chapter 3 The Shīʿīs in Galilee

1 The Region of Safed

The first indication of the presence of Shīʿīs in the district of Safed (though not in the town itself), appears during the Mamlūk period in the second half of the eighth/fourteenth century. The historian al-ʿUthmānī (d. 780/1378), repeated al-Dimashqī’s description in Ta‌ʾrīkh Ṣafad, in which he explained that in the district of Safed, there was a village called Hūnīn (today in northern Galilee, Israel), which was inhabited entirely by Shīʿīs.1 In general, he noted, the district of Safed had a majority of Shīʿīs and Druzes.2 A century later, the Egyptian historian al-Qalqashandī (d. 821/1418) explained that the population of Hūnīn in the region of Safed was Shīʿī.3 Nevertheless, neither al-ʿUthmānī nor al-Qalqashandī mentioned any Shīʿī population else- where in Palestine. Ibn Khaldūn (d. 804/1402) mentioned the town of Safed in his Riḥla, but did not mention Shīʿīs at all.4 Mujīr al-Dīn, the tenth-/sixteenth- century judge (qāḍī) from Jerusalem, mentioned in al-Uns al-jalīl the towns of Ashkelon, including what “the Fāṭimids claimed was the mashhad of Ḥusayn.” He also mentioned Ramla, which had been almost totally destroyed during the time of the crusaders and up to his period, and other towns in the region of Hebron and Jerusalem. Yet, his detailed description did not include any Shīʿī population in Palestine.5 Throughout most of the Ottoman period, the area was characterized by a certain amount of autonomy among the minorities, but Shīʿīs suspected of collaborating with the Iranian Ṣafavids (a dynasty that transformed Iran into

1 Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-ʿUthmānī, Ta‌ʾrīkh Ṣafad (Damascus: al-Takwīn, 2009), 119. 2 Ibid., 126. Like Muḥammad b. Abī Bakr al-Dimashqī, al-ʿUthmānī also mentions the Druzes in al-Buqayʿa village. Interestingly, both al-Dimashqī and al-ʿUthmānī describe al-Nabī Shuʿayb, the tomb of Jethro near Tiberias, though they do not mention a Druze cult in this location. See al-ʿUthmānī, 123–124. Shīʿīs are not mentioned in Tiberias or Acre. 3 al-Qalqashandī, Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā, 4:157. 4 Ibn Khaldūn, Riḥla, 413–414. 5 al-ʿUlaymī, al-Uns al-jalīl, 2:128–131, 135; D., Talmon-Heller, “Job (Ayyub), al-Husayn and Saladin in Late Ottoman Palestine”, p. 131–132.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004421028_005 The Shīʿīs in Galilee 67 a Shīʿī power in the tenth/sixteenth century) were executed, sometimes. This was the case of the Lebanese Shīʿī scholar Zayn al-Dīn b. ʿAlī l-Jubāʿī l-ʿĀmilī “the Second Martyr” (executed in 965/1558). Al-ʿĀmilī passed through Ramla during one of his trips from Damascus to Egypt, and stopped and prayed in the well-known white mosque (built during the Umayyad period), where he wrote of being alone in a cave in the year 960/1552. Nevertheless, as in the case of the first martyr (shahīd), the second martyr did not mention any Shīʿī pres- ence in Ramla or elsewhere in Palestine.6 Like the Arab sources, the Turkish Ottoman documents that mentioned the rafizi (Shīʿīs) were silent concern- ing most of Palestine. The only Shīʿī population that was mentioned in Palestine in this period, was located in northern Galilee, mainly in the district of Safed.7

1.1 The Druze Decline: Shīʿī Crisis and Opportunity The decline of the Druze principality, which enjoyed a great deal of au- tonomy under Muslim authorities, was a significant development and dra- matically influenced the Shīʿī population. First, from the sixth/twelfth to the ninth/fifteenth centuries, the Druze amīrs from Tanūkh tribal federations controlled parts of southern Lebanon and Galilee, including the region of Safed; then from the ninth/fifteenth to the late eleventh/seventeenth cen- turies, the Druze amīrs from the Maʿn tribal federations controlled the same areas.8 Until the end of the eleventh/seventeenth century, the Druzes controlled the Shīʿī territories and raised taxes for the Ottomans. Nevertheless, the Druze leader Fakhr al-Dīn ibn Qurqumāz (the second) had ambitious plans to pursue

6 al-Majlisī, Bihār al-anwār, 53:296–297. 7 See, for example, Stefan H. Winter, “Shiite Emirs and Ottoman Authorities: The Campaign Against the Hamadas of Mt. Lebanon, 1693–1694,” Archivum Ottomanicum 18 (2000), 233, 235. 8 The zenith of the Druze rule in northern Palestine was during the reign of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Maʿnī, who also ruled in the district of Safed, which included several Shīʿī villages. On the process of the Druze immigration to Ḥawrān, see Firro, History of the Druzes, 31–32, 37, 42, 45; also see his map on 44; it shows that most of the Druze villages in Palestine had disappeared by 1890. See also Nejla M. Abu Izzedin, The Druzes: A New Study of their History, Faith, and Society (Leiden: Brill, 1984) 42–43, 131–133. According to Abu Izzedin, there were also Druzes in southern Palestine, including Ramla, Gaza, Ashdod, and Ashqelon during the fifth/eleventh century. Most of the villages in Galilee that appear in Druze sources from the tenth/sixteenth and eleventh/seventeenth century, no longer exist.