During the winter of 1996, six years after the end of Lebanon’s civil war, my family finally had enough faith in peace to start building a summer house in Shimlan, a small village half an hour’s drive into the mountains above Beirut. Nestled in hills clad with pine trees, its stone houses looking out on breathtaking views of the capital, Shimlan was once home to several large Christian families who for centuries shared the area with the small Druze community, one of the 18 religious denominations in Lebanon.