Some people ask why the El Chemor/Gharios family, by having such an impressive pedigree, was not more influential in Lebanon and the middle eastern Levant in the last 150 years.
The answer is very simple. First, by descending from the last king of Ghassan Chemor Jablah VI, and refusing to convert to Islam, the family represented resistance to Islamic regimes. Second, after the 1700’s, the principality of Mount Lebanon and the autonomous Sheikhdoms, were tyrannically controlled by the Ottoman Empire. Until then, it had a similar structure of the Holy Roman Empire, with freedom and autonomy only having to pay tribute to the Turkish sultans.
However, with the deposition of the family in 1747, and the “open war” against the El Chemor family (declared by sultan Mahmud I, the hunchback) made the heirs of Sheikh Youssef, the last ruler of Zgharta-Zeywe, to flee and even change surname in order to avoid assassination.
Obviously, that echoed in the last 150 years. The families complacent to the Ottoman occupation were given more prestigious political roles until present days. Even changing the last name, being aware of the history, some members of the Gharios branch of the El Chemor family in Lebanon, returned the legal use of the surname “El Chemor” after “Gharios” in the beginning of the 1900’s.
Regardless of the persecution, the El Chemor family kept using the titles uninterruptedly, and claiming all its rights until the present days. We have irrefutable documentation showing the aforementioned: land deeds, tombstones, books, modern passports, etc. check the link below:
The branch of the family that accepted to convert to Islam had a more prominent recent history, ruling the principality of Ha’il (or Jabal Shammar/Chemor, currently Saudi Arabia) until 1921. All these historical chronicles can be found in the Encyclopedia of the Maronite families (Notre Dame University) volume 4, page 2236. Check the links below:
THE ROYAL HERALD 
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