How Lebanese Muslims Embraced a Shared Identity

How did Muslims accept a Lebanese identity?

I know this is controversial, but i will ask anyway.

Reading the history of Lebanon, it seems that the idea behind the creation of the state was to have a country for the Levantine Christians, and Druze to some extent.

The territories added in 1919/20 were just so this Christian state would have more territory.

So, how did Lebanese Muslims, who mostly lived in those added areas of Greater Lebanon, developed a sense of belonging to Lebanon?

I am asking because i am aware of a somewhat similar situation. I come from the Balkans, and Bosnia and Herzegovina also has a mixed population. Serbs (Orthodox), Croats (Catholics) and Bosniaks (Muslims).

Croats and Serbs almost totally reject the idea of a shared Bosnian nation, often don't want to be called Bosnian. The first thing Bosnian Serbs did in the war in the 1990s was to scrap all parts of city names that included "Bosnian", you might face problems if you go to a lot of majority-Serb or majority-Croat cities with a Bosnian football jersey. Despite Bosnian going all the way back as an independent state to the medieval eras, they reject the idea of having anything to do with Bosnia because they perceive it as a Muslim project and idea (Bosnian sovereignty and state) to have their state beside the Catholic Croatia and Orthodox Serbia. This is rooted in the fact that it was mostly politicians of Bosniak ethnicity who always were behind protecting the status of Bosnia as a separate entity in almost all states it was part of, for example.

So, how this process didn't went that way for Lebanese Muslims, how don't for example Sunnis or Shias in Lebanon don't advocate for their own states or annexation to other countries (for example Sunni areas becoming a part of the majority-Sunni Syria).
Post Author: /u/Halale01
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