The Ottoman Cities of Lebanon: Historical Legacy and Identity in the Modern Middle East

At the beginning of the sixteenth century Sultan Selim I invaded Syria and Lebanon, and the area would remain nominally under Ottoman rule until the end of World War I. Whether defined as essentially ‘Turkish’, and therefore alien to the Lebanese experience, or remembered in its final years as a tyrannical and brutal dictatorship, the period has not been thought of fondly in most Lebanese historiography.