Membership of Jordanian Clans

First, a bit of background regarding Jordan: Jordan is a land of crossroads. Historically, it was a land that travelers passed through between the Levant and Arabia, the Holy Land and Iraq, Egypt and Asia. As with many other areas in the Levant, many of Ibrahim Pasha's soldiers decided to make this their home, which explains the abundance of Egyptian-derived surnames in the Levant.

The mass migrations of Palestinians here in 1948 and then again in 1967 has raised a renewed interest in the identity of, "native" Jordanians. It is a natural human tendency to want to feel special, and given that the majority of Jordan's population are, in fact, Palestinian migrants, some of those who didn't immigrate here over the past century like to feel a bit different.

The problem that arises is that many people do not understand how caliphate-era residents of Jordan determined clan membership. Let's first start with what clans are not: they are not exclusively blood relations. The larger clans (like the enormous Bani Hassan and the Da3ja of the capital region) are split into many families. The members of each individual family are generally closely related, possibly descending from related ancestors. However, different families within a clan are often not related. Bani Hassan absorbed caliphate-era Palestinian and Iraqi migrant families into their ranks in a symbiotic relationship that ensured the safety of all those involved against their common archenemy: Bani Sakhr. Similarly, Da3ja absorbed Egyptians, which make up the Jawamees family. (I once had the strange experience of convincing a young man from the Jawamees that his ancestors were originally Egyptian.) The Mahhadeen family of Kerak is originally Iraqi, and many of the families of Salt are originally from Nablus, Palestine, with an occasional mixture of Egyptian blood for variety.

These migrant families confederated into clans for practical purposes. Living in a resource-scarce area like Jordan, which the Ottomans and other caliphs before them had no interest in controlling, meant that you were either absorbed into one of your neighbouring clans or you would be constantly abused by bedouin raids. The clans thus operated as primitive nations: each family had allegiance to every other family in the clan, and problems would be resolved, in the worst case, by the clan's shaykh. Thus, being the member of a Jordanian clan was a primitive form of citizenship. No one claims that Americans are all racially related. Rather, they stand as a single nation for the purposes of protection, economic advantage, etc. The same principle held for the clans of Jordan.