History

The Harb tribe is among the largest and most widely spread in the Hejaz, its lands reaching from Medina in the north to al-Qunfudhah in the south, and from Jeddah and the Red Sea eastward beyond Wadi al-Rummah. The tribe divides into two great branches: Bani Salim and Bani Masruh.

This family belongs to Bani Salim — the branch settled east and south of Medina, comprising well-known clans whose descendants are today spread between the Hejaz, Najd, and distant places of migration.

In the early nineteenth century a severe famine struck the Hejaz. Medina depended for its food on grain caravans from Egypt; when war and unrest cut them off, hunger deepened until chroniclers recorded widespread death. Mass migrations began toward Egypt — the land the food had come from.

The family settled in Kafr Shubin, some four kilometres from Shibin al-Qanatir in Qalyubia. It was fertile farmland in the heart of the Delta — as distant as could be from the Hejazi desert they had left.

Zain al-Din died about two years after arriving and was buried in the village. His wife died six years later and was buried beside him. Mousa — the only son — remained an orphan in a foreign land; it is to him that the entire family would afterwards be named.

Mousa grew, and married a woman of Arab tribes who had come with her father from Arabia. He fathered six sons and a daughter. From this single household in a small Egyptian village descend every branch of the family today.

The sons of Mousa settled at al-Dafanat on the eastern bank of Wadi al-Shallala, some four kilometres from the district of Beersheba — fertile land that allowed them to combine farming with herding.

The Negev in that century was a theatre of continuous conflict among its great tribes: the Tarabin, Tiyaha, Azazma, Jabarat and Hanajra. The family fought two wars: in the first, they and their allies defeated the Tiyaha after four years of fighting, and the most renowned fighter among the sons of Mousa was the eldest, Abd al-Ati.

A second war followed against the Azazma, in which three of Mousa's sons were killed: Hussein, Ismail and Abd al-Rahman. They were buried at the shrine of Sheikh Nuran at a place called Qawz al-Izz — named for the pride the victors took in their triumph there; a *qawz* in Negev speech being a mound rising above the land around it.

Mousa died and was buried at al-Khalasa, south of Beersheba. Three of his sons survived him: Abd al-Ati, Muhammad and Abd al-Nabi — and from these three descend all the living branches of the family.

With the Nakba of 1948 the tribes of Beersheba were driven from their lands, and branches of the family took refuge in Khan Younis and Abasan al-Saghira in the Gaza Strip. The family's burial places bear witness: in this generation they shift from Qawz al-Izz and al-Khalasa to Khan Younis and Abasan.

From Gaza further branches extended to Jordan and beyond, where families now live in Amman and elsewhere.

The branch of Abd al-Nabi, son of Mousa, did not travel with his brothers to Palestine; his descendants remained in Egypt where the first grandfather had settled. Their graves lie to this day in Kafr Shubin and Shibin al-Kawm in Monufia, and the names of their latest generations are wholly Egyptian — a branch that lived two centuries in the country that was, for the others, only a waypoint.

The largest movement into Jordan followed the 1967 war and the displacement from the Gaza Strip that came after it. Families settled in Amman — the capital that received successive waves of Palestinian refuge — and in Jerash to the north.

In Jordan the ninth and tenth generations from Zain al-Din were born — the first two generations in the family's history to know no displacement. They grew up in settled cities, studied in their schools and universities, and took up professions unknown to their ancestors: engineering, medicine, teaching and software.

And from Amman this record was compiled — in the city that has become, after two centuries of movement, home to a branch of the family that keeps the memory of the homelands that came before.