During early Ottoman rule, they maintained an alliance and marital ties with the Ma'n dynasty, the Chouf-based, paramount Druze emirs and tax farmers of Mount Lebanon.

Under Haydar, the Shihabs crushed their main rivals for paramountcy amongst the Druze at the Battle of Ain Dara in 1711, consolidating their dominance of Mount Lebanon through the mid-19th century.

In 1831, he allied with Muhammad Ali of Egypt during his occupation of Syria, but was deposed in 1840 when the Egyptians were driven out by an Ottoman-European alliance, leading soon after to the dissolution of the Shihab emirate.

Despite losing territorial control, the family remains influential in modern Lebanon, with some members having reached high political office.

[1] According to the 19th-century historian Mikhail Mishaqa, they were descendants of the Banu Makhzum clan of the Quraysh tribe to which the leader of the 7th-century Muslim conquest of Syria, Khalid ibn al-Walid, belonged.

Mishaqa held the family's ancestor was a commander in the conquest, Harith, who fell in battle at the Bab Sharqi gate of Damascus during the Muslim siege of that city in 634.

[3][4] The 19th-century family histories of the Shihabs by Haydar al-Shihabi and his associate Tannus al-Shidyaq claim that the clan's leader during its migration to Wadi al-Taym was Munqidh ibn Amr (d. 1193), who defeated the Crusaders in an engagement there the following year.

The latter allied with the Ma'n family, a Druze clan based in the Chouf region of Mount Lebanon, and defeated the Crusaders in an engagement in 1244.

Ali's son Yunus was mentioned by the contemporary Damascene chroniclers al-Busrawi and Ibn al-Himsi as being involved in a rebellion in Damascus in the late 1490s.

[11] Ahmad fought alongside the Ma'nid emir Fakhr al-Din II and the Kurdish rebel Ali Janbulad in a revolt against the Ottomans in the Levant in 1606, which was stamped out the following year.

[13] When, in the following year, Hafiz Ahmed Pasha launched an imperial-backed campaign against Fakhr al-Din, Ahmad, his brother Ali and many other local allies of the Ma'ns joined the Ottoman forces.

[16] As Ottoman troops raided Wadi al-Taym, the Shihabs fled to the Keserwan region in northern Mount Lebanon seeking Hamade protection.

[21] Emir Ahmad fled and had his tax farms confiscated and transferred to Musa Alam al-Din, who also commandeered the Ma'n palace in Deir al-Qamar.

[22] The transfer of the Ma'n emirate to the Shihabs made the family's chief the holder of a large tax farm that included the Chouf, Gharb, Matn and Keserwan areas of Mount Lebanon.

[21] Other clans, including the Druze Jumblatts and the Maronite Khazens were subsidiary tax farmers, known as muqata'jis, who paid the Ottoman government via the Shihabs.

He also captured the rebel Mushrif ibn Ali al-Saghir, sheikh of the Shia Muslim Wa'il clan of Bilad Bishara in Jabal Amil (modern South Lebanon), and delivered him and his partisans to the governor of Sidon, who requested Bashir's assistance in the matter.

At the turn of the 18th century, the new governor of Sidon, Arslan Mataraci Pasha, continued the good relationship with Bashir, who by then had appointed a fellow Sunni Muslim Qaysi, Umar al-Zaydani, as the subsidiary tax farmer of Safad.

[24] The situation worsened for Emir Haydar when he was ousted by the order of Bashir Pasha and replaced with his Choufi Druze enforcer-turned enemy, Mahmoud Abi Harmoush in 1709.

[27] In 1711, the Qaysi Druze clans mobilized to restore their predominance in Mount Lebanon, and invited Emir Haydar to return and lead their forces.

[28] The Shihabs became the paramount force in Mount Lebanon's social and political configuration as they were the supreme landlords of the area and the principal intermediaries between the local sheikhs and the Ottoman authorities.

The latter directed his son Mehmed Pasha al-Kurji, governor of Tripoli, to transfer the tax farms of Byblos and Batroun to Emir Yusuf in 1764.

[33] Emir Yusuf cultivated ties with Uthman Pasha and his sons in Tripoli and Sidon, and with their backing, sought to challenge the autonomous power of sheikhs Zahir and Nasif.

Afterward, Emir Yusuf's large Druze force from Wadi al-Taym and Chouf was routed by Sheikh Nasif's Shia cavalrymen at Nabatieh.

[36] After a four-month siege, al-Jazzar withdrew from Beirut in 1772, and Emir Yusuf penalized his Yazbaki allies, sheikhs Abd al-Salam Imad and Husayn Talhuq to compensate for the bribe he paid to the Russians.

Emir Yusuf subsequently captured Qabb Ilyas from his brother, and was transferred the tax farm for the Beqaa Valley by the governor of Damascus, Muhammad Pasha al-Azm.

[36] Among al-Jazzar's principal goals was to centralize authority in Sidon Eyalet and assert control over the Shihabi emirate in Mount Lebanon.

His ability as a statesman was first tested in 1799, when Napoleon besieged Acre, a well-fortified coastal city in Palestine, about forty kilometers south of Tyre.

Unable to conquer Acre, Napoleon returned to Egypt, and the death of Al-Jazzar in 1804 removed Bashir's principal opponent in the area.

[39] In 1840, four of the principal European powers (Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia), opposing the pro-Egyptian policy of the French, signed the London Treaty with the Sublime Porte (the Ottoman ruler) on July 15, 1840.

[39] According to the terms of this treaty, Muhammad Ali was asked to leave Syria; when he rejected this request, Ottoman and British troops landed on the Lebanese coast on September 10, 1840.