Social Conflict, Sects, and Foreign Intervention

This chapter contemplates the production of shared identity in the modern age and the creation of a framework for comparison and the couching of grievances between those who share that identity. It traces the emergence of sectarianism in the nineteenth-century Levant. Indeed, it was the Tanzimat reforms that created a nascent Ottoman public sphere and introduced new ideas and currents. This chapter argues that the interplay of local conflicts, top-down reform, and foreign states’ efforts to cultivate local constituencies by presenting themselves as the protectors of particular religious groups, produced an environment which encouraged locals to fall back on the latter, sowing the seeds of political sectarianism. The events of the Mount Lebanon massacres of 1860 were the Tanzimat’s greatest test. They were the product of some social transformations that led international response to produce the Arab World’s first sectarian political system in the Mutasarrifate of Mount Lebanon.