“The year Saffuq Al Jarba was slain”: October 1847
Bedouin testimonies in the Abbas Pasha Manuscript (APM) do not mention the calendar year an event took place. That’s because Bedouins, having an oral culture, did not record years the way people with a written culture did. Instead, the referred to major events that took place in the those years: “The year water was sold”, “the year Ibrahim Pasha went back westwards”, “the year Saffuq Al Jarba was slain”.
The latter event is mentioned on page 477: “In the year that Saffuq al Jarba was slain, a hamra mare came to us which had been captured by Musay’id, the son of my brother“. Using Ottoman archives, Wiliamson, in his “Political History of the Shammar tribe” dated the treacherous murder of Sfuq al-Jarba, leader of the Shammar, by the Ottomans to late October 1847:
An Ottoman contingent under the leadership of Gange Agha left Baghdad in late October, 1847, and met Sufuq at his camp a few hours outside of the capital […]. Sufuq remained behind under the protection of his personal guard. Gange Agha, leader of the Ottoman troops, supposedly remained behind to assist Sufuq in the event of trouble. […] Gange Agha [now] had the opportunity to execute the secret orders of Najib Pasha [of Bagdad]. On a prearranged signal an Ottoman soldier shot Sufiuq in the back and decapitated him. Within hours, Najib Pasha held the head of the “lord of the desert.”
yes this is Sultan Al Suwait’s testimony about a story of shuwaymah al sabah, When Mesaieed, his nephew, uprooted it from his neighbor Aba Dhara Sheikh Al-Qawasim, both of whom were from Al-Dhafeer, He took her from alKrijha from Al-Muwaiqa from Al-Saba’ from Anza, and that mare is by her father Al-Muhayoubi, so Ibn Hashush(from al dafeer) took her by recognition as Al-Shuwayma Al-Sibahiya, and he narrate her story her origin was devolve to AlaHasna from Arab Ibn Melham (Al-Munabaha Aneza) and she devolve from Al-Hasna to the son of Ali from Al-Samir (Samir bin Dokhi). And from them to the sabaa from Anzah and they said : It is Shuwaimah al-Sabah.
This means that the Dhafeer tribe were present in the north (in the Syrian or Iraqi side) during the incident of the assassination of Safouq Faris al-Jarba by the Turks.
correct. If not all the Dhafeer, then at least one part of them.
For example, Ghadir al-Simri al-Dhafeeri was questioned about the Hamdani Simri strain in the majliss of Farhan Al Jarba, which means that some Dhafeer were nomadizing with the Jarba at the time of the testimony (1852).