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 ʿAbd 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 for hegemonic state and individual narratives—he provides a comprehensive account of Shaykh Mithqal's courtship of the Yishuv; his alliances with the Transjordanian urban merchant elites of long ago Syrian and Palestinian origins; and his more and less skillful opposition to and accommodation, both willing and less so, of great power and encroaching state interests.

In a book that offers so much of interest, it is necessary to highlight in particular two related themes woven through its chapters for their contribution to critical canonical discourse regarding Jordan's history. Alon emphasizes the importance of land ownership in Jordan, the wealth and power of landowners, and both in spite of and due to that wealth and power, their vulnerability to the institutions that governed ownership of land and the financing of debt. He likewise emphasizes the deliberate deployment of nationalist and pan-nationalist discourses to support and advocate for tribal and kin interests in a centralizing state system that threatens, and ultimately undermines, shaykhly and tribal autonomy. Throughout the book, Alon traces a trajectory of continuous centralization—one that parallels the arc of Mithqal al-Fayiz's life—seeking to subdue and modernize this part of the Ottoman frontier and the postwar state created for it. With innovations easing the movement of goods, people, and communications and the outlawing of raiding, a shaykh's ability to wield power through the distribution of largesse depended on the profits of his land. Shaykh Mithqal was one of Jordan's most significant landowners, amassing an enormous estate and a vast fortune. Between the years of the short-lived Arab Kingdom under Faysal's rule and the creation of the Desert Patrol, he was also salaried. While carefully hedging his bets throughout the Great War and the years of uncertainty that followed, despite signing petitions and espousing the doctrines of nationalism and pan-nationalism appropriate for his audience, Shaykh Mithqal ultimately sided with ʿAbd Allah because, better than a European power would have, the Hashemite state served his interests, those of the Bani Sakhr, and their autonomy.

The interstices of economic hardship and Britain's imposition of state power, both coercive and repressive, in Jordan's hinterlands and deserts as the 1930s began bore out the wisdom of such a calculation. Further to this point, Alon's book is its best and most interesting in its use of archival sources for exploring a crucial trajectory for this second theme: not unlike Emir ʿAbd Allah's similar contacts and initiatives, Mithqal al-Fayiz's leadership among a significant cadre of other large Transjordanian landowners in support of potential sales of Transjordanian land to the Jewish Agency and Jewish settlement in Transjordan. In the context of his own financial hardship and its impact on his ability to operate, Shaykh Mithqal searched for Arab alternatives to the offer of a British loan that came with difficult conditions for his power over his own estate. He thus involved himself deeply in Palestine affairs, cultivating relationships with the most powerful Arab political circles, including that of the Husaynis, while simultaneously engaging with the Zionists in a potentially mutually beneficial relationship. This problematic initiative ultimately failed, of course, under the weight of the 1936 revolt and Mithqal's necessity to support it, during which he repaired his image vis-à-vis the Palestine issue, reengaged in mutually beneficial positionality with Emir ʿAbd Allah, and comfortably took a stand against the British. Later overtures to reengage the Jewish Agency unsurprisingly failed. While one could look askance at Alon's benign presentation of this extensive episode relative to the brutality with which it deserves to be read and internalized vis-à-vis multiple aspects of Jordan's perpetually hardening national narrative, the research is superb.

As much as this book contributes to a better understanding of Jordan's history in its many complexities and nuances, the anodyne nature of its presentation of Mithqal al-Fayiz's relationship with the Jewish Agency leads me to conclude with two related observations, somewhat tangential to the work itself. Alon opens his book with a synopsis of the events of autumn 2012, a crescendo in nearly two years of intensifying activism in opposition to the long, ongoing erosion of the social contract and its resultant inequality, accompanied by the further authoritarian securitization of the state. While much of the academic and journalistic analyses published since have seized on this same moment to offer better and worse versions of “why Jordan survived the ‘Arab Spring,’” Alon's purpose is to provide crucial historical context for that moment and what has followed through the actions of his subject's descendants, who came forward, of course, in strong defense of national unity, the monarchy, and with the harshest possible language for and about the protestors. As historians we need to take this long view and tie it explicitly to the contemporary moment as Alon has done, as the events to which we have borne witness over the past several years are best understood in light of the longer, highly contextualized lenses we can offer for viewing them. We have a responsibility to be of service to the uprisings and to our field by our unrelenting insistence on such nuanced contextualization, and by our refusal to cede to anything less. While not his task to do so, it might be a disappointment to some readers that Alon takes these few pages about a fraught, important moment no further. There is no subsequent interrogation of what the kind of action he describes of Mithqal al-Fayiz's descendants says about elite complicity in an untenable status quo and the potential for agency (or lack thereof) of a hirāk in it. That said, Alon has added to the solid foundation, including his own excellent scholarship, by which we might better understand the nodes of symbiosis between Jordan's tribes, monarchy, and state. The path is well laid for scholars who will use autumn 2012 in the future as a lens for refracting histories of resistance.

The final observation is this: despite decades of excellent, interdisciplinary scholarship on tribes in Jordan and the broader region, the nuance too often gets lost out there, and Jordan and its history are continually reduced to stories about great men, ultimately loyal Transjordanian tribes, and a plucky monarch versus an angry and hostile Palestinian majority, and then Iraqis, and then the migrant laborers, and now Syrians, and next who and what? It is so much more complicated than this narrative. But this narrative is easy and serves a popular discourse that at its best is ignorant and at its worst enables a continuously hardening nationalist militarist identity discourse manifest in claims to the scraps of the frayed social safety net and how it got to be this way. With The Shaykh of Shayks, Yoav Alon has given us another piece of critical scholarship with which to foster better, critical understanding of complex histories with immediate relevance. Let's be sure to use it, and wisely so.