1860 Mount Lebanon Civil War

• Rabīʿa Jābir (1972-, Lebanon) – Yūsuf al-Inglīzī (‘Yusuf the Englishman’, 1999), trilogy Bayrūt Madīnat al-ʿĀlim (‘Beirut: A City of the World’, 2003- 2007) and Drūz Bilgharād: Ḥikāyat Ḥannā Yaʿqūb (‘The Druze of Belgrade: the story of Hannah Yaqub’, 2010).

Yūsuf al-Inglīzī interweaves fact and fiction in a telling of his Druze’s ancestors during the turbulent history of Mount Lebanon in the 19^th century. It centres on Yūsuf Jābir, the real or fictitious brother of the author’s great-great-grandfather, who had contact with American and British Protestant missionaries in Mount Lebanon and Beirut and who resided in England for a period of time (reference).

Jābir’s trilogy Bayrūt Madīnat al-ʿĀlim covers 50 years of the city, following the story of ʿAbd al-Jawwād al-Bārūdī and his children and grandchildren. The first volume depicts al-Bārūdī fleeing from Damascus to Beirut and Ibrahim Pasha’s Ottoman expedition against the Druze, while the second volume describes the defeat of the Egyptian army in 1840 and the participation of one of the al-Bārūdī family members in the 1853 – 1856 Crimean war. The last volume focusses in the 1860 civil conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus between mainly the local Druze and Christians, and the displacement of citizens following this conflict. The trilogy stops in 1875 (reference).

Drūz Bilgharād: Ḥikāyat Ḥannā Yaʿqūb, which is based on real facts, describes the expulsion of 550 Druze fighters to Belgrade following the civil war in Mount Lebanon. As a future exchange for a fellow fighter, they take with them Ḥannā Yaʿqūb, a Christian man from Beirut who sells eggs and was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time (reference). The novel follows the Druze’s suffering on their difficult trip through the Balkans, which made them see Ḥannā, who started out as their enemy, as a part of their community (reference). The novel won the International Prize for Arabic Literature in 2012 (also in M: Minorities: Druze).