Popular and scholastic understandings of the status of the Shi'i ulama living under Ottoman rule in Syria tend to present the experience as one of systematic oppression and - instances of taqiyya (religious dissimulation) notwithstanding - categorical exclusion from official positions within the legal and scholastic spheres of Sunni officialdom. While the Shia living under Ottoman rule were certainly victims of oppression and exclusion, totalizing portrayals of such phenomena prevent us from seeing a more nuanced reality. This paper challenges such assumptions by examining the socio-political position of the al-Amin family, a family from Jabal Amil (roughly South Lebanon), that produced numerous generations of scholars from the eighteenth century through to today. The most prominent member of the family, the early twentieth century marja‘ al-taqlid (religious exemplar to the Shii community) Muhsin al-Amin, was a significant contributor to the circulation of tropological accounts of Shi‘i exclusion and oppression by the Sunni Ottoman Turkish authorities. An examination of the socio-political activities of members of the al-Amin family’s line of scholars, however, reveals a more complex reality in which Shi‘i ulama could be active participants in their community’s negotiations with regional and local authorities. Various moments throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries indicate that members of the al-Amin family obtained official positions within the Ottoman legal and educational systems, maintained close if fraught relations with local, non-Shi‘i authorities, and engaged in extensive economic activities some of which were made possible as payment for the services rendered on behalf of the Ottomans. By presenting an account of the al-Amin family’s participation in the political and economic life of the region we achieve not only a better understanding of the status of the Shia under Ottoman rule but a better understanding of what it meant to be a family of ulama and how particular Shi‘i families came to maintain dominance within both the Shi’i scholastic milieux and lay society.