The Shihab dynasty (alternatively spelled Chehab; , ALA-LC: al-Shihābiyūn) is an Arab family whose members served as the paramount tax farmers and local chiefs of Mount Lebanon from the early 18th to mid-19th century, during Ottoman rule. Their reign began in 1697 after the death of the last Ma'nid chief. The family centralized control over Mount Lebanon, destroying the feudal power of the mostly Druze lords and cultivating the Maronite clergy as an alternative power base of the emirate. The Shihab family allied with Muhammad Ali of Egypt during his occupation of Syria, but was deposed in 1840 when the Egyptians were driven out by an Ottoman-European alliance, leading soon after to the dissolution of the Shihab emirate. Despite losing territorial control, the family remains influential in modern Lebanon, with some members having reached high political office.
History
Origins
The Banu Shihab were purportedly an Arab tribe originally from the Hejaz. According to the 19th-century historian Mikhail Mishaqa, they were descendants of the Banu Makhzum clan of the Quraysh tribe to which the leader of the 7th-century Muslim conquest of Syria, Khalid ibn al-Walid, belonged. Mishaqa held the family's ancestor was a commander in the conquest, Harith, who fell in battle at the Bab Sharqi gate of Damascus during the Muslim siege of that city in 634. At some later point, the tribe settled in the Hauran region south of Damascus. In 1172, the Banu Shihab migrated from their home village of Shahba in Jabal Hauran westward to Wadi al-Taym, a plain at the foot of Mount Hermon (Jabal al-Sheikh).
Governors of Wadi al-Taym
The 19th-century family histories of the Shihabs by Haydar al-Shihabi and his associate Tannus al-Shidyaq claim that the clan's leader during its migration to Wadi al-Taym was Munqidh ibn Amr (d. 1193), who defeated the Crusaders in an engagement there the following year. The same sources note that he was appointed governor of Wadi al-Taym in 1174 by the Zengid ruler of Damascus, Nur al-Din. Munqidh was succeeded by his son Najm (d. 1224), who was in turn succeeded by his son Amir (d. 1260). The latter allied with the Ma'n family, a Druze clan based in the Chouf region of Mount Lebanon, and defeated the Crusaders in an engagement in 1244. Amir's son and successor, Qurqumaz, took refuge with the Ma'ns in the Chouf during a Mongol invasion in 1280. After his death in 1284, his son Sa'd succeeded him as governor of Wadi al-Taym. The Shihabs continued to govern Wadi al-Taym throughout Mamluk rule (1260–1516), according to the family histories. Their chief, Ali ibn Ahmad, was mentioned by the local Druze chronicler Ibn Sibat (d. 1520) as the governor of Wadi al-Taym in 1478. Ali's son Yunus was mentioned by the contemporary Damascene chroniclers al-Busrawi and Ibn al-Himsi as being involved in a rebellion in Damascus in the late 1490s.