Marada
The
Marada were a group of autonomous communities living on
Mount Lebanon and the surrounding highlands following the conquest of
Syria by the
Arab caliphate in the
630s CE. Although some historians claim that the Marada created "states" ruled by a
Maronite Christian,
Aramaic-speaking warrior elite known as the
Mardaites, other historians tend to downplay their relevance and to describe a more complex scenario. Clusters of Christian Aramaic tribal groups managed to obtain a relative autonomy in the rugged hinterland of the Mount Lebanon coastal range, which was at the time on the borderline between the
Umayyad (and later
Abbasid) caliphate and the
Byzantine empire. The Byzantine expansion between
985 and
1025 AD provoked an influx of
Maronites from the
Orontes valley into the northern part of Mount Lebanon, in particular into the
Kadisha gorge. Maronite groups settled there as a confederation of tribal clans, with the
Maronite Patriarch as a community chief.
In the civil wars that plagued
Lebanon in modern times, one of the Maronite militias styled itself the "
Marada Brigades".
*
Phares, Walid.
Lebanese Christian Nationalism: The Rise and Fall of an Ethnic Resistance. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1995.
* Salibi, Kamal.
A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered, London: I B Tauris, 1988.
* Salibi, Kamal.
Maronite Historians of Medieval Lebanon, Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1959.
* Salibi, Kamal.
The Modern History of Lebanon, Delmar: Caravan Books, 1977.
