Ottoman Saida and Problems of a Lebanese ‘National’ Narrative.

Book Summary

There has been a growing interest in recent years in reviewing the continued impact of the Ottoman Empire even long after its demise at the end of the First World War. The wars in former Yugoslavia, following hot on the civil war in Lebanon, were reminders that the settlements of 1918-22 were not final. While many of the successor states to the Ottoman empire, in east and west, had been built on forms of nationalist ideology and rhetoric opposed to the empire, a newer trend among historians has been to look at these histories as Ottoman provincial history. The present volume is an attempt to bring some of those histories from across the former Ottoman space together. They cover from parts of former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece to Lebanon, including Turkey itself, providing rich material for comparing regions which normally are not compared.

Article Abstract

The challenge of constructing a national historical narrative faces many societies that emerged in modern times from multi-national empires. Historians in Ottoman successor states have found various ways of relating the old empire to modern issues, ranging from dismissive condemnation of the Ottoman past, to selective incorporation, and even to nostalgia. This chapter looks at issues in recent Lebanese historical writing about the Ottoman period, using three studies of Ottoman Saida as its material. Lebanese writing about the country during the Ottoman period has in large part focused on the histories of the Mountain-based Ma'ni and Shihabi emirates for the earlier centuries, and the Mutasarrifiyya for the later decades. The appearance over a period of 15 years in the 1980s and 1990s of three monograph-length works dealing with Ottoman Saida presents an opportunity for historiographic investigation. These works invite readers to consider how the authors understand their country's Ottoman past.