Click HERE to get the text written in Arabic by Father Kossaify and HERE to go back to Section I (English version).

History Brief of the Maronite Church

Section II

Translated into English by “Jean Louis Atelier de Traduction"- Jounieh, Lebanon
(Click HERE for the original translation)

Translation Edited by Joe Bassil

What is certain and confirmed is that freedom was the supreme purpose lying behind the establishment and development of the first Maronite community. According to Dr. Charles Malik (one of the co-contributors to the United Nations’ International Human Rights Charter of 1948), Maronitism represented, from the beginning, a quest and struggle for continuous freedom, sovereignty and faithfulness to its heritage, destiny, and moral values. Therefore, when it became harder for its followers to find a decent living as a result of the Arab Islamic expansion in the 7th century, and when they were deprived of their freedom and their spiritual and financial stability, they could no longer remain in the northern fertile part of Syria, which was at that time at the very heart of the military and political crossfire between the super powers of  the conflict: Byzantines and Arabs, that in addition to the Maronites’ old renewed conflict with the non-Chalcedonians. 

The Maronites had no choice but to take the path of emigration to ensure their survival and continuity. They preferred to live modestly, but freely, in the rough, hard to reach Lebanese mountains, in lieu of an easy and comfortable living in the fertile valleys of northern Syria where they would be facing a permanent conflict, where they faced then and still face now the risk of losing their freedom and their religious, cultural, and political identity; the choice they made  gave them the chance to witness a  unique experience throughout history, an experience from the Book : “But when they persecuted you in this city, flee ye into another …. (Matthew 10/23)”. 

They took ancient paths along the Orontes River (Al-Assi), all the way up to its source in Hermel, Lebanon. From there, they climbed Lebanese mountains: to the Cedars side (Jebbet Becharre), to the Akoura side (Jebbet Al Munaitra), a hard to reach area for the Arab-Muslim conqueror’s cavalry, and they settled gradually in the mountains and valleys of those areas.

In no time, the newcomers became part of the demographic composition formed by the preceding immigrants and the native inhabitants who accepted the annunciation; all together, they formed one nation and one community named the Maronites.

According to an Islamic historian of that era, by the end of the 9th century, the Maronites had expanded south, inhabiting Mount Hermon (Jabal El Sheikh). Anyway, according to scriptures written by European historians, most of them lived during the 11th century in the regions of Jebbeh, Batroun, and Jbeil, the mountains overlooking the sea coast from Akkar to Nahr Ibrahim.

When they reached Keserwan in the 15th century, it was barely inhabited after the Sunni Sultan Al-Ashraf Khalil and his brother Sultan Al-Nasir Muhammad had massacred the Shiites and the Druze, only to replace them with very few newcomers from the Turkman community who formed the Emirate of Beni Assaf and who, later on, found support among the Maronites with whom they coexisted and lived in peace.

From Kesrouan, they expanded to Metn and Chouf areas to meet other Emirs: Maan Druze and Sunni Shehabists. They did not go there as laborers but as agricultural experts, an expertise they acquired in the monastery while practicing in the high, arid mountains. On one occasion, Patriarch Gewargios Omayra wrote a book that he sent to Emir Fakhreddine, teaching him about land reform, canal building and water irrigation systems. Despite all of their expertise, the Maronites remained a poor community throughout their history, one never to obtain any support or assistance; they only received whatever they worked hard to earn.

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The hardest thing a researcher faces when digging deep into the Maronite history is the desperate calls for help made by the Maronite Patriarchs to the clergy in Rome and to the French monarchs. The clergy sent them clerical clothing after theirs were completely worn out, or sent receptacles such as the Host of the Eucharist since the chalices were wooden made; on one occasion,  the King of France sent a thousand pennies, so that Patriarch Doueihy would remove the lien placed on his See in  Qannoubine, and on another the French King mediated with his friend and counterpart, the Ottoman Sultan, so that he would remove the injustice and extortion  to which the Patriarch was subjected, and that according to Patriarch Doueihy who suffered  from the tyranny and racketeer to the extent  he was short of papers to note down his ideas and secrets.

History remained silent about the Maronites for five complete centuries, the same centuries which constituted the Maronites' history in Lebanon. The history never relates their sufferings from the Sultan's oppression and tyranny; however, it was deduced from some incidental indications, in particular from the doubtful and horrible history vacuum, that they existed as beacons of freedom and that they were known at that time to be the unique freedom claimants. 

Their claim of freedom was briefly mentioned by Al Massa’oui, a short expression yet with a significant meaning :  “The concern of the Maronites is famous and well known;” the Maronites are famous in the Levant (Greater Syria) and in other places, most of them in Mount Lebanon, in Snir ( i.e. Hermon), in Homs and in its neighborhoods. What was greater than the Maronites' steadfast conduct against Empires was their resistance in the face of the arid and deserted nature. If this nature would have spoken, it would have told the story of the multiple encounters between the Maronites and this land; at first, encounters between two fierce enemies, which developed into a harmonious relationship and ended with a great love story. This land became the mother, wife, daughter and the beloved of the Maronite who came to her as an orphan, after he was abandoned by his mother, Antioch, beaten by his Jacobist neighbors, looted by his Omayyad governor, and stabbed by his Byzantine king.

Both westerners and easterners were fascinated by this unique relationship; they were taken by its beauty and dominated with the envy of taking it over. Many attempts were made to disengage the man from his land, but every time he was subjected to murder and expulsion, his remains would become one with its soil and would return to it with persistent nostalgia. Many times this land was subject to usurpation, capture, or destruction. Each generation bore witness and every place became an illustration after every Maronite village repeatedly experienced the impairment of its plantations, the destruction of its walls and the demolition of its houses. One should only go through the pages of Patriarch Doueihy’s book “History of times’’ or read what was saved from Ibn El Kela’is popular poems and the stories related by old men to know that each village was indeed a history of love, holding both joy and suffering, materialized into an extension to this land, an extension built with the people’s corpses.

This land was “irrigated” by the sweat of the Maronites, the blood of their martyrs; it embraced the remains of their dead to its soil, only to become a vibrant character relishing, in life and death, men’s sanctity and dignity. It resembles the continuity of a man’s life and death and his legacy carried in his children and grandchildren. This land grew and was built with the same stones and soil; therefore, it is alive just like the living being. It is the bride of the Canticle of Canticles, “With me in Lebanon you’ll be crowned.”

The way the Maronites looked to their land and the way they stood to it brought in a new perspective to the East. During those times, the East only knew the Bedouin (nomads) perspective or the imperial one as kingdom, property of its shepherd who entrusted it to rulers, who rented it out to governors, who hired it o feudal lords, who rented it out to small grantors, each in his turn was assigned to collect the tax imposed on the land and working labor. All of them, kings and followers, aimed at wealth at the expense of the land and labor. Accordingly, it is a pasture and people are the herd; consequently, the relationship is between a master and his subject.

While the subjugated land was abandoned and deserted by the herd (community) which gave up the most fertile parts in the Bekaa, Akkar, and the South, with the  sole purpose of getting  rid of tax payment to greedy collectors, the Maronites opted for the most arid and difficult areas; they racked their soil and rocks, turning them into suspended green gardens looking over the valleys. A strange relationship, one of  life and destiny. Only by reading the stories of retaining walls, olive trees, grapevines, roads and stones, one would understand the biography and way of life of the Maronites, and the eradicated traces of their history will only be known when looking at their villages. Why were they built in such a way? Why in the valley? Or over cliffs? Why On the hills? Villages accessible only through one or two entrances. Is it a fortress or a bridge or a fort? A cache, refuge, or cave, or even a lighthouse? Every plot of land  in those villages has a story, a long story; each plot of land has a genealogy told by old people. The land is the Maronite family tree.

When Lebanese poets and philosophers like Gibran Khalil Gibran, Amine Nakhle and Elias Abou Chabke, spoke in their books about the land and the mountains, they were not standing before the ruins; they were looking into the depth and dimensions of life; they believed  that the land is the partner in joy and sorrow; it is familiar with  life and death just like the living being; they call it livelihood as if its soil were their aliment; they call it property, which enables its owner, a farmer living  in the mountain, to meet and engage with the Sultan in Istanbul, because the farmer is also a hidden Sultan.  

Slightly Edited Translation

 The land for the Saints, like St Charbel who worked out the soil, planted it , built its walls for a quarter of a century without tasting even one grape, is the symbol of the Kingdom since the New Testament said : Blessed be the humbles who inherit the land i.e. the Kingdom. Along with this new point of view towards the land , the Maronites brought forward another perspective : the homeland .

The Maronites grew up such an antithesis, a repudiation of the empires, either political or religious or linguistic or racist. Their direction was contrary to these empires, similar to El Assi river where they grew in its neighborhood . While the eastern rivers streams flow downward to the south , the Assi river ascends to the north , from Hermel up to Antioch. The Maronites followed the reverse course, they headed towards its sources by thought, belief and life, since they have not accepted their existence from anybody’s will.

Upon the rise of nationalism --theories and concepts-- in the West during the end of the XIX century, the Maronites found great support for what they were trying to establish. No wonder they were the first to bring forward to the East the recently nationalist concept from Europe after the kingdoms wreckage there. No wonder that they then entered into a fierce battle with the prevailing oriental mentality and with the Ottoman Sultanate, consequently they had to pay a heavy price with thousands of victims. Each time events used to happen and destroy what they had built or thwart their endeavor and retract their scope of life sometimes to a more positive extent than to expand another time.

Upon the inception of this Lebanon , the Maronites nearly forgot their Maronite identity through the effect of their waivers and self-sacrifice. The World nearly forgot the Maronites, a famous and renowned name in the thought capitals during the last three centuries. They used to say in the West at that time: scholar erudite like a Maronite. After all such great efforts and achievements, they found themselves displaced, similar to their status when they left Antioch regions. They became denuded from the friendship of the existing Empires; no wonder, they were dispossessed from this era empires during their first exodus. After the dislocation of this small beloved homeland and dispersion of their big dreams, they had nothing left, no other sanctuary, place to inhabit, except the Maronite scope as a spiritual space, and a burning desire for freedom.

Between the period of their exodus to the Lebanese mountains, during the 7th and 10th centuries, and the arrival of the Crusades to the Orient, at the end of 11th century, the Maronites experienced a difficult phase represented by retraction and isolation. During that era, they lived in dim light and a lot of shadow. However, such retraction allowed them to build a new structure: the church- the nation, to make the Patriarch, the religious, civil and military chief at the same time.  

Sources:
Abbot Paul Naaman: History of the Maronite Church

The Maronites (Excerpts, pdf) by Abbot Naaman

 Relevant Links:

The Maronites and Lebanon, A Brief History

Opus Libani- Saint Maroun

History of the Maronites

Maronites in the United States- A History

Maron

Bishop Theodoret

Cyrrhus in Syria

Maronite Mummies

The Maronites -- The Past, The Present, The Future

Maronites in LEBANON: Challenges and Possible Responses

GRADING SCALE FOR EACH SECTION OF EACH SESSION

0 ; 1 ; 2 ; 3

 0 (Not Submitted);

1 (Poor: little effort; little work done; not very relevant -- Good, but Late)

2 (Good: good effort; answered questions appropriately; relevant -- Very Good, but Late)

3 (Very Good: great effort; answered questions very well; answers based both on text and on relevant (listed) outside sources,
and they demonstrate higher order thinking skills)

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GRADING

TOTAL: 100 Points

20 %: Session 1 || 20 %: Session 2

20 %: Session 3 || 20 %: Session 4

20 %: Participation [Engagement and Motivation],

Attitude, & Aspirations

(Interactions on Facebook Group + Page play a big role)

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