164 A Short History of the Middle East
ploiting and widening the religious divisions with which Syria,
more than any other Middle Eastern country, is vexed. Sunni
Muslim Arabs constitute about 53 per cent, only of the population
of Syria and Lebanon combined. Some minorities form more-or-
less compact geographical blocks: the 340,000 Maronites in the
Mountain Lebanon; the 325,000 Alawis or Nusairiya1 in the Jebel
Nusairiya (Ansariya) along the northern half of the coast; the
160,000 Druze, mainly in the Jebel Druze but also in Lebanon;
perhaps as many as 200,000 Kurds in the Jazira of the north-east.
The separatist tendencies of all these minorities, which had un-
doubtedly suffered discrimination at the hands of the Sunnis under
Ottoman rule, were encouraged. In 1920 the old sanjaq of
Lebanon was expanded to three times its size by the inclusion of
the predominantly Muslim towns of Beirut, Tripoli, and Saida
(Sidon); South Lebanon down to the Palestine frontier, with a
predominantly ShTi population; and the fertile Biq'a, with a mixed
population consisting mainly of Muslims and Orthodox Chris-
tians. In this enlarged Lebanon the Maronites no longer had an
absolute majority as in the old sanjaq, and Christians of all sects
constituted only a precarious majority.2 This weakening of the
Christian position was perhaps designed to make them more
dependent on French protection and less inclined to follow a
nationalist line of their own. In 1921 the Jebel Druze, and in 1922
the Territory of the Alawis, were recognized by the French as in-
dependent. The remainder of Syria was divided in 1920 into the
two states of Damascus and Aleppo, in an attempt to exploit the
traditional rivalry between the two great cities but this experiment
did not last, and in 1924 the two states were united.
Having thus dismembered the country, the French set to work
to impose their cultural pattern on it in a fashion which was pas-
sively accepted by the inarticulate majority, but was bound to
estrange further the minority that had political aspirations. The
pinning of the Syro-Lebanese currency to the French franc,
though logical, had the unfortunate effect of causing it to follow
the franc's severe devaluation. The teaching of French was carried
to such a pitch that it was reported that in some districts children
1 Their religion is a curious amalgam of Shi'i Islam, with early Christian and
pagan elements j cf. Encyclopaedia of Islam, art. Nusairi.
2 This they are now losing, owing to the higher Muslim birth-rate, and the
disproportionate amount of emigration by Christians. (Pierre Rondot, Les
Institutions Politiques duLiban (Paris, 1947), 25 ff. and sketch map, p. 32 Us.)