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Yoav Alon , The Shaykh of Shaykhs, Mithqal al-Fayiz and Tribal Leadership in Modern Jordan (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press , 2016). Pp. 240. $85.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780804796620
Book Review
History
The name al-Fayiz looms large in Jordan's history and politics, evocative for all who take serious interest in these subjects. In this book, the second of his vital contributions to understanding the interplay among shaykhs, tribes, the Hashemites, and the British, Yoav Alon offers a biography of Shaykh Mithqal al-Fayiz of the Bani Sakhr. His life spanning approximately 1880 to April 1967, "Mithqal al-Fayiz's rise to prominence and work as a shaykh thus allow us to trace both a remarkable individual life story and the evolution of a central social, political and cultural office in an era of major social and political change" (p. 5). As historians must, given the decentralized situation of archival sources in Jordan, Alon creatively draws on a diversity of archives and periodicals from Jordan, Israel, the UK, the United States, and Germany, memoirs in Arabic, European travel and related literatures, numerous Arabic-language biographies and tribal histories, ethnographies, studies in literary and poetic traditions, and his own interviews, including with Mithqal al-Fayiz's family. The result is a well-written and often richly descriptive picture of the patriarch of one of Jordan's most notable political families that serves as a lens for both specialist and nonspecialist readers to consider the crafting of a state, the narratives that are made to frame it and its modernity, and the intersection of interpersonal and state politics in both.
Shaykh Mithqal's was an extraordinary life, its early decades as riveting and improbable as the fictional accounts of late-19th and early-20th-century Bedouin life portrayed in the likes of recent Arabic-language television serials and the Oscar-nominated film Theeb (2014). In five chapters, Alon draws from his sources a comprehensive narrative of that life. He traces Shaykh Mithqal's rise among rivals during insecure times to lead the Bani Sakhr; the circumstances of his loyalty to the Ottomans; his reconciliation with the Hashemites and his sometimes fraught relationship with Emir 'Abd Allah. He chronicles his martial leadership on the Transjordanian frontier in the years of military vacuum and his role in service to state institutions. Most interestingly--and problematically...