Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate
After Fakhr al-Din's downfall, the Ottomans attempted, unsuccessfully, to undo the unity of the Druze-dominated Chouf and the Maronite-dominated Keserwan forged under Fakhr al-Din. In 1660 the Porte reestablished the Sidon Eyalet and in 1697 awarded Fakhr al-Din's grandnephew Ahmad ibn Mulhim the "iltizam" of its mountain nahiyas of the Chouf, Gharb, Jurd, Matn, and Keserwan. The singular rule over the mountain nahiyas by Ahmad and his successors from the Shihab clan inaugurated what became known to later historians as the "Lebanese emirate", a term that was not used until the last Shihab ruler, Bashir III, in 1840. Nonetheless, the system of fiscal cantons in Mount Lebanon introduced by the Shihabs in 1711 was the precursor to the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate established in 1861, which in turn, was a precursor of the modern Lebanese Republic. Although he did not actually establish a Lebanese state, Fakhr al-Din is regarded by the Lebanese people as the founder of their modern country because he united the Druze and Maronite districts of Mount Lebanon, the neighboring Mediterranean coastal cities, and the Beqaa Valley under a single authority for the first time in history. According to Salibi, Fakhr al-Din's only "enduring" political legacy was the tenuous, symbiotic union of the Maronites and the Druze, which became a significant development throughout Mount Lebanon's later history. In the view of Harris, Fakhr al-Din inaugurated the continued interaction among the Druze, Maronite, Shia and Sunni communal elites of the constituent regions of modern Lebanon, namely Mount Lebanon, Jabal Amil, the Beqaa Valley and the coast. From the establishment of the French Mandatory state of Greater Lebanon in 1920, Lebanese schoolchildren have been taught that Fakhr al-Din was the country's historical founder.