The Greek Orthodox Waqf in Lebanon During the Ottoman Period

SHEDET (Annual Peer-Reviewed Journal Issued By The Faculty Of Archaeology, Fayoum University), 2015

In the past ten years, I have never enjoyed a book as much as I enjoyed the Balkanlar’da Osmanlı vakıfları, vakfiyeler Yunanistan. In just a few words, this book considers the best publication of 2017 concerning the Ottoman Greece. Though, the immense number of publications dedicated to the Ottoman heritage in the Balkans in general and particularly in Greece, especially during the last three decades, this book opens a new circle of more analyzed studies regarding the ottoman presence in Greece from various aspects. In the past ten years, I have never enjoyed a book as much as I enjoyed the Balkanlar’da Osmanlı vakıfları, vakfiyeler Yunanistan. In just a few words, this book considers the best publication of 2017 concerning the Ottoman Greece. Though, the immense number of publications dedicated to the Ottoman heritage in the Balkans in general and particularly in Greece, especially during the last three decades, this book opens a new circle of more analyzed studies regarding the ottoman presence in Greece from various aspects. This book represents the second edition of the IRCICA series that titled “Ottoman Waqfs in the Balkans,” its first edition was published in 2012 in a three-volume book titled “Ottoman Waqfs in the Balkans: Waqf Deeds, Bulgaria.” A demi-decade, the second edition has been published; a five-volume book publishes 487 waqf deeds ‘waqfiyehs’ belonging to the waqfs that were founded on the Greek territories under the Ottoman rule. These waqfiyehs were collected from the Waqfiyeh Registers “Vakfiye Defterleri” in the Archives of the General Directorate of Waqfs of Turkey, the Turkish Prime Ministry’s Ottoman Archives, and the Topkapı Palace Archives. The 487 published waqfiyehs cover 54 Greek villages, townships and islands between the years 1427–1912.

This book contains translations into English of the documents of the Ottoman Umur-i Mühimme Defteri, or Register of Public Affairs, which bear on the history of Lebanon – or, rather, the parts of Ottoman Syria that ultimately came to form Lebanon – in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is the period in the Ottoman history of the country that has hitherto received the least scholarly attention because local documentation for it is, at best, scarce and uneven and, for the most part, lacking. This is not the case for the history of Lebanon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when local documentation becomes more plentiful. Consequently, scholars of Lebanese history during the Ottoman period have tended to focus their attention on these two latter centuries and barely touch on the two preceding ones.

The Ottoman Empire promulgated codes of rules for Lebanon based on the principle of ethnic-religious representation during the process of institutional reforms launched in the Tanzimat Period. It can be said that the pressure imposed by the imperialist great powers determined the road map of this process, in such a way that, secular redefinition of the population of this region might deactivate intervention device which was executed by means of ethno-religious representation. In this sense, the Lebanon society was defined not as a secular and national unity, but as a religious agency founded on the principle of religion. And, political regime, which was constituted according to this principle under the control of imperialism, found sources for ideological legitimacy within the religious communion system. This study aims to investigate the ethnic-religious/sectional component of this system; and in this context, to attempt to analyze the disjunctive role of administrative regulations in a divided society in the context of Ottoman Empire district of Lebanon. The database of this investigation will be "Lebanon Mountain Regulations" introduced in 1850 and 1864. The primary purpose in selecting these regulations as the sample case is that they contain comprehensive information for the analysis of relations of politics and administration in a divided society.

2015

Despite the protection afforded to the smaller minorities of the Ottoman Empire through the millet system (Chapter One), Syrian Orthodoxy witnessed weakness and depletion throughout the nineteenth century, caused by significant conversion to Western Christianity, particularly in

Estudos Internacionais, 2020

The 19 th century was a time of social and political upheaval for the Ottoman Empire. To contend with dwindling territories, uprisings, unrest, and international military, political, and economic pressure, it had to overcome structural deficiencies in the armed forces, economy, and State bureaucracy that kept it lagging behind its European counterparts. The modernizing impetus ultimately took the form of full-fledged legal and institutional reform by mid-century, transforming but also unsettling the Ottoman State and society. In this article we discuss a central component of those reforms and of the international relations of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century: the legal status of non-Moslem minorities. We frame our discussion in the analysis of two moments: the official recognition of the Greek-Catholic (Melkite) religious community in 1848 and the sectarian civil conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus in 1860. The intersecting vectors of economic religious and political interests in their local, regional and international dimensions will be fleshed out, evincing a more nuanced and multilayered, and less monolithic and state-centered, approach toward the international relations of the late Ottoman Empire and the working of its institutions.

In the House of Understanding: Histories in Memory of Kamal S. Salibi, 2017

A review of Lebanese-authored, Arabic-language histories of Ottoman Tripoli, part of my attempt to understand how Lebanese historical works interpret their country's Ottoman past, and what these interpretations say about contested Lebanese identities.

Middle Eastern Studies, 1999

A review of the way that Syria's and Lebanon's Ottoman period has been presented in local urban histories written and published in Arabic in the two countries from the 1970s through the 1990s.

Educational Research and Reviews, 2013

The madrasa began to spread in Syria (Bilad al-Sham) as a higher institution for religious education since the Zangid rule (521H./1127 to 569H./ 1173). During the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods, main cities of Syria were characterized by many madrasas, especially the major cities that served the political rule like, Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem and others. By the late Mamluk period, various factors had a direct effect on the fall of the madrasa function in Syria. Although a number of attempts were made to renovate and redevelop the waqf of madrasas, the adverse circumstances had such a strong impact that the eventual result was extensive disintegration of the waqf and madrasas in Syria. This paper discussed the motives of endowing madrasas in Syria during the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods, despite the difficulty in separating one motive to another. During the Zangid and Ayyubid periods, it is noticeable that religious motives were stronger, while the political factor was underscored during the Mamluk era.

הוצאת רסלינג 2023