Arab, Lebanese Sunni

The Sunni Lebanese are the Sunni Muslim Arabs of Lebanon, one of its three largest communities and about a third of its citizens. Their roots are in the old coastal cities, Tripoli, Beirut and Sidon, where Sunni merchant and scholarly families (the Karami of Tripoli, the Solh, Salam and Beyhum of Beirut, the Bizri of Sidon) formed the Ottoman-era urban elite, and in the farming and tribal villages of Akkar, Dinnieh, Iqlim al-Kharrub, Arsal and the western Bekaa. In 1920 France joined these Sunni areas, which had looked to Damascus, to the Christian mountain to create Greater Lebanon; Sunni leaders accepted the state in the 1943 National Pact, which reserves the premiership for a Sunni. They speak Levantine Arabic, with marked city dialects (Tripolitan, Beiruti, Saidawi). Sunni Lebanese are distinct from the Shia, Druze and Christian Lebanese in religion, religious courts, quarters, party loyalties and marriage, and from the Syrian and Palestinian Sunnis who live among them, whom the state counts as foreigners.

Sunni urban life turns on the souk, the mosque and the family: Tripoli's Mamluk old city, its sweets (halawet el-jibn, knefeh) and soap-makers, Sidon's Khan al-Franj and sea castle, Beirut's Tariq al-Jdideh and Ras Beirut. Ramadan evenings fill with iftar tables, musaharati drummers and Sufi chanting, and the Prophet's birthday (Mawlid) is marked with processions in Tripoli. Families are large and patriarchal; cousin marriage is still common in Akkar and Dinnieh. Akkar and the Bekaa keep clan and tribal ties, including naturalised Arab tribes. The Sunni middle class is highly educated (the Makassed schools, Beirut Arab University) and many work in the Gulf.

Lebanese Sunnis follow the Hanafi school in their official courts, an Ottoman legacy, while much of the countryside follows the Shafi'i school. The Grand Mufti (Sheikh Abdel Latif Derian since 2014) and Dar al-Fatwa appoint imams and run sharia courts, waqfs and the Makassed charity. Popular piety includes Sufi orders, visits to saints' tombs and Mawlid celebrations; Salafi currents, born in Tripoli in the 1940s and strengthened by Gulf funding and the Syrian war, reject these. The Islamist Jamaa Islamiyya, the Lebanese branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, competes with the Hariri-era Future Movement and a secular middle class. Many younger urban Sunnis are religiously observant in a mild, cultural way, and outright conversion is rare.

The Bible is available in Arabic, including the 1865 Van Dyck translation made in Beirut, with modern versions, the JESUS Film, audio Scripture and satellite and online programmes in Levantine Arabic. Lebanese churches and ministries reached hundreds of thousands of Syrian Sunni refugees after 2011, but outreach among Sunni Lebanese themselves is thin and mostly through schools, clinics, aid in poor districts of Tripoli and Akkar, and media. Christian neighbours live close by in Tripoli's El Mina, Koura, Zgharta, Akkar villages and Sidon.