The Mountain and the Crescent

In 750 AD, the Abbasid revolution swept away the Umayyad caliphate and with it the administrative arrangements that had made Islamic rule tolerable for the Christian mountain communities of the Lebanese highlands. Within two years, the fiscal pressure of the new regime had become unbearable, and Elias of Baskinta led the first of two revolts that would shake Abbasid control of the Levant and permanently reshape the communal geography of Mount Lebanon.

The Mountain and the Crescent tells the full story of the Mount Lebanon revolts of 752 and 759 AD - two armed uprisings by Maronite and Mardaite highland communities against the tax collectors and administrators of an imperial power that had unilaterally revoked the terms on which their cooperation had been purchased. From the assassination of Elias at a diplomatic banquet in the Beqaa Valley to the sovereignty claim of Bandar of Munaytirah, from the military campaign of the Abbasid general Salih ibn Ali to the landmark legal intervention of Imam al-Awza'i in defense of the expelled Christian communities, this is a history of ordinary people in extraordinary terrain making decisions whose consequences would echo for more than a millennium.

The revolts failed. The communities endured. And in the Qadisha Valley and the high country of the northern Lebanon range, they built something the caliphate had not intended to create: a self-sustaining highland polity whose institutional depth and communal identity would define Levantine history for centuries to come.