The
Ammarin are derived from the tribe of Bani Atiyeh, a
large tribe with branches in the Hijaz (in Saudi
Arabia), Jordan, and Egypt. The Ammarin tribe consists
of five branches: Eyal Awwad, al-Shousheh, Eyal Hameed,
al-Gmour, al-Hasaseen, and al-Bakhaiteh. Eyal Awwad the
Ammarin Fuqara, the branch of Eyal Awwad.
The
Ammarin claim descent from two brothers of Bani Atiteh,
called Atiyeh and Nasser. The former of these two stayed
in Hijaz while the latter came to Rakhm, in southern
Palestine.
From that deereh they traveled to Gaza where
they traded with a merchant called Abou Khadra, who sold
to them on credit. In due course, their debts to him
grew to the point where he asked for repayment, which
they could not provide. He took seventy-five of their
horses, which were not sufficient to cover the total
value of the debt, but they were a major loss for the
tribe. Enraged, they burned his books of accounts by way
of revenge. But Abou Khadra was a man of parts. He
gathered his men and attacked the Ammarin. The battle
developed into a major massacre of the tribe, after
which they moved east, across to Wadi Araba into Jordan.
At
some point in the early nineteenth century, Awwad, an
ancestor of today’s Ammarin, bought land in Beidha,
close to Petra, for the price of ten goats and a gun.
His estate, which was a plateau in the mountains, came
to be known as Farsh Eyal Awwad (roughly, the estate of
the sons of Awwad). Slowly, his cousins and their
families joined him. As the tribe grew, competition, and
later conflict, developed between them, and the
neighboring tribes, al Rafai’ah and al Saeediyeen. After
a bloody battle, which the Ammarin won, the Saeediyee
fled to Buseira (near Tafileh in southern Jordan), while
the Rafai’ah were expelled to Khirbet al Rafai’ah,
also near Tafileh.
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