"Sitt Nasab," Mother of Fakhr al-Din

Trials weaken feeble powers and whet strong souls, thrusting them forth from their place. Such trials plucked Sitt Nasab the Tanukhi from her seclusion and cast her into the field of action.

The Ottomans slew Emir Qurqumaz, emir of Lebanon, in 1584, and pursued his two sons, Fakhr al-Din and Yunus, seeking to root out his family and to destroy every hope Lebanon had of resistance and independence. The beautiful widow, Sitt Nasab, rose up and snatched her two cubs from the claws of the Ottomans, hiding them from their eyes and keeping them as a treasure for Lebanon and a trust watched over by the Khazen family, and then by her brother the Tanukhi emir, Emir of the Gharb.

Tenderness, wisdom, and composure — these are the qualities that distinguish the soul of Sitt Nasab; they won her a great place in the heart of her son Fakhr al-Din, and that great emir would turn back to her in the difficulties of rule, seeking light in her opinions, and she was his best counselor. His mother's counsels led him along the path of victory, and so Fakhr al-Din established a wide and firmly founded emirate stretching from Nahr Ibrahim to the country of Safed in Palestine and the mountains of Ajloun in Transjordan.

The Ottomans watched that emirate expand and grow strong, and they sensed Fakhr al-Din's contacts with foreign powers to form an alliance against them. So they sent against Lebanon their armies, advancing from the banks of the Tigris and the shores of the Black Sea and the Bosphorus; and there massed against Fakhr al-Din the forces of fourteen beylerbeys and fifty sanjaks, supported from the sea by the Ottoman fleets. The noose tightened around Lebanon, its fortresses and its valiant men, and Fakhr al-Din found no way out, in 1613, but to set his face toward the West, to urge its states to hasten to band together and to attack the Ottoman state. Fakhr al-Din entrusted Lebanon to his mother Nasab and to his brother Yunus.

Sitt Nasab remained the soul of resistance and struggle for some two years. The Lebanese fought with desperate valor in defense, ransoming their lands with their blood, proving their fidelity to their emirs and their fierce attachment to their independence. But how could they stand against the swelling army the Ottomans had sent against them, which a number of Lebanon's feudal emirs had joined, foremost among them Ibn Sayfa? The enemies wrought havoc through the land, set fire to the villages of the Shouf, destroyed its dwellings, trampled its crops, and uprooted its trees. In that ordeal all eyes turned to Sitt Nasab, and the people called upon her; she answered the call with her well-known resolution and with the spirit of sacrifice for which she was famous — and she had by then reached about sixty years of age. The emir's mother went from Banias to the Pasha's camp and rebuked him boldly for deliberately destroying the Sultan's subjects and ruining a country that paid him tribute. With such boldness and such daring did the great-souled emira face that tyrant of a Pasha; and despite his crushing victory she did not come to him humbled and abject, but confronted him with the proud spirit for which the Druze of Lebanon and their emirs are known. The emira went to the Pasha's camp accompanied by thirty sheikhs of the uqqal and bearing precious gifts for the Pasha, among them four head of thoroughbred horses and twenty-five thousand piasters. Agreement was reached that the Pasha would leave the rule of the Shouf to Emir Yunus in return for the payment of three hundred thousand piasters, half to be paid at once and the other half left for the following year; and the Pasha kept the emir's mother as a hostage. Thus Sitt Nasab turned the harm of the Ottomans away from Lebanon, sacrificing herself as a ransom for her people and her country.

The Pasha kept that precious hostage even after Lebanon had paid what was owed. Yunus then showed his men their error in having trusted the Pasha's word and given him hostages. After the battle of Barouk the Lebanese returned to struggle and combat, while Sitt Nasab tasted with the uqqal the bitterness of captivity.

But God's justice broods over all things, and fortune's wheel turns upon the oppressor. The Sultan's favor turned against Fakhr al-Din's enemies, grand vizier and serdar alike: one of Fakhr al-Din's friends, Muhammad Jarkas Pasha, took the place of the tyrant Ahmad Pasha al-Hafiz and loosed the bonds of the captive. Sitt Nasab hastened to work for her son's return and summoned him, that her eye might be comforted by him before her death. She wrote to him, while he was in Naples, in 1618: "I was imprisoned in Damascus, and when its governor released me I returned to the homeland and did not find you. I have grown old in years; come to me, that I may see you before death."

With this appeal, filled with a mother's tenderness, Sitt Nasab called her son; and Fakhr al-Din made haste, saying to the Duke of Naples: "You know best how dear a mother is to her son. She has adjured me by her rearing of me, and I can no longer delay."

These are a few fragments from the life of Sitt Nasab, to whom Fakhr al-Din would turn in every grave matter, drawing inspiration from her counsel. She was, as the Italian Santi says in his report, "of greater standing with him in the days of peace, and more respected; the people set her in the rank of the prophets," and at his court she was known as the Great Lady. And truly Sitt Nasab was great — great in her heart, great in the soundness of her mind and her wisdom, great in her composure and her daring in calamity. She is the noble Lebanese woman; she is the mother — the mother of Fakhr al-Din, nay, the mother of Lebanon, which she built with her wise counsels and her leaping spirit.