They exercised control over multiple tax farms in the rural hinterland of Tripoli in the seventeenth century through complex relationships with both the Ottoman state authorities and the local non-Shiaa communities.
To the Ottomans they were therefore always leading candidates for local fiscal and political offices, including for the military governorship of the sub-province of Homs, to which they were appointed to partially offset the influence of the increasingly hegemonic Druze emirate.
The unnamed Ibn Harfush appears in an Ottoman archival source as early as 1516, when he and several other local notables signed a letter offering their submission to Sultan Selim I, but was executed in 1518 by Janbirdi al-Ghazali as a rebel.
If nothing else, his being selected to lead a tribal auxiliary division in return for an official governorship in 1568, more than twenty years before the Ma‘n family received their emiral title, points towards both the possibilities and the limits of Shiite enfranchisement under Ottoman rule: the progressive monetarization of provincial government and the privatization of military power in the later sixteenth century created a context in which non- Sunni tribal leaders constituted viable, even ideal, candidates for local tax and police concessions, accredited by the state and integrated into the imperial military administrative hierarchy.
Yet their success would also depend on their ability to hold sway locally, to transcend their narrow parochial bases, raise revenues and capitalize on western Syria's changing economic situation.
Covering the years 1616 to 1635, the register among other things provides documentary evidence of the Harfushes’ growing marginalization as well as of the rise of the Shihabis of Wadi Taym as new contenders for government tax farms in the region.
Fakhr al-Din's offer was matched by Yunus, and the iltizam was reconfirmed to his son ‘Ali Harfush by the kadıs of Damascus and Baalbek immediately after the battle of ‘Anjar.
[9] There was at least one Imami scholar from the Bekaa by the name of Harfush in the Ottoman period: Muhammad ibn ‘Ali al-Harfushi (died 1649), a cloth-maker, grammarian and poet from Karak Nuh, was apparently persecuted for rafd in Damascus and then moved to Iran, where he received an official state post.
In 1711, French consular reports suggest, Husayn Harfush gave shelter to Haydar Shihabi and then supplied 2,500 troops to help him wipe out his Druze rivals in the Battle of Ain Dara, and establish himself as sole emir of the Shuf.
The Shiite ‘Usayran family, for example, is also said to have left Baalbek in this period to avoid expropriation by the Harfushes, establishing itself as one of the premier commercial households of Sidon and later even serving as consuls of Iran.
[16] The abrupt disappearance of the Harfush emirate left the Shiite community of Baalbek bereft of any anciently rooted, indigenous social leadership, making it that much more of a likely venue for the rise of foreign-inspired, ideological mass movements such as Communism, Nasirism and the Hizb Allah in Lebanon's tumultuous 20th century.