Origins

The Lebanese in Canada trace their origins to a country along the eastern Mediterranean Sea that may have attained independence only in the second half of the twentieth century but that has had a long history stretching back several millennia. The earliest settlements in Lebanon date from Paleolithic times; the Phoenician seafarers made their homes along its coasts; King Solomon used cedars from Lebanon to build his legendary temple; and references to the country figure repeatedly in both the Old and New Testaments.

Present-day Lebanon is a small country of only 10,400 square kilometres bordered by Syria in the north and east, Israel to the south, and the Mediterranean Sea along its western shoreline. Traditionally, Lebanon referred only to the western half of the country consisting of the coastal plain and Lebanon Mountains. Today, most of the country’s 2.1 million (1990) inhabitants are concentrated in the metropolitan region of the capital, Beirut, on the Mediterranean coast, and in the Biqa valley beyond the mountains in the eastern part of the country. Lebanon’s economy is driven almost entirely by private enterprise, in particular banking, transport, tourism, and communications, which account for about two-thirds of the national income. Industry and agriculture each represent about 10 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, although the latter employs about half the labour force.

Lebanon is an Arabic-speaking country, but French and English are widely taught and spoken as well. There is also an Armenian minority that accounts for about 5 percent of the population as well as 310,000 Palestinian refugees living within the country’s borders. It is religion rather than language or ethnicity, however, that determines the major socio-political cleavages in Lebanese society. Traditionally, Christians comprised the majority population, but this is no longer the case. The single largest religious community is that of the Shiite Muslims, who, together with the Sunni Muslims and the Druze (professing a religion derived from Islam), make up the majority (about 57 percent) of the country’s population. The largest Christian denomination is the Maronites, followed by the Antiochian Orthodox, Melkite Greek Catholics, several other Orthodox and Catholic groups, and a number of Protestant denominations. There is also a small Jewish community.

Certain themes have persisted throughout Lebanon’s history. Since Phoenician times (around 3000 B.C.E.) it has been a trading centre with both maritime and land transportation routes near at hand. In part because of easy access to transportation, the Lebanese settled in various parts of the world. While Lebanon’s geographical position has made it an international bridge linking the inland countries of the Middle East with the countries bordering the sea to the west, the country’s mountainous terrain has at the same time provided a degree of protective isolation enabling it to survive with an identity of its own as well as to provide shelter to numerous minority groups.

Nevertheless, the country’s mountainous topography was not enough to keep out powerful invaders, and, during the first millennium B.C.E., Lebanon was conquered by a series of empires, from the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, and Macedonian Greeks to the Romans and their successors, the Byzantines. It was during the Byzantine era (395–636 C.E.) that Christianity became the dominant religion in Lebanon. Its adherents were the Antiochian Orthodox Christians, who, under the influence of the Byzantine Greek church of Constantinople, accepted the decrees of the fourth ecumenical council held at Chalcedon in 451.

The religious make-up of the entire Middle East was to be profoundly changed by the expansion of Islam during the seventh century. In 636 Arab Muslim forces conquered Lebanon and, through them, various dynasties (Umayyads, Abbasids, Mamluks) ruled the area almost without interruption until the Ottoman conquest in 1517. The Ottoman Turks were also a Muslim people and their Islamic empire was to control all of Lebanon and neighbouring Syria and Palestine until the end of World War I.

In the seventh century, Arab Muslims settled in Lebanon’s coastal areas, but the country as a whole witnessed the steady growth of Christian and other religious groups. This was possible since in general the Arab Muslim and Ottoman rulers were tolerant of other religious communities (millets) as long as they obeyed the law and paid their taxes; in fact, these communities were semi-autonomous and remain so today. Among the new Christian groups was the Maronites, spiritual descendants of the early fifth-century monk Maron. The Maronites observed the Eastern Antiochene rite, but by the sixteenth century (some say even much earlier) they had come into union with the Roman Catholic Church. A smaller Christian group widespread in Lebanon was the Melkites. These are former Antiochian Orthodox Christians who in the eighteenth century united with Rome to form the Byzantine-rite Melkite Greek Catholic Church.

Lebanon also became home to a unique religious group, the Druze. When in the eleventh century the Fatimid ruler of Egypt, al-Hakim, declared himself an incarnation of God, two of his followers, Hamza and Darazi, formulated dogmas for a cult centring around him. Darazi arrived in southern Lebanon to preach the new faith. His followers, known as the Druze, were eventually to become one of the most important religious and political groups in Lebanon.

The religious divisions within Lebanon, especially among its two strongest groups, the Maronites and Druze, were exacerbated during the second half of the nineteenth century. This was a period of decline in Ottoman authority and of intervention in Lebanon by Europe’s Great Powers, most especially France, which favoured the Maronites, and Great Britain, which supported the Druze. Following a bloody conflict between the Maronites and Druze that began in 1841 and culminated in widespread massacres of civilians in 1860, the European powers forced the Ottomans to adopt the Organic Statute of 1864, whereby a semi-autonomous province under a non-Lebanese Ottoman Christian governor (mutasarrif), assisted by a council representing Lebanon’s main religious communities, was set up in a small region along the central part of the coastal area (but excluding the city of Beirut and its environs) known as Mount Lebanon. The so-called mutasarrifiyyah period was to last from 1864 to 1915.

As a result of the 1860 massacres, political corruption, and lack of economic opportunities, many Lebanese sought better lives by emigrating to Egypt, to other parts of Africa, and to the New World, including Canada. At the same time, Western influences were reaching Lebanon via new French and American universities, the establishment of a vibrant Arabic-language press promoting Western ideas, and the return visits and remittances of Lebanese living abroad.

When World War I broke out in 1914, the Ottoman Empire became an ally of the Central Powers and Lebanon’s precarious autonomous status was formally abolished. Four years later the war ended with the defeat of the Central Powers and the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. The victorious Allies, in deciding the fate of former Ottoman territories, agreed in 1920 to place Lebanon under a League of Nations mandate administered by France. Lebanon’s borders were expanded to include Beirut, the Biqa valley, and the Anti-Lebanon Mountains. As a result, the population of “Greater Lebanon” changed dramatically; now, Christians officially accounted for slightly over half the inhabitants; Muslims and Druze, slightly under half. During the French mandate, a constitution creating a republican form of government was adopted in 1926 and each religious community was given equitable representation in the Parliament (roughly a 6:5 Christian-Muslim [plus Druze] ratio). In practice, the Christians (in particular the Maronites) wielded considerable political influence, while business leaders in Beirut (of all confessions) dominated the economy.

The mandate period ended in 1940, when France fell to Nazi Germany. Lebanon initially came under control of the Vichy French government, but in 1941 British and Free French forces under Charles de Gaulle ousted the Vichy authorities in Lebanon and recognized the country’s independence. A National Pact supplementing the 1926 constitution was made between representatives of the Maronites and Sunni Muslims. Its four provisions required that Lebanon remain independent, relying neither on Western powers nor on other Arab states; that it retain cultural ties with the West; that it cooperate with other Arab states but side with none; and that public offices should be distributed proportionally among the recognized religious communities. In particular, the president of the republic should be a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the president of the Chamber of Deputies a Shiite Muslim.

During the first decades following World War II, Lebanon’s economy flourished and the country became the wealthiest in the region. Political tensions continued, however, as the Druze and Muslims complained that Christians continued to dominate the government and that, therefore, the National Pact was being violated. Events in the rest of the Arab world polarized the political situation further, as did the Lebanese president’s attempt to amend the constitution to promote his own career. This culminated in a short-lived revolt against the government in 1958 which was quelled only after the intervention of American troops.

Badly shaken by the 1958 crisis, the Lebanese refrained during the 1960s and early 1970s from challenging the fragile political system of their country. These same years were characterized by further economic success, although the prosperity seemed to favour Christians more than Muslims, the poorest of whom were the Shiites in the far south.

The economic disparities between religious groups were exacerbated by demographic change whereby Muslims became the majority population, and by the phenomenal increase in the number of Palestinian refugees whose numbers in Lebanon grew from about 40,000 in 1948 to 400,000 in 1975. The Palestine resistance movement made Lebanon its centre, from where their guerillas launched raids against neighbouring Israel. The Israeli army retaliated with attacks against sites in Lebanon. The demographic changes, rather than leading to changes in the political balance of power, impelled the Maronites to become yet more defensive of the status quo and of Lebanese nationalism. At the same time, a congerie of Muslim, Druze, and leftist political groups demanded a government-directed redistributive economy and a turn towards pan-Arabism.

The internal and external tensions exploded in early 1975, when open conflict erupted between Muslims (joined by the Druze) and Christians (mostly Maronites). The Christian/Muslim-Druze dichotomy was overlaid by divisions between the economically and politically powerful and powerless, the right and the left, Lebanese nationalists and Arab nationalists. For nearly fifteen years the country was torn apart by brutal fighting among the Lebanese themselves, at the same time that Palestinian forces and Syrian and Israeli armies, along wth states external to the region, allied with one faction or another. Beirut was literally ripped apart, the economy reduced to shambles, and tens of thousands of Lebanese were forced to emigrate abroad.

A political agreement among the warring Lebanese factions was finally reached in late 1989 in Ta’if, Saudi Arabia. Two years later the last military force to resist the central government surrendered. Since that time Lebanon has begun the task of economic reconstruction and some Lebanese who fled during the civil war have begun to return home. The longer-term prospects for political stability, however, remain uncertain.