page_title: Zahir al-Umar
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Zahir al-Umar / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Omar El Zidani's house in Arrabe דלת מעוטרת בבית עומאר אל זידאני בעראבה
context_page_description: Zahir al-Umar al-Zaydani, alternatively spelled Daher al-Omar or Dahir al-Umar was the autonomous Arab ruler of northern Palestine in the mid-18th century, while the area was still nominally part of the Ottoman Empire. For much of his reign, starting in the 1730s, his domain mainly consisted of Galilee, with successive headquarters in Tiberias, Arraba, Nazareth, Deir Hanna and finally Acre, in 1746. He fortified Acre, and the city became a center of the cotton trade between Palestine and Europe. In the mid-1760s, he reestablished the port town of Haifa nearby.
  Zahir successfully withstood assaults and sieges by the Ottoman governors of the Sidon and Damascus provinces, who attempted to limit or eliminate his influence. He was often supported in these confrontations by the rural Shia Muslim clans of Jabal Amil. In 1771, in alliance with Ali Bey al-Kabir of the Eyalet of Egypt and with backing from Russia, Zahir captured Sidon, while Ali Bey's forces conquered Damascus, both acts in open defiance of the Ottoman sultan. At the peak of his power in 1774, Zahir's autonomous sheikhdom extended from Beirut to Gaza and included the Jabal Amil and Jabal Ajlun regions.
context_section_description: Zahir was born in the village of 'Arrabat al-Battuf in central Galilee. His date of birth is not definitively known, with the years 1686, 1689/90 and 1694 cited by Zahir's contemporary biographers Volney, Mikha'il Sabbagh and Khalil al-Muradi, respectively. According to biographer Ahmad Hasan Joudah, 1689/1690 is the most likely year of his birth because he considers Sabbagh to be the most reliable source for Zahir's personal life. The proper transliteration of his given name is Ẓāhir, but in the local dialect of Arabic used in Galilee, his name is pronounced Ḍāhir. Zahir's family, the Zaydani clan, were Sunni Muslim notables from the Qaisi tribal confederation based in the Tiberias area who had strong connections to the Arab-Bedouin tribesmen of Galilee, which at the time was part of the Ottoman Empire. Zahir was the youngest of four sons born to Sheikh Umar al-Zaydani; his brothers were Sa'd, Salih "Abu Dani" and Yusuf, and his sister was Shammah. Zahir grew up in the village of Saffuriya.
  Zahir's father and grandfather had both served as the multazim (chief tax collector) of Tiberias, having been appointed by the Druze emirs (princes) of the Ma'an dynasty which governed the region from their headquarters in Mount Lebanon. In 1698, Umar az-Zaydani was appointed multazim of the Safad region by Bashir Shihab I, the Sunni Qaisi emir who succeeded the Ma'ans as governor of the Mount Lebanon Emirate. The Zaydani family maintained commercial trade relations extending from Galilee to Aleppo and controlled tax farms in Galilee; Zahir's uncle Ali, for instance, held the tax farm of al-Damun. Zahir's elder brother Sa'd became the head of the family when their father died in 1706, but the family's tax farms were transferred to Zahir, who was still a teenager. This was done as a precautionary measure, so that in the event of a default in tax payments, the Ottoman government would not be able to hold the practical owners of the tax farms accountable. Nonetheless, legal ownership of the Zaydani tax farms gave Zahir considerable power within his clan.
  In 1707, Zahir was involved in a brawl in Tiberias in which he killed a man. As a result, Sa'd opted to move the family to Arraba after being offered safe haven there by the Bani Saqr tribe. In Arraba, Zahir received a degree of formal education from a certain Muslim scholar, Abd al-Qadir al-Hifnawi. During his youth, Zahir also learned how to hunt and fight. When the village of Bi'ina was attacked by forces dispatched by the governor of Sidon Eyalet sometime between 1713 and 1718, Zahir played an important role in defending the village and managed to evade the governor's troops. According to chroniclers of the time, this event, along with Zahir's moderation, turned Zahir into a folk hero in the area. His martial talents gained him further respect among the local peasantry throughout the 1720s.
  Along with Sa'd, he also gained prestige among the people of Damascus, with whom he continued the commercial relationships established by his father. Among the contacts Zahir made there was the Muslim scholar Abd al-Ghaffar al-Shuwaki, who introduced Zahir to Sayyid Muhammad of the al-Husayni family, which provided the sharifs of Damascus at the time; Zahir married Sayyid Muhammad's daughter and moved to Nazareth because she considered Arraba too small. When Sayyid Muhammad died, Zahir inherited his fortune.
caption: Zahir's home in Arraba
exif: {"Image Make": "Panasonic", "Image Model": "DMC-LS80", "Image XResolution": "180", "Image YResolution": "180", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Ver.1.0", "Image DateTime": "2006:02:02 05:57:24", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "612", "Image CustomRendered": "Normal", "Image ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "Image WhiteBalance": "Auto", "Image DigitalZoomRatio": "0", "Image FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "33", "Image SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "Image GainControl": "None", "Image Contrast": "Normal", "Image Saturation": "Normal", "Image Sharpness": "Normal", "Image PrintIM": "[80, 114, 105, 110, 116, 73, 77, 0, 48, 50, 53, 48, 0, 0, 14, 0, 1, 0, 22, 0, ... ]", "Image Tag 0xC6D2": "[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, ... ]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail Orientation": "Rotated 90 CW", "Thumbnail XResolution": "180", "Thumbnail YResolution": "180", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "7926", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6129", "Thumbnail YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/160", "EXIF FNumber": "14/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2006:02:02 05:57:24", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2006:02:02 05:57:24", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "3", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "11/2", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1920", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2560", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed"}