Fakhr al-Din Uthman ibn al-Hajj Yunis Ibn Ma'n (), also known as Fakhr al-Din I, was the Druze emir of the Chouf district in southern Mount Lebanon from at least the early 1490s until his death in 1506, during Mamluk rule. He was the head of the Ma'n family, whose emirs controlled the Chouf since 1120. He is credited by an inscription for building a mosque in Deir al-Qamar in 1493. Fakhr al-Din was briefly imprisoned by the Mamluk authorities in 1505 in relation to his alliance with the Bedouin Bani al-Hansh clan against the Mamluk-appointed, Druze governor of Beirut.
Before modern research by Kamal Salibi, most modern historians, including Salibi initially, based their information about Fakhr al-Din on the 19th-century works of local historian Haydar al-Shihabi, who confused him with his grandson, Qurqumaz ibn Yunis, and placed his death in 1544.
Family origins
The Ma'n family, to which Fakhr al-Din belonged, established itself in the Chouf (Shuf) area in southern Mount Lebanon, where they founded their headquarters at Baaqlin, in 1120. The progenitor of the family had fought against the Crusaders near Antioch and was sent to Mount Lebanon by the Muslim Burid emirs of Damascus to reinforce the position of the Tanukhids in the Gharb area (around Aley) against the Crusaders in Beirut. They formed marital ties with the Tanukhids and were assisted by the Tanukhid emir Buhtur in building permanent dwellings.
Sources and identification
Modern sources largely derive information about the Ma'nid period in Mount Lebanon preceding the rule of Fakhr al-Din ibn Qurqumaz (Fakhr al-Din II) from the 19th-century works of Haydar al-Shihabi (d. 1835) and Tannus al-Shidyaq (d. 1861). Al-Shihabi and al-Shidyaq chronicle a Ma'nid emir named Fakhr al-Din ibn Uthman, who was also referred to by historians as Fakhr al-Din I to distinguish him from his descendant Fakhr al-Din ibn Qurqumaz. According to al-Shihabi the emir was recognized as the preeminent Druze emir (prince or commander) of Mount Lebanon by the Ottoman sultan Selim I upon his conquest of Damascus in 1517 and that he died in 1544. According to research by the modern historian Kamal Salibi, Fakhr al-Din I's actual name was "Fakhr al-Din Uthman" and he died in 1506, the year 1544 having seemingly been "chosen at random" by al-Shihabi. The figure of Fakhr al-Din I that historians, including Peter Malcolm Holt, Phillip Hitti, Henri Lammens, Ferdinand Wustenfeld, and Salibi himself in his article on "Fakhr al-Din" in the Encyclopedia of Islam, acknowledged was actually Emir Qurqumaz, who died in 1586. Salibi attributes the historical mistake to al-Shihabi's work. The historian Clifford Edmund Bosworth writes that Salibi "convincingly argues that the Fakhr al-Din I (b.) Uthman who is supposed to have submitted to the Ottoman Sultan Selim the Grim in 1517 at Damascus and to have been confirmed in the chieftainship of the Jebel Druze [Mount Lebanon], cannot have been reigning at that time".
Biography
According to Salibi, Fakhr al-Din was the first Ma'nid "whose historicity is beyond question". He ruled the Chouf in the late Mamluk period (1260–1517) until his death in August/September 1506, a decade before the Ottoman conquest. The local Druze chronicler Ibn Sibat (d. 1520) indicated that Fakhr al-Din's given name was Uthman, while "Fakhr al-Din" was a laqab (honorific) meaning "pride of the faith". Ibn Sibat referred to him as the "emir of the Chouf in the region of Sidon" who died in 1506. A 1493 inscription on a mosque in Deir al-Qamar credits "al-Maqarr al-Fakhri [the Fakhrid Seat] Emir Fakhr al-Din Uthman" as its builder and further notes that he was the "son of al-Hajj Yunis ibn Ma'n". Both Fakhr al-Din and his father lived during the era of the prominent Druze reformer Jamal al-Din Abdullah al-Tanukhi (d. 1479), who urged his coreligionists to engage in Muslim religious practices, hence the usage of the honorary title al-Hajj (one who has completed the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca) by Yunis and the construction of a mosque, which were not used by the Druze, by Fakhr al-Din.
