![]() Portraying the Phoenicians as champions of free enterprise, much like themselves, the Lebanists argued that these ancient Phoenician roots gave the Lebanese a Western, Mediterranean-focused identity, very different from the Muslim culture of the broader Syrian region, which they saw as distasteful and uncivilised. A local candidate presented itself: the Phoenicians, the ancient traders who had founded the coastal cities, sailed the length of the Mediterranean and beyond, and invented the alphabet that we still use today. The nation-state might have been new in the Middle East, but the Lebanists knew that nationalist movements needed historical legitimation, a common past on which to build a common polity. These ‘Lebanists’ emphasised the natural symbiosis between the mountain and the coast: for them, the proposed new country was already a coherent whole it just needed a distinctive history to justify its political autonomy. In 1919, with all the Ottoman territories on the negotiating table, a group of local Christian, francophone businessmen and intellectuals recognised an opportunity to expand this upland enclave to include the wealthy ports in a new state of ‘Greater Lebanon’. Nonetheless, since 1861 they had been governed together under the Turks as a separate administrative district from the coastal cities of Beirut, Tyre and Sidon, which were largely inhabited by Sunni Muslims. ![]() The Maronites and the Druze had a history of warfare and little in common. The French Mandate of Syria included a strip of prosperous Mediterranean ports backing on to the rural highlands of Mount Lebanon, the traditional home of the Maronites, who are Eastern Catholics in communion with the Vatican, and the Druze, whose beliefs combine Islamic teachings with elements from other Eurasian religious traditions. European powers scrambled to carve up the region in their own, relatively new, model of nation-states, initially under British or French supervision. In the aftermath of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire that had ruled the Levant for 400 years collapsed. ![]() Despite claims by various partisans of Lebanese, British and Irish nationalism to enlist the Phoenicians as their ancient progenitor, the Phoenicians never existed as a self-conscious community, let alone a nascent nation. Take the ancient Phoenicians, enlisted in support of the nationalist histories of Lebanon, Britain and Ireland, and in some cases seriously distorted by them. ![]() And in return, history is called upon to justify nationalism itself, as well as the existence of particular nation-states Eric Hobsbawm once said: ‘History is to nationalism what the poppy is to the opium addict.’ All this gives modern nationalism an extraordinary power to shape – and misshape – the practice and understanding not only of modern history, but even of antiquity. Modern nationalism took history from the province of the wealthy gentleman amateur, as nationalism’s focus on literacy and organised education professionalised and democratised the past. Modern nationalism created history as we know it today: what we learn in school, what we study at university, what we read at home is all shaped by the forms and norms of our nation-states. ![]()
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