages were founded, including the Ma'n's headquarter village of Baaqlin. Baaqlin became a major center of the Druze faith, and in the present day is the largest Druze locality in Lebanon. Betts deems it improbable that the Banu Ma'n had been followers of "the Druze religion before coming into its sphere" in Mount Lebanon. Ma'n died in 1148 and was succeeded as head of his clan by his son Mundhir. According to the historian William Harris, the Banu Ma'n retained their lordship of the Chouf, as well as their ties to the descendants of Buhtur and the Banu Shihab, from their establishment in 1120 through the Mamluk era (1260–1516).

The first Ma'nid "whose historicity is beyond question" was Fakhr al-Din Uthman, in the words of Salibi. He is also referred to as Fakhr al-Din I to distinguish him from his better known descendant. The Gharb-based Druze chronicler Ibn Sibat () refers to Fakhr al-Din Uthman as the "emir of the ''Ashwaf'' lural of Choufin the region of Sidon" who died in August/September 1506. The Damascene historian Shams al-Din Ibn Tulun () notes that a certain "Ibn Ma'n" was in the custody of the Mamluk governor of Damascus in 1498–99. An inscription in a mosque in Deir al-Qamar, a major village in the Chouf, credits "''al-Maqarr al-Fakhri'' he Fakhrid SeatEmir Fakhr al-Din Uthman ibn ''al-Hajj'' Yunus ibn Ma'n" as the builder of the mosque in 1493. Fakhr al-Din's construction of a mosque, which were not used by the Druze, and the honorific of ''al-Hajj'' attached to the name of his father Yunus indicates they were influenced by the major Druze religious reformer, their contemporary al-Sayyid al-Tanukhi (), who advocated for Druze adoption of traditional Muslim rituals. They may also have represented attempts to gain favor with the Sunni Muslim Mamluk rulers. The usage of the terms "emir" (commander) and ''al-Maqarr'' (an honorific for leading Mamluk officers or officials) suggest the Ma'nid chiefs held military commissions in the Mamluk army. Fakhr al-Din's son Yunus was also called by Ibn Sibat the "emir of the ''Ashwaf''" at the time of his death in 1511–12. The accounts of Ibn Sibat indicate the Ma'n controlled all or parts of the Chouf before the Ottoman conquest of the Levant in 1516.

Early interactions with the Ottomans

Following the Ottoman conquest, the Chouf was administratively divided into three ''nahiyas'' (subdistricts) of the Sidon-Beirut Sanjak, which was a district of the Damascus Eyalet. The Chouf subdistricts, along with the subdistricts of Gharb, Jurd and Matn were predominantly populated by Druze at the time and collectively referred to as the Druze Mountain. The Ottoman sultan Selim I, after entering Damascus and receiving the defection of its Mamluk governor Janbirdi al-Ghazali, who was kept in his post, showed preference to the Turkmen Assaf clan, the Keserwan-based enemies of the Ma'nids' Buhturid allies. He entrusted the Assafs with political authority or tax-farming rights in the subdistricts between Beirut and Tripoli, north of the Druze Mountain. The Buhturid emir Jamal al-Din Hajji did not give allegiance to Selim in Damascus and after discarding an Ottoman call to arms in 1518, he was imprisoned. The son of the Ma'nid emir Yunus, Qurqumaz, was summoned and confirmed by Selim in Damascus as the chief of the Chouf in 1517, according to the 17th-century historian and Maronite patriarch Istifan al-Duwayhi. Ibn Sibat does not mention any Ma'nid being received by the sultan in Damascus, but noted that the Ma'nid emirs Qurqumaz, Alam al-Din Sulayman and Zayn al-Din were all arrested by Janbirdi al-Ghazali in 1518 and transferred to the custody of Selim, who released them after a heavy fine for supporting the rebellion of the Bedouin Banu al-Hansh emirs in Sidon and the Beqaa Valley.

The three Ma'nids likely shared the chieftainship of the Chouf, though the length and nature of the arrangement is not known. Zayn al-Din is assumed by the modern historian Abdul-Rahim Abu-Husayn to be the "Zayn Ibn Ma'n" mentioned in an Ottoman register as the owner of a dilapidated watermill with two millstones in 1543, while Ibn Tulun's reference to a part of the Chouf as "Shuf Sulayman Ibn Ma'n" in 1523 likely refers to Alam al-Din Sulayman. Neither Zayn nor Sulayman are mentioned by later chroniclers of the Ma'nids, likely for political reasons related to the chroniclers' association to the Ma'nid line of Qurqumaz. The latter was based in the Chouf village of Baruk, where he gave refuge to members of the Sayfa family after their flight from Akkar in 1528. Qurqumaz's establishment in Baruk instead of his predecessors' apparent seat in Deir al-Qamar may have been related to a conflict with Alam al-Din Sulayman, who may have controlled Deir al-Qamar at the time, or a division of the Chouf between the Ma'nid chieftains.

In 1523 forty-three villages in Shuf Sulayman Ibn Ma'n, including Baruk, were burned by the forces of the Damascus governor Khurram Pasha for tax arrears and Ma'nid disobedience, and the governor's forces sent back to Damascus four cartloads of Druze heads and religious texts in the aftermath of the campaign. According to Harris, "such brutality entrenched ruzeresistance", and in the following year Druze fighters killed '' subashis'' (provincial officials) appointed by Khurram Pasha to administer Mount Lebanon's subdistricts, prompting another government expedition against the Chouf, which returned three cartloads of Druze heads and three hundred women and children as captives. The death of Jamal al-Din Hajji in prison in 1521 and the Ottoman expeditions led the Buhturids to accept Ma'nid precedence over the Druze of southern Mount Lebanon. In 1545 the leading emir of the Druze, Yunus Ma'n, was lured to Damascus and executed by the authorities under unclear circumstances, but suggesting continued insubordination by the Druze under Ma'nid leadership.

Following the death of Yunus, the Druze moved to import from the Venetians long-range muskets superior to those employed by the Ottomans. In 1565 the new arms were put to use by the Druze in an ambush on Ottoman ''sipahi'' (fief-holding cavalries) in Ain Dara in the Jurd sent to collect taxes from southern Mount Lebanon. For the next twenty years, the Druze successfully beat back government attempts to collect taxes and confiscate weapons, while increasing their rifle arsenals. In 1585 the imperial authorities organized a much larger campaign against the Chouf and the Sidon-Beirut Sanjak in general led by the ''beylerbey'' (provincial governor) of Egypt, Ibrahim Pasha. It ended in a decisive government victory, the confiscation of thousands of rifles and the collection of tax arrears, which had been accruing for decades, in the form of currency or property. The most important leader in the Chouf at the time was a Ma'nid emir named Qurqumaz, possibly the son of Yunus, The modern historian Muhammad Adnan Bakhit holds this Yunus was likely the head of the Ma'nids at the time. A Ma'nid chief named Yunus was recorded by the contemporary poet Muhammad ibn Mami al-Rumi () to have been captured and hanged by the Ottomans at an undefined date as a result of unspecified complaints by the ''qadi'' (head judge) of Sidon to the Sublime Porte. and possibly the grandson of the above-mentioned Qurqumaz. He had likely been the chieftain of the specific area of the Chouf referred to as "Shuf Ibn Ma'n", a subdistrict mentioned in Ottoman government documents from 1523, 1530, 1543 and 1576. His preeminence among the Ma'nids was possibly the result of the natural deaths or eliminations of the other Ma'nid chiefs. Like his father, Qurqumaz was a ''multazim'' (tax farmer) in the Chouf, though he resided in Ain Dara, and was recognized as a ''muqaddam'' of the Druze, his title of "emir" being used by local historians as a traditional honor rather than an official rank. Qurqumaz had refused to submit to Ibrahim Pasha and escaped the Chouf and died soon after in hiding.

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See also

* Mount Lebanon Emirate

Notes

References

Bibliography

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Further reading

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Lebanese noble families