Marada

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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".

[edit] References

• 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.