page_title: Fakhr al-Din I
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Fakhr al-Din I / Biography
caption_attribution_description: Fakhredine mosque in Deir al-Qamar, Lebanon العربية: مسجد الأمير فخر الدين، أقدم مسجد في جبل لبنان، يقع في بلدة دير القمر.
context_page_description: Fakhr al-Din Uthman ibn al-Hajj Yunis Ibn Ma'n also known as Fakhr al-Din I, was the Druze emir of the Chouf district in southern Mount Lebanon from at least the early 1490s until his death in 1506, during Mamluk rule. He was the head of the Ma'n family, whose emirs controlled the Chouf from 1120. He is credited by an inscription for building a mosque in Deir al-Qamar in 1493. He was briefly imprisoned by the Mamluk authorities in 1505 in relation to his alliance with the Bani al-Hansh clan against the Mamluk-appointed, Druze governor of Beirut.
  Until modern research by Kamal Salibi most modern historians, including Salibi initially, based their information about Fakhr al-Din on the 19th-century works of local historian Haydar al-Shihabi, who confused him with his grandson, Qurqumaz ibn Yunis, and placed his death in 1544.
context_section_description: According to Salibi, Fakhr al-Din was the first Ma'nid "whose historicity is beyond question". He ruled the Chouf in the late Mamluk period (1260–1517) until his death in August/September 1506, a decade before the Ottoman conquest. The chronicle of the local Druze chronicler Ibn Sibat (d. 1520) indicates that Fakhr al-Din's given name was Uthman, while "Fakhr al-Din" was a laqab (honorific) meaning "pride of the faith". Ibn Sibat referred to him as the "emir of the Chouf in the region of Sidon" who died in 1506. A 1493 inscription on a mosque in Deir al-Qamar credits "al-Maqarr al-Fakhri [the Fakhrid Seat] Emir Fakhr al-Din Uthman" as its builder and further notes that he was the "son of al-Hajj Yunis ibn Ma'n". Both Fakhr al-Din and his father lived during the era of the prominent Druze reformer Jamal al-Din Abdullah al-Tanukhi (d. 1479), who urged his coreligionists to engage in Muslim religious practices, hence the usage of the honorary title al-Hajj (one who has completed the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca) by Yunis and the construction of a mosque, which were not used by the Druze, by Fakhr al-Din.
  According to the historian William Harris, in the 1490s Fakhr al-Din entered into an alliance with the Bani al-Hansh, a Sunni Muslim clan that controlled most of the Beqaa Valley at the time. The Bani al-Hansh were at war with the Buhturids (descendants of Jumayhur Buhtur) led by Jamal al-Din Hajji, the Mamluk-appointed governor of Beirut between the 1490s and 1512. In July 1496 he was summoned with other Syrian chieftains to Damascus by its viceroy Qansuh al-Yahyawi, according to the Damascene chronicler al-Busrawi (d. 1500), for unclear reasons. The chronicles of the Damascene chroniclers Ibn al-Himsi (d. 1527) and Ibn Tulun (d. 1546) hold that in the following year, he joined the rebellion of the Mamluk officer Aqbirdi when the latter besieged Damascus; Aqbirdi died of natural causes in 1498 and Fakhr al-Din was imprisoned in the Citadel of Damascus with other Syrian chieftains on 17 April 1499 for their participation in the rebellion. Fakhr al-Din was imprisoned by the Mamluk authorities in 1505, the year the Bani al-Hansh raided Jamal al-Din's soap stockpiles in Beirut. The Mamluks nonetheless held him in high esteem and he was released shortly after "covered with honor", according to al-Shidyaq. The latter remarked on Fakhr al-Din's emergence as "the sun setting on the Tanukh [Buhturid] emirate and rising on the Ma'n emirate".
caption: Fakhreddine Mosque in Deir al-Qamar, built by Fakhr al-Din in 1493
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