The Banu Saqr or Al Sqour (alternatively transliterated Sakr, Saqir or Sagr) is a Bedouin tribe formerly concentrated in the Beisan Valley of Palestine from until the 1948 Palestine war and now resident in modern Jordan. Throughout the 18th century, they were the strongest of the Bedouin tribes of northern Palestine and were in frequent conflict with the strongmen of the region, first the tax farmer Daher al-Umar (1730–1775) and then the governor Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar (1775–1804). Their conflict stemmed from these leaders' efforts to stem the tribe's raiding of the region's villages and roads.
The Saqr remained a potent tribe throughout the 19th century and were reported by western travelers during this period to have dominated the Beisan Valley. From the 1880s through the early 20th century, they were semi-nomadic cultivators, shepherds and cattle-raisers who seasonally migrated through the Jordan Valley to graze their livestock. They acquired deeds to the lands of the Beisan Valley they had long inhabited in the 1920s, but much of these lands were sold to Arab middlemen and eventually to the Jewish National Fund, which evicted the Saqr from those lands. By the late 1940s, the sheikhs of the Saqr and Palestinian nationalist politicians warned of the impending "extinction" of the tribe as a result of their displacement. In the days leading up to the 1948 Palestine War, the Saqr resisted the occupation of their tribal areas by Jewish forces but were defeated and expelled or fled to the Emirate of Transjordan.
The tribe claimed common ancestry with the Sardiyya, a Bedouin tribe established in the Hauran from at least the 16th century. By the 20th century, Saqr consisted of several subtribes and clans from different lineages, regions and lifestyles, though their paramount sheikhs claimed descent from the tribe's original ancestor. The tribe had its own set of customs and traditions regarding social status, marriage, circumcision, justice, mediation and honoring of saints. They remained politically affiliated with their traditional tribal allies in Palestine, the Hauran and Transjordan.
History Ottoman period Origins and establishment in Palestine According to their oral traditions, the Banu Saqr established themselves in the Beisan valley of Palestine in . The tradition holds they were a branch of the Mafarija tribe whose abodes were in the Hauran and Balqa and their migration to Palestine was precipitated by the invasions of their home areas by the Anizzah Bedouins from Najd. As recorded by ethnographer Tawfiq Canaan in his 1936 publication about the Saqr, the tribe's leading families traced their descent to an ancestor named Mallak; Mallak's brother Fawwaz was the ancestor of the leading family of the Sardiyya, a branch of the Mafarija. While the descendants of Fawwaz migrated to the Hauran, the descendants of Mallak partly settled in the Balqa where they formed part of the Abbad tribe and others eventually settled in the Beisan Valley as the Saqr. A similar tradition places the 16th-century abode of the Mafarija (or Banu Mufarrij) in the Nablus highlands and that a conflict at that time split off the Saqr under Umar ibn Jabal from other Mafarija faction, the Sardiyya under its leader Rashid.
As Bedouins, the Saqr roamed the region between Safed in the north to Nablus in the south. According to historian Thomas Philipp, "They had a bad—but probably well-deserved—reputation as an unruly, dangerous element, making highways insecure, endangering commercial traffic, looting and plundering, and not paying taxes." According to historian Moshe Sharon, during this century, the "Banu Saqr was the strong tribe of northern Palestine".
Activity under Daher al-Umar As early as 1707, they forged ties with the Zayadina (sing. Zaydani), a formerly Bedouin family whose members served as tax farmers of the Galilee's districts from the late 17th century, by facilitating their settlement in the village of Arraba, where leaders of the Saqr lived. After the Ottoman governor of Sidon Eyalet and the rural clans of Jabal Nablus jointly assaulted the Saqr to rein in the tribe, the Saqr under their leader Rashid al-Jabr, chose the upstart Zaydani sheikh Daher al-Umar to intercede on their behalf with the authorities. Daher, in turn, drew on the strength of the Saqr and with their support, occupied the town of Tiberias in 1730, expelling its (governor) and gaining its tax farm.
The Saqr's alliance with Daher faltered by the mid-1730s. Daher increasingly relied on a professional troop of Maghrebi mercenaries rather than the Saqr, who were harder to control, more interested in plunder than combat, and only available for short stints. Furthermore, the Saqr's raids on the Galilee's villages and highway robberies directly contravened Daher's key policy of establishing law and order in his growing domains and became a liability for him. Daher limited the Saqr's ability to launch looting raids and curtailed their activies. Under Rashid al-Jabr, the Saqr defected to the clans of Jabal Nablus led by the Madi and Jarrar families in their struggle with Daher over control of Nazareth and the fertile Marj Ibn Amer plain, which separated Jabal Nablus from the Galilee. The Zayadina with their Maghrebi soldiers and the Nazarenes routed the Saqr–Jarrar coalition, but withdrew from Jabal Nablus after failing to subdue the Jarrars at their Sanur fortress.
The Saqr continued to act against Daher in the following years, including supporting his elder brother Sa'd al-Umar's bid to gain the paramount (chieftainship) of the Zayadina. They backed efforts by the governor of Damascus, Sulayman Pasha al-Azm, to eliminate Daher in 1737–1738 and 1742–1743. In the clashes between Daher and Sulayman Pasha in 1737, the Saqr captured Daher's brother Salih and handed him over to Sulayman Pasha, who had him executed in Damascus. This furthered the hostility between Daher and the tribe. During the sieges of Tiberias (1742–1743) by Sulayman Pasha, the Saqr again formed part of the governor's coalition against Daher, along with the Beni Sakhr tribe. In 1771, when Daher and the forces of Ali Bey al-Kabir of Egypt launched their widescale assault against Damascus Eyalet, the Saqr backed the governor of Damascus, Uthman Pasha al-Kurji.
Despite the frequent hostility between the Saqr and Daher and the latter's limits on the tribe's activities, he continued to allow them to dwell in the Marj Ibn Amer and Beisan valleys and graze their livestock there. According to historian Amnon Cohen, provided the Saqr and other Bedouins did not disturb traffic and commerce along the trade routes, Daher "was prepared to adopt a reasonably tolerant attitude towards the nomadic tribes".
Activity under Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar Daher's practical successor as regional strongman, the Acre-based governor of Sidon Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, maintained and strengthened fortifications in the Tiberias area to keep the Bedouin, including the Saqr, in check. Nevertheless, these measures were mostly effective in preventing the entry of Bedouin tribes from outside of Palestine and less effective against the Saqr, who were already present in Palestine. They continued to threaten the settled population, prompting Jazzar's warning to their lead sheikh at the time, Zamil, and his son Faris. The Saqr shifted their raiding activities from Sidon Eyalet to Nablus Sanjak. In response to the Saqr's attack on an Ottoman government convoy in Jabal Nablus en route to Jerusalem, Jazzar launched an offensive against them, killing Zamil. In 1778, the Saqr renewed their raids against the villages in Jazzar's domains and partly destroyed the waterworks around Acre. Jazzar launched a counterattack with support from the local Druze and by the end of 1783, soundly defeated them and reestablished security for the villages and on the roads. By 1801, the Bedouin of the Lower Galilee and around Mount Tabor, probably the Saqr, were reported by a traveler to have remained in a state of rebellion and that Jazzar had launched a large-scale campaign against them. By the end of his rule in 1804, Jazzar's stringent military measures against the Saqr and the Bedouin in general led to long-term security in the Galilee from Bedouin depredations for the following decades.
Late Ottoman period
The Saqr were estimated to have 300 horsemen by A. Jaubert in 1812. The Swiss traveler Johann Ludwig Burckhardt mentioned the Saqr as one of three Bedouin tribes inhabiting the River Jordan valley in the vicinity of Tiberias in 1816. The Saqr were reported to "have possession of the Ghor [Beisan Valley]" by scholars Edward Robinson and Eli Smith in 1852. Likewise, in 1863, Henry Baker Tristram reported that "the whole" of the Beisan Valley was in the control of Bedouin tribes, including the Saqr. Clashes were reported between these Bedouins and the settled Arabs in the adjacent hill country by C. R. Conder.
The Ottoman government instituted its landmark Land Code in 1858 to regulate land ownership, abolish the previous system of tax farming and restore government control of state land; the lands of the Beisan valley were considered state land by the government. In 1874, the Palestine Exploration Fund's Tyrwhitt Drake estimated the size of the Saqr of the Beisan Valley and Wadi al-Jalud at 400 men in 150 tents and noted they were the largest tribe there and owned most of the cattle, sheep and goat herds; they formerly possessed many horses and camels but these were reduced following the tribe's suppression by the governor of Nablus, Muhammad Sa'id Pasha, in . Population registers from 1881 to 1885 recorded that the population of the Saqr in the valley was about 1,000; the next largest tribe, the Ghazzawiyya numbered 500. At that time, in 1882, Sultan Abdul Hamid II () registered the lands of the Beisan valley in his name, with the Bedouin, including the Saqr, who lived there required to pay a tithe on the lands they inhabited amounting to one-tenth of the agricultural output.
The government strove to settle the nomadic Bedouin and by the 1900s the tribes of the Beisan Valley had become largely stationary and paid their taxes. A 1915 government study commissioned by the Ottoman governor of Beirut Vilayet surveyed the valley and noted that the Saqr numbered 2,500 to 3,000 tribesmen and cultivated 12,500 dunams of land. A 1917 report indicated a "semi-Bedouin" population in the valley of 6,000, with the Saqr concentrated west of the town of Beisan, alongside 4,000 (peasants).
British Mandatory period
The British conquered Palestine in 1917 during World War I and the British Mandate government of Palestine was established in 1920. The British initially maintained the Ottoman land system, registering the sultan's lands as state land with the Bedouin paying taxes and continuing the process of sedenterization that had begun in the 1880s. The 1922 census and a 1923 document clarifying its data for the Beisan valley showed the Saqr tribe population divided into those under the leadership of Yusel al-Irsan, numbering 484 persons, and those under Abdullah al-Husayn, numbering 1,037 persons. In addition, the Saqr subtribes or settlements of Umm Ajra, Arab al-Safa and Khuneizir were counted separately and collectively numbered 424 persons.