In a 1988 interview about the Great Syrian Revolt (1925–7) in Lebanon’s northern Bekaa – a predominantly Shiʿi borderland – the aging revolutionary fighter Husayn Yasin Jaʿfar criticizes Western-educated historians who later documented the events:
The revolt ended and was buried. I believe that the generation that was born in the 1940s knows nothing about it … The people who were around in the days of the revolt were not educated, and those who wrote the history books relied on the foreigners’ record instead of referring to the people. Me, I am in my eighties today; and I wish that our patriotic battles against the foreigners would be given the interest they deserve in the history that my grandchildren study. For this is history that we wrote, and we wrote it in our blood.Footnote 1
Husayn Yasin Jaʿfar does not conceal his disdain for the educated professionals who, immersed in the French archives, wrote the history of Lebanon. The contrast drawn is between the ‘uneducated rebels’ and the presumably ‘educated’ historians who consult foreigners’ records. Beyond the contrast between oral and written history, this fault line also suggests two kinds of historical knowledge: the local, first-hand, and almost visceral knowledge of engaged rebels who ‘wrote [this history] in [their] blood’ and the professionalized knowledge of far-removed researchers immersed in the colonial archives. Beyond these divergent ways of knowing, there lies an ethos of what the uprising meant to participants, not only militarily but in the embodiment of normative and, as I shall argue, gendered behaviours.
I
How does one recover the voices of Bekaaʿi rural fighters whose perspective was systematically marginalized – first by colonial administrators who saw them as criminals, and later by nationalist historians who generally preferred to limit themselves to Syria’s nation-state borders?
By tracing the papers of the Haydar family in Lebanon’s Bekaa district of Baalbek-Hermel, this microhistory focuses on a region both overlooked in the broader historiography of the Great Syrian Revolt and largely undocumented except by local authors.Footnote 2 It integrates disparate source materials to bring to light the role and activism of Tawfiq Hawlu Haydar and his mother, Shahina, in the uprising, as well as the role of their senior relatives who collaborated with the French. Detailing the Bekaa’s militantism, sectarianism, family feuds, and gendered norms of behaviour, the story uses this local case study to interrogate the broader French colonial discourse of rogue rebel bandits, rugged masculinity, and the subdued status of oriental and especially veiled women.Footnote 3 It looks at how global colonial discourse intersected with rural areas, local gendered norms, and qabaḍāy (local toughs) activities in northeast Lebanon. While the French used paternalism and an imperial ideology of masculinity to naturalize their colonial authority, their rigid framework stood in opposition to the more fluid gender dynamics of the mobilized rural class of the peripheral Bekaa.Footnote 4 Similarly to Reem Bailony’s examination of Wadi al-Taym in the south of Lebanon, I focus on a contested borderland and its impact on the momentum and spread of the revolt.Footnote 5
To reconstruct the local reality of the Bekaa, I draw upon multiple sources, moving beyond the French archives to foreground non-official materials that give voice to non-politicians and non-urban actors. This method has made its strides in Middle East scholarship, mainly for its ability to recover hidden voices.Footnote 6 My results do not claim to represent ‘the truth’ about what went on in the Bekaa, but rather ‘help illuminate a perspective that is missing from the way in which the story has been told’ in the colonial archives and literature.Footnote 7 Ultimately, the challenge is to produce an account that meets the rigour of scholarly work on local sources and adds the micro-historical benefit of reflecting the subjectivities of its protagonists.Footnote 8 The sometimes-episodic nature of these stories stems from the bits and pieces recovered. Even so, I have tried to situate all sources in their larger context, and to fill the gaps with adjoining primary and secondary literature, both colonial and local.
The article is organized around three entangled themes. It begins in section II with the life of Tawfiq – an entry point into the lived experience of rebels’ rugged masculinity – and situates that performance historically. The narrative of Tawfiq’s life follows a loose chronological arc: his membership and Arab nationalist commitment in the underground society al-ʿArabiyya al-Fatat, the First World War, the 1920 battle of Maysalun, which brought down the Arab Kingdom under French arms, and, finally, the Great Syrian Revolt (1925–7). While nationalism was a new phenomenon in the region, we can already see in Tawfiq’s rhetoric an emphasis on national identities – Arab vs Turk, Arab vs French – as opposed to sectarian or other identities. It was interwoven with concepts of hard masculinity as best understood through these toughs’ propensity to engage in physical fighting rather than negotiate with the colonizers. Thompson adequately qualifies this space of negotiation as ‘the colonial civic order’.Footnote 9 Section III then frames the northern Bekaa as a contested site. It turns to Baalbek’s most controversial and fiercest confrontation with French forces, led by Tawfiq, in May 1926, when the local serail – government office – was burned and sectarian tensions ran high. It foregrounds class antagonism, violent sectarianism, and the criminal actions of violent rebel factions. Section IV of the article turns to women in the revolt, especially Shahina, Tawfiq’s mother. While keeping with the chronological arc of the Great Syrian Revolt in the Bekaa, it foregrounds battles that unfolded in the summer of 1926, before the revolt was crushed by French military might.
The sources are fuller for Shahina – her political interventions and battlefield presence – than for most other women for whom we have only scattered recollections here and there. Even so, these fragments can be gathered and read alongside Shahina’s involvement in the revolt, to place rural women of the Bekaa in dialogue with the literature on women’s activism.
II
In its most striking feature, the record of the Great Syrian Revolt presents a tapestry of words belonging to the lexicon of masculinity. Quite predictably, the local rebels frame their anticolonial motivations as manly characteristics of heroism, honour, and chivalry, defending the proverbial al-arḍ wa-l-ʿirḍ (land and honour).Footnote 10 By contrast, the French colonials portray the rebels as an expression of excessive masculinity – or as General Carbillet, who saw the outbreak of the revolt, called it: ‘the most masculine energy’ – that falls outside the realm of the ideal civilized man.Footnote 11 Of course, the traits of masculinity attached to both colonial and anticolonial ambitions have been recounted multiple times in the broader historiography of the French empire.Footnote 12 To move beyond these well-researched binaries, the following biography of Tawfiq – Arab officer in the Ottoman army turned insurgent – offers a micro-historical lens on how masculine ideals were locally enacted, narrated, and made meaningful in the context of violent defiance in the northern Bekaa.
Tawfiq’s father, Hawlu Haydar, passed away when he was only two and his mother Shahina raised him and his brother under the sponsorship of his grandfather and later of his uncle.Footnote 13 From a young age, they inculcated Tawfiq with the values of hard masculinity. When he was only three, his grandfather put him on a horse and took him hunting. While grandfather shot bullets in the air right above Tawfiq’s head, the child’s body and ankles were held stable by men on either side of the horse.Footnote 14 The experience was intended to toughen Tawfiq from a young age. It aimed to make the sound of gunfire ordinary and inculcate fearlessness into a boy expected to become a qabaḍāy. Under his grandfather’s sponsorship, Tawfiq attended the prestigious Iʿdadiyya school in Damascus before joining the Christian Batrakiyya school in Beirut. Tawfiq was a rowdy teenager. This may have been why, when his grandfather died, his uncle Hasan sent him to military school in Istanbul at age seventeen, where he would mingle with fellow Arab soldiers from a much more modest background.Footnote 15
Tawfiq was already in Syria when the revolt broke out, and his pan-Arab ideology had anchored him in military action long before 1925. He claimed his political education started in Istanbul at the ḥarbiyya military school when he entered the secret society al-ʿArabiyya al-Fatat founded by an older relative, Rustum Haydar.Footnote 16 It was in Istanbul that Tawfiq and others like Zayn Mirʿi Jaʿfar and Saʿid al-ʿAs would develop a nationalist consciousness that would inspire them to struggle for Arab independence. It was there that the slogan ‘Arab lands belong to the Arabs’ was first championed and that Tawfiq first started his career as a revolutionary.Footnote 17
Al-ʿArabiyya al-Fatat was formally established in Paris but worked in Istanbul amongst Arab youth within the structures of the ‘Literary Forum’, an ostensibly non-political organization that nonetheless became an incubator for still-fuzzy notions of Arab nationalism in the Ottoman capital. Though al-ʿArabiyya al-Fatat became the most famous of them, other Arab societies mushroomed in the empire.Footnote 18 In his last recorded interview with Ilyas ʿAbbud in 1966, Tawfiq narrates its activism among Arab military men, noting its ‘top secret’ character and, how ‘together with the Forum, they constituted what resembled the Arabs’ sole political party’.Footnote 19
In 1914 Tawfiq engaged in sabotage activities that provoked the Ottomans, who pursued him as a result. The self-fashioning in Tawfiq’s narrative – its comic turns and escapes – reads like an entertaining tale of risks and close shaves: he went into hiding, then sneaked into Bulgaria. His Christian friend from Akkar, Lebanon, ʿAtiyya ʿAtiyya, forged a passport for him under the false identity of a Christian Orthodox from Jerusalem named ‘Tawfiq Badawi’. This allowed him to escape his death sentence in absentia.Footnote 20 The contrast between his narrative and the French rhetoric of banditry highlights how these rebels curated their own stories, while colonial archives criminalized them.Footnote 21 Though many rebels looted and pillaged, French files explicitly depicted anti-colonial sentiment as Muslim fanaticism, xenophobia (xénophobie), and Francophobia. Tawfiq’s adoption of a specific Christian identity is a key moment in the narrative, illustrating the fluid self-representation he sought to convey in opposition to the rigid anti-Christian label many rebels of the Great Syrian Revolt would receive.
In one episode, he recounts how he became an Orthodox hajj (pilgrim), in Bulgaria during his fugitive days:
At the time, I was twenty-one years old. … A giant of a gendarme came to me while I was sitting in a café. He pointed to me and said: ‘Please come along.’ He led me to the barracks where I met a colonel. … As soon as he found out that I was Orthodox by sect, he embraced me happily, shouting: ‘Orthodox! Orthodox!’Footnote 22
If Tawfiq sometimes gilded the tale, Ilyas ʿAbbud – the interviewer in 1966, himself a Christian – met him with a voice that renders the material approachable, lively and, crucially, sympathetic to the cause Tawfiq embodied: ‘And, here, the man fleeing the Istanbul gallows recalls amusing stories of his sojourn in the small Bulgarian city.’Footnote 23 ʿAbbud continues:
The officer held a large party in his honour, attended by the bishop, the chief of police, the governor, and the dignitaries, all asking for his blessings and asking him about his city, Jerusalem, and the holy sites in it. The city’s inhabitants would not let him leave for twenty-eight days, bestowing their generosity and hospitality on him. And the ten golden liras he had with him remained with him for the sole reason that he was an ‘Orthodox’ and a ‘hajj’ from Jerusalem.Footnote 24
After the execution of his relative Salih Haydar by the infamous Ottoman governor Jamal Pasha in 1915, Tawfiq volunteered in the French forces, fighting on the Greek front against the Ottomans and the Germans in 1917.Footnote 25 His sojourn from Bekaa to Damascus, Beirut – where he went to school as a young student – Istanbul, Bulgaria, and then Greece, all by the time he had reached his mid-twenties, was a formative experience. In addition to naturally passing for a Greek Orthodox hajj from Palestine, he enrolled in the Christian French troops to fight against the Muslim Ottoman empire in Greece, but then returned to his homeland and waged an armed revolt against French colonialism. Told in his voice, these episodes sound like popular drama, suggesting a larger-than-life adventurer, very different from the clichés we see in the French archives of a sectarian rural mutineer from the Bekaa.Footnote 26 When Bulgarians took an unprecedented interest in him because of his supposed Christian Jerusalemite origins, he was amused, recalling: ‘They sought my blessings as if I were a holy man or a saint!’Footnote 27 Ironically, he showed no sectarian qualms about being misidentified as a Christian, easily falling into the role and boasting: ‘I greatly benefited from my fake [Christian] identity.’Footnote 28
In April 1919, he returned to Greater Syria and joined the Arab forces in Damascus. Recounting the famous tale of the battle of Maysalun where the French army defeated the indigenous forces of the Arab Kingdom in Syria, Tawfiq, stationed in Zabadani, says:
I knew very well the commanders of the Arab army, headed by the martyred hero Yusuf al-ʿAzma. They wanted to fight a battle that was … desperate, because doubts and suspicions had filled their hearts regarding the policy of weakness and feebleness pursued by the government in Damascus. For the latter had submitted to General Gouraud’s threats and first demobilized part of the army.Footnote 29
Tawfiq’s words suggest a rift between the politicians who acquiesced to power and the military men who fought despite the odds, and sometimes precisely to counter the ‘suspicions’ filled by ‘feeble’ government policies. In the view of the mujahidin, the political disposition to negotiate with the oppressor and enter the French civic order amounted to subjugation.Footnote 30 Nevertheless, such pacifist notions of diplomacy were familiar to the Western-educated Arab bureaucrats who often preferred the pen to the sword.Footnote 31 For Tawfiq, these idealist slogans, so thinly veiled under the violence of enforcement, were deceitful. He continues:
The orders to withdraw continued to come in from Damascus until they were objected to by Yusuf al-ʿAzma’s will in Maysalun. He came in person to the front and decided to resist … at any price. … If it was inevitable for the enemy to enter Damascus, then it must enter on our corpses. … The late Yusuf al-ʿAzma wanted to fall as a martyr … He carried the cannon on his chest and headed forward, placing his body amidst the hell of bullets, and was killed. What he did was voluntary martyrdom, for he could have easily withdrawn.Footnote 32
Al-ʿAzma became an Arab legend for his willingness to set his life on the line in pursuit of liberation from foreign colonial rule. Read this way, al-ʿAzma’s choice was a politics of defiance: turning one man’s sacrifice into popular resolve. As Satiʿ al-Husari – then minister of education and close colleague of al-ʿAzma – recalled: ‘[after Maysalun] the protagonists of nationalism … entered into a new life of struggle, arduous and ramified’.Footnote 33 And already by 1925, the Shiʿi ʿAmili poet al-Humani cast al-ʿAzma’s death in the idiom of the battle of Karbala – one of Shiʿism’s defining moments when Imam Husayn was martyred. Likening al-ʿAzma’s sacrifice at Maysalun to the sacred act of martyrdom, he wrote: ‘My horse stopped at Maysalun – as I have stood so many times at Karbala.’Footnote 34
After the defeat of 1920, Tawfiq returned to Baalbek to find that his senior relatives had already arranged for a meeting with a high-ranking French officer, a certain ‘Colonel Niger’, to negotiate his terms of surrender and secure the obedience of this unruly rebel – in effect, to tame and re-educate him in the mould of French masculinity.Footnote 35 It was common for French officers to work tirelessly to ‘tame’, ‘neutralize’, and ‘sedentarize’ rebel fighters.Footnote 36 However, in line with the ideologies of manly anti-colonial resistance and further baffling French officials whose military might was undeniable, Tawfiq persisted with armed struggle.
He continues: ‘The plan was to stage the revolution in 1931 with the aim of expelling the French and immediately joining Iraq. But the events in Jabal al-ʿArab [i.e. Jabal Hawran] sped it up. The government arrested some shaykhs and humiliated them, and the Jabal rose like one man.’Footnote 37 Meanwhile, the French government saw itself as a ‘leader with carte blanche’, and characterized Arab ‘public opinion [as] female’ because ‘she is sensitive’ but also ‘indifferent’ and therefore inconsequential.Footnote 38 The gendered competition between both narratives drove the actors’ modes of behaviour and was reflected in their rhetoric such that the French mandate assumed the role of a stern father given ‘carte blanche’ to educate his ‘female’ Arab subordinate, while the Arab dissidents rose as ‘one [unified] man’.Footnote 39
Tawfiq spent most of his time in Syria, but left in April 1926 when the resistance was shrinking.Footnote 40 He returned to Baalbek where he rallied his men.Footnote 41 Given the power differential, scepticism of military victory was a recurrent theme of the period. Even more recurrent was the theme of manly defiance and ‘honourable death’ in the face of colonial oppression.Footnote 42
Tawfiq had learnt this lesson very well. Shaped by history and his own experience of colonialism, the will to fight became forged in these rebels’ self-definition of masculinity. King Faysal neatly summed it up when he proclaimed, in 1919, a year before Maysalun: ‘I consider no one a man unless he served his soil.’Footnote 43 When Tawfiq reached Baalbek in April 1926, only fifteen militants joined his uprising, while the notables of his family tried to dissuade him from fighting. They arranged a meeting with the Bekaa’s chief of intelligence, Lieutenant Mamier, on 21 April 1926. The event was a failure because Tawfiq did not denounce his nationalism and, as Senator Ibrahim Haydar later confessed to the High Commissioner in Beirut, Tawfiq left the premises disavowing his own family and swearing ‘to shed his blood for the sake of his homeland’.Footnote 44
In the mind of the French administration, this kind of hard masculinity was strongly associated with a pre-modern warrior image.Footnote 45 It vindicated their belief that Arab society was brutal and irrational.Footnote 46 Scholar Zafir al-Qasimi reported that a bewildered French official once commented: ‘What shall we do with these Syrians who believe that if they win, they are happy and if they die, they are martyrs?’Footnote 47 Tawfiq’s secret intelligence file shows the bitter anger of French administrators who could not control this ‘assassin and bandit’.Footnote 48 They sentenced him to death in absentia in 1927 and placed him under house arrest after his return from exile, only to report that he needed even ‘closer surveillance’.Footnote 49 They reported his mother as an active participant and documented his marriage in exile to an Egyptian woman. They observed that Tawfiq was without money and concluded ‘his wife must cost him a lot’.Footnote 50 The report ends with the judgement: Tawfiq ‘must be considered an irreducible and serious enemy, but also, perhaps, purchasable, at a high price’.Footnote 51
The tone of the report is bureaucratic yet frustrated. It portrays him as an emasculated husband who struggled to meet his wife’s financial demands. Moreover, the mention of his mother Shahina’s activism is not seen as pointing to a more gender-egalitarian environment. There is no sign that the fact that she is said to ‘actively support his band’ suggests that this rural woman’s role jars with the mandate power’s assumed models of local gender relations – portraying women as subservient appendages to men and as playing no role in public affairs.Footnote 52 There is no appreciation of the fact that Shahina’s activism may be an instance of at least some local rural women’s greater freedom and involvement in public social and political affairs. This blindness to the more complex role of women in the resistance becomes comprehensible when it is placed in the context of the mandate power’s view of masculinity – scattered across reports and memoirs – as a means of controlling other men rather than empowering women of the Levant.Footnote 53
III
Not only did the gender stereotypes imposed on local ties by the colonial power fail to understand the complexity of gender relations, but other stereotypes imported from the European feudal era also identified the role and status of local dignitaries with those of feudal European lords, denying the lower-status members of local clans any political agency. While Robert de Caix himself explicitly referred to local notables as latifundia landowners, the famous colonial-era researcher André Latron corroborated: these ‘primitive subgroups remain nominal and without any de facto existence’.Footnote 54 They ‘gather around a leader who is at the same time the master, the sole arbiter, and the representative of the community’.Footnote 55
The Syrian leadership of the uprising had planned for the formation of a network of mujahidin in the northern Bekaa as the basis for renewed mobilization in northern Syria and Lebanon. Consequently, in April 1926 a new group of about forty fighters led by the rebel Fayyad Shihab was formed in Baalbek to supplement Tawfiq’s band.Footnote 56 It is reported that the French got wind of the preparations and feared the spread of the rebellion to Baalbek, as its inhabitants had increasingly ‘favoured the revolution’.Footnote 57
On 14 May 1926, they led to a series of arrests amongst the rebels.Footnote 58 The heads of the Haydar family were not arrested on that specific day but later during the uprising.Footnote 59 The French saw them as feudal notables who could not control their unruly subordinates.Footnote 60 Acting on their conception of a European feudal society, the French could not fathom the disobedience of Bekaaʿi peasants to their feudal lords. The assumed lack of agency within the great majority of the common people is striking. This corroborated the French conclusion that despite their appearance of collaboration with the French mandate, the notables of the Bekaa, including Ibrahim Haydar, were stealthily directing the revolution. In a letter pleading for the release of his father and uncle, Ibrahim Haydar reveals:
In politics, what can we [Haydar notables] be blamed for? We have always sought to support the government. It is our temperament. As landowners it is even our interest … The insurrection? Only one member of our family has participated in it. He is neither the most notable nor the most influential. Wouldn’t the insurgents want us [notables] in their ranks? What proves it is the declaration made by the insurgent Tawfiq Hawlu who denies us, who especially pours out his hatred against my father and my uncle, guilty in his eyes of not having declared themselves for the insurrection and of not having provided the weight of their adhesion … We do not ask for mercy, your Excellency. No element of guilt has been retained by the heads of our family.Footnote 61
The letter is followed by a French report of the situation labelling the Haydar notables ‘anti-mandataire’.Footnote 62 The quoted passage suggests the Arab elite were unable to control this new radical generation of rebels even within their own family. Nonetheless, the French insisted obstinately on understanding Arabs through the lens of sectarian feudal societies. If the French identified the people of the Bekaa through units of family lineage and sectarian solidarity, then how could members of a family be at odds with their family’s notables and patriarchs? While Ibrahim Haydar clearly outlined the socio-economic distinctions within his family, insisting that Tawfiq was ‘not the most notable’ nor a political leader, the French continued to view the Haydars as one conniving feudal entity. This is not to say that the notables of the Bekaa did not support the uprising. However, their stance, like most notables, was always ambiguous and fraught with caution, two characteristics that did not fit the radicalism of the Arab officers.Footnote 63 They modestly supported the revolt but certainly did not lead it.
Despite arrests, the preparations for the uprising were ongoing. In Baalbek, three bands would lead the revolt: Tawfiq’s band, the ʿUkasha band, and Fayyad Shihab’s band.Footnote 64 On 18 May, the rebels of the three bands attacked the city of Baalbek and took over the government offices.Footnote 65 They set fire to all files, including court and real estate records. They moved on to loot and pillage hotels.Footnote 66 Detailed, first-hand accounts of that evening – the kind a microhistory would want – are rare but they do exist, and they show us a view unlike the bureaucratic recordings of France’s military and intelligence. Local historians of the Bekaa have often preserved crucial archival material by reproducing rare documents, verbatim, in their works. For example, Muhib Hamada’s narrative of the Great Syrian Revolt is interspersed with pages directly extracted from manuscripts that are virtually impossible to find. These include the unpublished 1926 memoirs of Mikhaʾil Alluf, a Christian intellectual of the Bekaa who fell victim to the violence that night, who wrote:
At ten o’clock on the night of 18 May, the rebels burned down the Khawwam Inn, and Tawfiq gave the order to open fire … The people became terrified and fearing the worst, huddled alone in their homes. Tawfiq with a unit of fighters entered the city and a group attacked the serail, the gendarmerie guards fleeing without offering any resistance. Tawfiq and the raiders took control, collected the records of all government departments, and doused them with petrol. They then set fire to the piles they had made of the desks, chairs, and cabinets of the serail staff. The raging flames engulfed all their papers and leapt up to the roof, in the process destroying government books, title deeds, financial and court records, municipal writs, and departmental procedures. In short, a grave calamity for property owners and landlords: the foundations of ownership vanished from Baalbek and its hinterlands, bringing about myriad problems, disputes, and lawsuits amongst the people.Footnote 67
Alluf’s rendition is chilling: violence and terror its most salient features. Yet in the fire, dread, and chaos, one also sees gestures of colonial and class antagonism. The rebels’ actions resonate with disdain for the imperial bureaucratic order. As the rebels set fire to the serail, their supporters cheered them on: ‘They burned the house of injustice!’Footnote 68 Perhaps, destroying court records gave the outlaw rebels a semblance of freedom from French surveillance.
On the rebel side, memory leans towards virtue and manhood: supporters of the 18–19 May outbreak remembered Tawfiq for his ‘wise leadership and outstanding masculinity’ while ‘brave’ Zayn Mirʿi Jaʿfar – in Hermel – became famous for ‘breaking the obedience to the [mandate] authority’.Footnote 69 For French administrators submerged in the culture of pen and paper, the blazing fire reads as the peak of defiance. And for the notables of Baalbek, including Tawfiq’s relatives, the elimination of title deeds was at best an administrative nuisance and at worst a disaster in power relations.
The fire targeted more than buildings: the mandate’s effort to destroy what they saw as the ‘primitive community spirit’ of the rural Bekaa was directly tied to bureaucratic measures contained and enabled by the government’s serail – parcelling out communal lands and communal ownership because ‘the equality that it creates, contributes very strongly to maintaining the primitive structure of the community’.Footnote 70 ‘Communal cohesion’ was meant to be dismantled to make place for more ‘evolved’ forms of social patterns.Footnote 71 As we notice below, it was precisely this communal spirit, in conjunction with events of the revolt, that enabled a renegotiation of gendered modes of behaviour.
But those were not the only intricacies of the uprising. Most prominently, instances of violence and kidnapping emerge as sectarian strife. In an episode described in the memoir of Alluf, Tawfiq’s rebel cousin appears:
The Christians were panicked, for while the fire was consuming the serail, some of the townsfolk rebels broke down Christians’ warehouses and plundered their money and valuables. Not lingering, they fled for safety. A rebel unit led by Milhim Mahmud Haydar went into the Christian neighbourhood, beating and abusing homeowners before looting their homes.Footnote 72
Alluf himself was assaulted by the rebels and directly went into hiding. His son, Ibrahim Alluf – owner of the Palmyra Hotel – was kidnapped, while the owner of Hotel Centrale was killed trying to protect his guests.Footnote 73 When Alluf found out his son was missing, he ‘became agitated and jumped up and down to go and get some valiant souls who might help rescue him’.Footnote 74 He narrates: ‘My [Muslim] Sunni and Shiʿi acquaintances, fearing for my life, stood in my way. … Husayn ʿAli Musa ʿAbbas, whom I had raised from a young age, took the matter in hand, and went with Mustafa Asʿad Shlula to search for the rebels’ hideouts in the mountain.’Footnote 75
The broader record from better-documented geographies of the revolt, especially Damascus, suggests that cross-sectarian solidarity under adversity was not unusual. Already by November 1925, the US consular post in Beirut was warning of the ‘menace of a civil war in Syria’.Footnote 76 Yet, the memorandum’s critical eye highlighted how everyday coexistence persisted in Damascus despite the violence of the revolt. He recalled the frenzy of a French bombardment on a Muslim quarter while the French postured as protectors of Christians, yet quickly withdrew thereafter, ‘leaving [the Christians] to their fate’.Footnote 77 If the revolt were truly a religious one, ‘as the French claim’, the consul reflected, one might expect the homeless and displaced Muslims to turn on their Christian neighbours. Instead, ‘the Muslim notables of the city went to the Christian quarter where the populace was horrified and assured them of their safety’.Footnote 78 This episode – one among many – tempers the all-too-familiar rhetoric of sectarian ruptures and reinforces a growing historiographical shift: that ‘every history of sectarianism is also a history of coexistence’.Footnote 79
While the details of Alluf’s story are hard to fully verify, the local press and the US consular files in Beirut confirm the core of it. A dispatch dated 24 May 1926 notes: ‘one of the relatives of Toufick Haider [sic] intervened and succeeded in reducing the ransom … upon the receipt of which the two gentlemen [Ibrahim Mikha’il Alluf and Yusuf Rashid Murad] were released’.Footnote 80 The incident’s third account, by the popular Christian journalist Iskandar Riyashi in al-Sahafi al-Ta’ih, highlights Tawfiq’s efforts to spare the captives, portraying him as a paradoxical figure – both chivalrous and lawlessly violent – amidst his disputes with the ‘Ukasha band.Footnote 81 In Alluf’s own memoirs, he describes his return to Baalbek, but the key intervenor, it turns out, was not only Hawlu’s kin; she was a woman: Fatima Haydar. He recounts:
There I found Fatima, the wife of Mustafa Bayk Haydar, ready to travel to al-Jurd to meet her nephew Tawfiq, and get his help to rescue the prisoners … I paid a ransom of 200 liras to Madame Fatima, so she headed for the revolutionaries’ headquarters in the mountains and paid them the amount for my son … They demanded more … Tawfiq did not agree…. He trekked with Ibrahim through the hills and valleys of Ras al-ʿAyn and dispatched [him] to us safely, assuring Ibrahim that the rebels would do us no further harm.Footnote 82
Such sectarian incidents were numerous – and abundantly recorded in the French archives and their secondary literature. They intensified as the mandate reinforced their legion of Christian Lebanese volunteers to guard the Bekaa and other regions of the Levant.Footnote 83 The distribution of weapons to civilian Christian villagers heightened tensions between communities: ‘the French by arming the Christians and disarming the Muslims and Druses, directly or indirectly create fervent hostility between these elements’.Footnote 84 While Muslims underwent collective punishment, Christian communities were being mobilized. Within the inhabitants of the same areas, the former were being disarmed, and the latter received their weapons.Footnote 85
But the animosity of the rebels was not simply sectarian. Looting and pillaging took place regardless of sectarian affiliation and were often directed at non-supporters of the uprising. The prominent rebel leader Fawzi al-Qawuqji admits in his memoirs: ‘we burned the village, including its provisions and furniture, so that we might teach a harsh lesson to all who would be tempted to cooperate with the French’.Footnote 86 Financing the uprising was a daunting task.Footnote 87 The attack on Baalbek’s wealthiest hotels lent weight to this concern.Footnote 88 It was also a way to pressure the wealthy to donate their money.
Alluf’s chronicle of the events foregrounds sectarian strife as the motive for harassment, kidnapping, and looting. Nonetheless, his personal relations are full of Muslim characters, both Sunni and Shiʿi, who help rescue his son. This cross-sectarian dimension is further attested by the reports of the US consular post in Beirut. Remarkably, it was Tawfiq and his kin who helped bring back Alluf’s son Ibrahim to safety. In the final analysis, sectarianism, so often deployed to explain support and/or defiance of the uprising, could not account for the complexity of events where geography, class, and gender concerns break the structures of a sectarian model. As for historians, they are left with two archives: one that catalogues sectarian vulnerability and one that inflates national unity. The first found expression in metropolitan newspapers like the French Figaro, which in 1926 asserted: ‘the Syrian people do not exist…. It is a terribly complicated mosaic of enemy races and of opposing religions’.Footnote 89 At the same time, the rebels, conscious of this accusation, rehearsed, if imperfectly, a secular nation, with the now-famed revolutionary slogan: ‘Religion is for God and the Nation is for all.’Footnote 90 As the story of Baalbek’s uprising demonstrates, sect marked a real vulnerability, but it never fully scripted people’s behaviour. It also bears remembering that reading the events as ‘sectarian’ or ‘nationalist’ did more than distinguish between colonial rhetoric and rebel discourse. Among the population, those favouring inclusion with Lebanon cast the rebels as criminals; those favouring unity with Syria generally hailed them as patriots. The predominantly Shiʿi – with Christian and Sunni pockets – and agrarian Baalbek’s economic and political interests generally lay to the east: it traded grain with the Syrian interior, and Homs functioned as its economic hub, linked by the Rayak-Aleppo railway.Footnote 91
IV
As the uprising in the Bekaa rose and declined, some women stood out in their fearless participation in armed conflict. However, the participation of women in these events merely dots the historical record in often unconnected and isolated events. Looking through the papers of Tawfiq and listening to family anecdotes, however, the influence of his mother, Shahina, is unmistakable. Family tales and Tawfiq’s archives open the door to a neglected dimension of gender relations.
When the Great Syrian Revolt broke out, peaked, and finally declined, Tawfiq and his mother Shahina remained steadfast opposition figures. While the clans of the Bekaa surrendered by the autumn of 1926, Tawfiq continued to fight vigorously.Footnote 92 In the summer of that year, he burned down the police station in Labwa, and on 11 June 1926, he engaged in a fierce battle that lasted seven hours.Footnote 93 The rebels brought the ire of Lieutenant Mamier and Paul Verchère de Reffye, who burned the whole village, making sure no stocks of grain remained available for subsistence.Footnote 94 As hunger spread, Tawfiq rushed to Jabal Hawran on 2 July 1926, in search of supplies. The move would have left his followers without leadership, but in an action that seems to cast doubt on assumptions about gender roles in Bekaaʿi rural society, Tawfiq transferred the leadership to his mother Shahina, who took over the command of a still active but now frail resistance network of mujahidin.Footnote 95
Getting caught up in the revolt’s battles on the way to Jabal Hawran, Tawfiq and his delegation disappeared for months. When Tawfiq and his band finally returned, they clashed with French authorities. In his last recorded interview, he comments on the appearance of his mother Shahina on the battlefield:
This battle confirms to us the invincible power of faith – ‘for how many a small group defeated a large one with God’s will’ [Quranic verse] … My mother and those with her on the other side were almost encircled and captured. At a moment of emotional impulse, I took aim at her, preferring that she be killed at my hands than to have the enemies capture her alive and torture her. But God was merciful, and she managed to escape the choker.Footnote 96
Because of Shahina’s indomitable character, rebels called her ikht rjāl – the sister of men.Footnote 97 And in Tawfiq’s last interview, she is characterized as al-Khansaʾ, a reference to one of the most famous and last poets of pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabia. The parallel between al-Khansaʾ and Shahina is telling. It foregrounds Islam as an important component of these women’s culture. Both were Muslim believers. Shahina was veiled and dressed modestly in the style of rural Bekaaʿi women, and al-Khansaʾ was an early convert to Islam. Both also problematize most of the common and ahistorical Orientalist stereotypes of the subjugated Muslim women across societies and eras.Footnote 98 While mid-nineteenth-century French literature had already ossified ‘la femme orientale’ into a fantasy – conjuring harems, veils, male despotism, and above all, female passivity – the character of Shahina runs against that colonial macro-discourse.Footnote 99 Shahina’s family commended her toughness and encouraged others to be like her. Similarly, al-Khansa’s often explicit poetry and audacious attitude were praised by her tribe.Footnote 100 This local narrative of female empowerment – both through the story of Shahina and the allusion to al-Khansa’ – stands in direct contradiction to a communal image of the East that is insensitive to historical eras, economic roles, and rural/urban distinctions; an image that prioritizes male despotism and female subjugation.Footnote 101
This is not to say that gender inequalities in the predominantly Muslim northern Bekaa did not exist, as they do to various degrees and in different forms in most – perhaps all – societies. Ideals of a passive and self-sacrificing woman were widely disseminated, and the adjectives used to praise these women’s activism (the sister of men – or ikht rjal – the valiant woman, the tough woman – or qabaḍāya) presuppose and accentuate the existence of gender binaries. These women did not necessarily change the model of femininity as much as they acquired the virtues required by ideal masculinity – virtues which were not confined to men, some of whom lacked them, while some women had them. In the case of Shahina, the militarized virtues of colonial times – honour, courage, martyrdom – were manly prerogatives.
Either way, these women’s actions problematized the dominant constructions of women – especially rural women in the early twentieth-century Levant – as subdued or passive and highlighted the moral dimension of gender differences. While masculine traits – courage, chivalry, honour – were valorized regardless of who embodied them, feminine traits – passivity, self-effacement, obedience – were judged according to the gender of the person. Thus, a brave and chivalrous woman like Shahina had morally positive character traits, while a man who was coy and passive was seen as emasculated.
While Shahina gained fame for her role in the Great Syrian Revolt, other incidents – only faintly recorded in history – attest that she was not an exception. Among other stories of heroism, Jana Haydar, the sister of Lutfi Haydar – editor of the revolt’s mouthpiece, al-Adahi – contracted gangrene as she was shot by French soldiers in battle.Footnote 102 It led to a permanent deformity in her leg. This happened as Jana entered the battlefield to provide water and relief to the rebels.Footnote 103 Maryam Shibli Haydar also became distinguished in 1916 as many Arabs rose against the Ottoman empire. In September of that year, she saved the life of Ali Haydar as she attacked a Turkish soldier ready to shoot the man from afar.Footnote 104
Women did not only engage physically during rebellions. Tawfiq’s papers include letters from his mother, informing him of important battle and political developments while he was away. In a letter from Shahina to her son dated 19 July 1927, she informs him of Saʿid Haydar’s departure to Istanbul and of the activism of ʿAdil al-ʿAzma – brother of the martyred commander Yusuf al-ʿAzma – in Palestine.Footnote 105 Indeed, Saʿid Haydar had travelled to Turkey with Fawzi al-Qawuqji to gather funds and support through their contacts in the army and the government.Footnote 106
The family archives also reveal women’s political agency before the French mandate. When Arab nationalists, like Salih Haydar, were hanged by the infamous Ottoman governor Jamal Pasha in 1915, al-Hajja Zaynab Haydar stealthily entered the offices of the secret society al-ʿArabiyya al-Fatat in Beirut at night and burned all the documents, saving the lives of its members.Footnote 107 This evidence contradicts the misrepresentation of rural women in the literature as premodern and subdued. As one can observe from the literature, the urban women of Beirut were no less defiant of gender categories, but their means of expression – women’s conferences, pamphlets, and organized marches – remained confined within ‘respectable’ categories more akin to the sort of feminist activism emerging in the European context.Footnote 108 The differences probably also stem from the economic role of rural women as part of a mobilized workforce who joined men in the field and in tending cattle, and from the limited access to work outside the home available to middle-class urban women in the region at that juncture of history.
Shahina’s activism was not unique among the women of the Bekaa, though her visibility was exceptional. Throughout the revolt, women’s participation – from provisioning fighters to engaging in armed combat – challenged both French colonial assumptions about ‘oriental women’ and some historians’ later erasure of female agency from nationalist narratives. The interesting changes and developments in the gendered Arab and rural framework of the Bekaa unfolded when local power relations were disrupted and forced to adapt and metamorphose by the infiltration of colonial power. Military confrontation with the French army brought with it a new configuration of power relations threatening the safety and independence of this rural and strongly communitarian society. Indeed, it was for the sake of the community that the women of the northern Bekaa could renegotiate their position in society.Footnote 109 As we have noted, the French empire carried with it the ambition to impose its own set of gendered characteristics on the colonized, some of whom, especially in urban and notable settings, embraced them as a consequence of colonial submission, but also as a means to power in this now Western-dominated order.Footnote 110
In 1929, French writer Valentine de Saint Point, who witnessed the Great Syrian Revolt, reflected:
It is the desire not to appear backward, or ‘uncivilized’, which pushes [Syrians] to settle into Western ways, after having long been socialized in its customs. In the East, the European dress has become the symbol of civilization … If some ignorant French person from France talks to a Syrian about the oriental costume he must wear in Syria, the Syrian is visibly offended. However, many Syrians, behind closed doors, long for the outfit of yesteryear … The Syrian no longer dares to be Arab. For nothing in the world would he show up in a robe, with a turban or a kaffiyeh … You have to appear Western, at all costs, because the West represents strength, and it is convinced that it also represents civilization. Whose fault is this?Footnote 111
While the most visible urban strata of the Arab population acquiesced to Western norms, other marginalized parts of the population like the rural northern Bekaa resisted these changes. However, the colonizing-colonized power relations also forced them to adapt their ideals of masculinity and femininity. This clash emerges in the Bekaa’s revolt. As French colonizers justified their military might to crush ‘backward’ modes of behaviour, the rebels adapted gendered norms to the circumstances – incorporating women in the fight – while resisting the colonial presence and ideology.
V
From a focus on rural Lebanon – and through the lens of family archives – certain patterns come into view from the northern Bekaa: first, that gender relations are central to understanding how honour, protection, and anti-colonial resistance were imagined and lived among the communities that revolted; second, that sectarianism was more malleable and situational than what the colonial archives present; and third, that class and geography shaped which actors the dominant historiography has tended to remember, but that voices from below can still be recovered.
The evidence showcased contradicts the European myth that the urban-educated middle class offered women greater liberation.Footnote 112 Indeed, the circumstances of the uprising in rural northern Bekaa reveal the military and political activism of women who, like the Haydar women, rose to the occasion to support their sons, husbands, and brothers. These women were not domesticated in a clear separation of the private and public spheres. As the case of Jana Haydar demonstrates, household responsibilities like feeding one’s family were not confined to the walls of the house. They extended into the battlefield and their voice resonated in the public sphere. More importantly, the men of the Bekaa were proud of ‘their’ strong women.Footnote 113
This study examined not the validity of gender models, but how these models were actually lived. In the twentieth-century French imperial context, ideals of masculinity and femininity went hand in glove with an ideology that treated these models as universal and ethical. Emphasizing how the characteristics of these gender models – both on the imperial side and in the colonies – were the malleable products of power relations between men, women, and other men, this study hopes to contribute to the discussion of hegemonic masculinities.Footnote 114 The Bekaa case suggests that the essence of hegemonic models of masculinity lies in the power relations they aimed to maintain rather than stemming from the moral imperative they purported to represent.Footnote 115 However, my study also recognizes that the belief in these models as immutable truths about what it means to be a man or a woman was crucial to the force of their embodiment and spread. This is why colonial powers presented their own gender ideas as universal and used this to justify total violence against competing notions of knowledge and behaviour to assert power and control.
In practice, the imperial ideology of masculinity naturalized unequal power relations, making the hierarchy between colonizer and colonized seem like common sense rather than the outcome of geopolitics and military force. Through a gendered lens, this study indicates how, during the Great Syrian Revolt, colonial constructions of femininity and masculinity were more rigid and less adaptable than those of local Arab actors, whose approaches were less doctrinaire and more responsive to shifting conditions on the ground – perhaps because, as colonized and subjugated, they were more compelled to adjust their behaviour to fit new conditions imposed from above and below.
Tawfiq and Shahina’s story is thus a revealing instance of how gender conceptions and roles operated not as a fixed cultural script but as a dynamic response to shifting power relations – relations that colonial intervention sought to reshape and anticolonial resistance sought to mobilize. Rogue brigand or anti-colonial fighter, traditional oriental, suppressed, and subjugated woman or an active member of her community fighting alongside her fellow men and women to defend themselves, Tawfiq and his mother’s story at the very least invites a re-examination of the colonial incomprehension of the complexities of colonized societies and their gender structures, and of how these structures change and adapt in response to imposed material and cultural colonialist modes of living.
Acknowledgements
This article came together over several years and multiple drafts, reflecting the conversations, feedback, and support of mentors, colleagues and friends: Ussama Makdisi, John-Paul Ghobrial, Nathan Citino, Abdel Razzaq Takriti, Peter Hill, Jens Hansen, Carol Hakim, Saleh Agha and Elora Shehabuddin and Sarah Fishman, whose expertise I specifically solicited and who so graciously agreed to read and comment. I also thank three anonymous peer reviewers and the editorial team at the Historical Journal for their feedback and collaboration. Lastly, I owe a special debt of gratitude to the Haydar family, who so warmly opened their homes and shared their stories with me.
Funding statement
This article was supported by the European Research Council Consolidator Grant under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 101001717) as part of the project ‘Moving Stories: Sectarianisms in the Global Middle East’, at the University of Oxford; and the Arab Council for the Social Sciences with funding from Carnegie Corporation of New York for the Early Career Fellows programme (Cycle 10). The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Open access
