In this presentation, I examine the late-Mamluk epic song Madīḥa ʿalā jabal Lubnān (In Praise of Mount Lebanon) authored by the Maronite-Franciscan Jibrāyil Ibn al-Qilāʿī (d. ca. 1516). The Madīḥa draws on historical events to tell a semi-legendary story of the Christian mountain’s past. Modern authors consider it as a foundation of Lebanon’s national historiography due to its original historical components. However, since it follows Syriac syllabic metre rather than classical prosody, and because it was written by a Mamluk-era Christian author, beyond its apparent importance for the field of Christian Arabic studies, scholars have overlooked it as a literary project in context. This is despite the fact that it is one of the first works ever to be written in Mount Lebanon and stands as a witness to the popularization of Arabic culture and its expansion in the Mamluk Sultanate’s Syrian province. Drawing on recent studies by Thomas Herzog, Hilary Kilpatrick, and Zayde Antrim, I approach the Madīḥa as a Mamluk sīra (popular epic)-inspired Arabic poem from the rural Christian milieu. The text reads like sīra because of its popular appeal, heroic tone, and the association it makes between homeland and political allegiance. My study thus expands medieval Arabic literature to include pioneering writings from confessional and provincial communities. I explain that the poet adjusted the popular epic genre to the taste of his audience by writing his narrative in a verse widespread in the Syriac church and by using Mount Lebanon’s pastoral imagery, Biblical tropes, folk tales, and collective memory. The liturgical form and culture-specific references broke with the episodic structure of Arabic narrative and made way for a meditative epic formed of cycles of sin and repentance, which builds the community’s imagined past while urging the public to reflect on the consequences of sin and heresy. Ibn al-Qilāʿī wrote his song to counter his party’s religious rivals, the Miaphysites, who were gaining ground in the mountain. The poem’s objective, I argue, is to stimulate the historical consciousness of largely illiterate 15th-century farmers and sheepherders who sought an explanation for their era’s unprecedented inter-confessional tensions.