History and Culture: Constructing a Lebanese Identity

Abstract

The most important critical assessment of Lebanese historiography was done by the prominent Lebanese sociologist Ahmad Beydoun in his defining Identité confessionnelle et temps social chez les historiens libanais contemporains. He treats the question of the multi-communitarian historical narrative and its denouement on the political and national space in a chronological and horizontal time period in a series of case studies. His first historiographical case study was of the contested episode of the Mamluk suppression of a Shi‘i community in Mount Lebanon and the resulting devastation of Kisrawan. A quasi-consensus had emerged among Lebanese Maronite historians to appropriate this event for their own community, presented as a beleaguered mountain community surrounded by a hostile hinterland.