page_title: Haditha Al-Khraisha
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Haditha Al-Khraisha / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Sheikh Haditha Al-Khraisha of Beni Sakher
context_page_description: Haditha Ali Abdullah Al-Khraisha was a Bedouin tribal sheikh in Jordan in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. Haditha was one of the two paramount sheikhs of the Bani Sakhr Tribe, arguably the most powerful tribe in Jordan. Haditha headed the northern clans of the Bani Sakhr, while Mithgal Al-Fayez headed the other half. In the early twentieth century, Haditha and the Bani Sakhr, in addition to other Trans-Jordanian tribes such as the Huweitat and the Belqawiah, fought the Wahhabi Ikhwan, a religious militia who helped establish Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud as the first King of Saudi Arabia. The Wahhabi Ikhwan were Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud's tool for territorial expansion and lent religious legitimacy to Ibn Saud's territorial and political ambitions. According to King Faisal Al Saud the armed resistance that Bani Sakhr put up against Ibn Saud and the Wahhabi Ikhwan was "the reason that Saudi Arabia's borders do not extend all the way to Palestine and why the Al Sauds never became the rulers of the Levant". Haditha was known throughout Arabia for his wisdom and chivalry, He played a significant role in building the nascent Jordanian state and shaping its development.
context_section_description: Sheikh Haditha was respected both by his fellow Arabs, the orientalists who met him on their travels, and by the British Mandate officers with whom he came into contact, several of whom expressed their grudging admiration for the sheikh as in this report by Captain Dunbar Brunton in 1920: "Haditha, in particular, deserves the greatest credit for the way in which he acted as intermediary...sensible and reliable...is not wealthy but never begs like others and is generous...His manners are quiet and he has a great personal charm. One might term him the only real gentleman among the sheikhs of this region." Glubb described Sheikh Haditha as "a man of sincere religion and a high standard of honour." As Alon writes in The Making of Jordan: Tribes, Colonialism and the Modern State, "Haditha clearly embodied the stereotypical Bedouin gentleman so admired by the British. It is worth noting that Britons serving in Transjordan in later years often remarked on his virtues."   In Adventures in Arabia, Seabrook describes Haditha as a man who possessed a "courtly dignity ... a tall, elderly man, of grave and noble countenance, seldom smiling, with whitening beard, and the far-away look of a dreamer in his eyes... [The Bedouin's] code of honor, in some respects, is as quixotic and fantastic as that of King Arthur's knights. Haditha embodied it, perhaps more than any other Bedouin I met. My friend Mithkal [Al-Fayez] was rich, prosperous, and worldly-wise, cynical, too, in an amiable way; yet he revered Haditha as a sort of saint. Haditha was "universally honored and beloved" and was "famous throughout the desert because of his extraordinary generosity".
caption: Sheikh Haditha Al-Khraisha of Beni Sakhr
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