Earlier generations of Arab historians treated the Ottoman legacy in negative terms, using 400 years of Ottoman rule as a backdrop for narratives of Arab national revival. But disillusionments of Arab nationalism since 1967, the renewed significance of religiously defined identities, and the entrenchment of distinct and separate Arab states, all changed the climate for consideration of Arab peoples’ Ottoman experiences. The place of the Empire in Arabs’ collective imagination is particularly telling, since a revived image of it as the first modern Islamic state (for good or for ill) competes with an older view of the Empire as the avatar of oppressive Turkish colonialism. Changing views of the Ottomans inform analysis of the highly visible “Islamic revival” —emphasizing supposedly Islamic cultural and political norms and values — in the Muslim Middle East since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In the specific case of Lebanon, the Ottoman past typically served as a foil for Lebanese writers’ self-representations and self-understandings. They characteristically presented the Ottoman era as a historical, political, and cultural dead weight that submerged Lebanon’s ancient glories without extinguishing the country’s allegedly unique historical personality. Though ideologically at odds because of competing political and territorial claims, Lebanese Arab nationalist and Phoenicianist Lebanese Christian nationalist narratives similarly portrayed the Ottoman past in pejorative terms. More recently, however, much work has been done on Lebanon’s Ottoman period, including the previously under-represented eighteenth century. Such writing is spurred and given a sense of urgency due to existential questions posed by the civil war that ravaged Lebanon from 1975 to 1990. Whereas historians of Mount Lebanon can (and often do) focus on internal histories and treat “the Ottomans” (and other mostly Muslim actors) as outsiders on par with “the Europeans,” histories that encompass Lebanon’s coastal towns (former centers of Ottoman administration) cannot externalize Muslims and Ottomans so easily. Moreover, even the Mountain’s various princes, beys, and sheikhs ultimately owed their positions to pecking orders legitimized and buttressed by an overarching Ottoman imperial system. Bearing this context in mind, my paper will treat 1980s-era Lebanese Arabist writing from two prolific historians, Wajih Kawtharani and Hasan al-Hallaq. Their works reevaluate Lebanon’s past in ways that reflect positively the Sultanate’s identification with Islamic rule. Deriving the significance of these historians’ understandings of themselves and their country through their treatment of the Ottoman era illuminates the ongoing dialogue between history and consciousness that underpins today’s “Islamic revival.”