Embracing the Divine: Passion and Politics in Christian Middle East

3. Mount Lebanon: A Voice in the Wilderness (1746–1750)

68 3 Mount Lebanon A Voice in the Wilderness (1746–1750) On October 12, 1746, Hindiyya arrived in Dayr Ziyarat al-Adhra (Visitation of the Virgin), a Jesuit convent established in 1744 in ‘Ayntura, a village in central Mount Lebanon. Her move to the mountains of Lebanon was meant to distance her from encroaching pressures and demands to transform her private communion with Christ into a public intercession for supplicants. In addition, like other Aleppans of her generation who moved to Mount Lebanon for religious purposes, she was escaping the materialism of city life for the imagined purity and spirituality of the “wilderness” of the Lebanese mountains. However, most critically, her voyage to Mount Lebanon was the only way to fulfill the responsibility she believed Christ had placed upon her. Since Ottoman authorities prohibited the construction of convents and monasteries in Aleppo, her move was necessary to establish the new religious order dedicated to the Sacred Heart. Yet the events which unfolded in her first four years in Mount Lebanon diverged greatly from any expectation she may have had in Aleppo. The Jesuit missionaries who had been her main supporters in Aleppo became, with but one exception, her nemeses and detractors. The one Jesuit who continued to believe in Hindiyya and her visions, Father Venturi, was recalled to Rome, leaving her alone without succor. The landscape of Mount Lebanon that appeared “hallowed” from the distance of Aleppo emerged as a place of physically arduous living and filled with human blemishes and imperfections . This cascade of realizations sent her into the depths of despair and doubt about her visions, her calling, and even the ethereal personage Mount Lebanon | 69 who had been her companion since childhood in Aleppo. Yet, like other visionaries before her, these trials were the necessary way for Hindiyya to submit her will to that of Christ in order to be one with him. In other words, this was a crucible of trials, which ultimately elevated her from the ranks of the extraordinarily devout to a living prophet. Her tribulations transformed her from a lonesome woman hesitantly communing with Christ to the founder and leader of a new religious order who drew ever nearer to completing her mystical union with Christ and from one who needed the blessing of male clerics to a religious woman who radiated grace to them and the larger church. Following her journey across this physically and spiritually demanding and convoluted landscape, we will map the construction of sanctity and religion amid growing political tensions between the Maronite Church and Latin missionaries. A Sanctified Mountain The place to which Hindiyya came was familiar and alien, similar to the one that her great-grandparents had left but also changed considerably since those times; it shared some things with Aleppo but was quite different in many other ways. Politically, Mount Lebanon, like Aleppo, was part of the Ottoman Empire. More immediately, its various territories fell simultaneously or alternatively within the administrative purview of the pachalik of Tripoli, Acre, and Damascus. Its inhabitants had to pay taxes, like their counterparts in Aleppo, to one or more of the Ottoman governors; and the ruler of Mount Lebanon had to be approved—albeit as a hollow formality in some instances—by the Sublime Porte in Istanbul. Beyond these broad outlines of similitude rested many significant differences. While the Ottoman government displayed and flexed its power in Aleppo through a garrison of Janissaries and an appointed Ottoman governor, Mount Lebanon was free of both symbols of Ottoman authority. Instead, the political structure was made up completely of local elites, though Ottoman governors made their presence felt frequently during the eighteenth century through military expeditions and imposed levies. At the top of this hierarchy were the emirs (princes) of the mountain, who throughout the eighteenth century came from the Shihab family, who were rural multazims (tax collectors) and 70 | Embracing the Divine whose position “was determined by a continual process of negotiation and the reshuffling of political relations” with provincial Ottoman officials.1 The political influence and control of the emirs of Mount Lebanon was projected through a fluid network of alliances with other families with titles such as “emir,” “muqaddam,” and “shaykh.”2 These influential families —like the Jumblatts, Arsalans, and Abi al-Lamas—commanded a large enough political force to make the emir’s rule difficult, if not impossible, at times.3 Among these muqata‘aji families...