Al 'Alī

The Al 'Ali were a Bedouin ruling house of the Banu Rabi'ah, a junior line of the Al Fadl, descended from Ali ibn Haditha. They held the Ghouta oasis around Damascus, with their seat at Qutayfa. Under the later Ayyubids Ali and his son Abu Bakr held the office of amir al-arab, commander of the Bedouin.

When the Mamluks took Syria in 1260, the office passed to their Al Fadl kinsman Isa ibn Muhanna; Abu Bakr's brother Zamil revolted, was defeated and imprisoned in Cairo, while Abu Bakr's son Muhammad briefly held the emirate in the early 1290s.

Driven from the Hauran by the rival Al Mira in the mid-thirteenth century and overshadowed by their Al Fadl cousins, the Al Ali remained a power of the Damascus countryside. A fifteenth-century estimate credited them with two thousand horsemen.