The Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate (1861–1918, Arabic: مُتَصَرِّفِيَّة جَبَل لُبْنَان, romanized: Mutaṣarrifiyyat Jabal Lubnān; Ottoman Turkish: جَبَلِ لُبْنَان مُتَصَرِّفلِيغى, romanized: Cebel-i Lübnan Mutasarrıflığı) was one of the Ottoman Empire's subdivisions following the 19th-century Tanzimat reform. After 1861, there existed an autonomous Mount Lebanon with a Christian Mutasarrif (governor), which had been created as a homeland for the Maronites under European diplomatic pressure following the 1860 Druze–Maronite conflict. The Maronite Catholics and the Druze founded modern Lebanon in the early eighteenth century, through the ruling and social system known as the "Maronite-Druze dualism" in Mount Lebanon.
This system came during the era of Tanzimat reforms initiated by Sultan Abdulmejid I in an attempt to extricate the Ottoman State from its internal problems, and it was approved after the major sectarian strife of 1860 and the numerous massacres that occurred in Mount Lebanon, Damascus, the Beqaa Valley and Jabal Amil among Muslims and Christians in general, and the Druze and Maronites in particular; European powers utilized sectarian tensions to pressure the Sultan in a way that achieved their economic and ideological interests in the Arab East. The Mutasarrifate era is characterized by the spread of national consciousness, science and culture among the Lebanese, for many reasons, including: the spread of schools in numerous villages, towns and cities, and the opening of two large universities that are still among the oldest and most prestigious universities in the Middle East: the Syrian Evangelical College, which became the American University of Beirut, and Saint Joseph University.
