This book is a history of the Shiite community of what is today Lebanon in the early modern period. It traces the rise and fall of the Hamadas, Harfushes and other Shiite notable families as mukataacıs, agents invested by the Ottoman state to tax and police the rural highland districts of Tripoli, Damascus and Sidon that were not otherwise amenable to government control. Their co-optation by the authorities of the nominally Sunni empire beginning in the sixteenth century, and their displacement through other sectarian groups by the late eighteenth century, raise a number of important questions about Shiism in both Ottoman and Lebanese history.

From the standpoint of Ottoman Islamic law, Shiites were seen as Rafızis or heretics. The consolidation of imperial rule and the systematization of both shari‘a and imperial administrative (kanun) jurisprudence in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the revolt by heterodox Kızılbaş tribesmen in Anatolia against this same process of state centralization, resulted in a legal position on Shiism that legitimized the killing of sectarians as Rafızis or Kızılbaş and thereby provided an official basis for the proscription of non-Sunni enemies both within and outside the Empire. The Ottoman chancery would in fact apply this vocabulary against refractory Shiites in Lebanon and elsewhere into the nineteenth century, denouncing them as ‘accursed Kızılbaş whose elimination is a religious duty’ whenever they ran foul of the state authorities.