History of Ajloun

The Nabataeans were the first known inhabitants of the area that is now Jordan. The Romans absorbed it into their empire, as part of the province of Arabia, in AD 106. Shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in AD 632, Arab armies entered the region and established the Umayyad dynasty. However, this became something of a provincial backwater after the conquest of Baghdad.

During the 11th and 12th centuries, Jordan was the scene of some of the major conflicts between the Christian Crusaders and Islamic forces. Salah ad Din (known in the West as Saladin) and his successors ruled Jordan from his main seat of power in Egypt from the late 12th century until they were displaced by the Mamluks, a race of mostly Kurdish and Circassian origin.

The Mamluks repelled the Mongol invasion of the 14th century but were eventually overthrown by the Ottoman Turks in 1517. Jordan was governed along with modern-day Palestine and Syria as a single administrative entity (called a vilayet). Turkish rule lasted, in an increasingly anaemic form, until the beginning of the 20th century.

After World War I, when the major Western powers began to dismember the old Ottoman Empire and distribute its territories among themselves, the area east of the Jordan River, known as Transjordania, fell to the British. Like neighbouring Palestine, Transjordania came under a League of Nations mandate under which the British maintained control. The mandate ceased in 1946, at which point Transjordania attained full independence under the present constitution.

The country came under the rule of King Abdullah ibn Hussein, a member of the Arabian Hashemite Dynasty who had held the position of Emir since the 1920s. When King Abdullah was assassinated in 1951, the crown passed to his son Hussein ibn Talal. King Hussein assumed the throne in 1952 and ruled the country until early 1999. Jordanian history and politics since independence have been dominated by the Palestinian issue and relations with Israel. When war broke out in 1948 between the newly-declared state of Israel and the Palestinians, backed by the forces from neighbouring Arab countries, the Jordanian army occupied a 6000sq km area of Palestine bounded by the west bank of the River Jordan.

Until a major change in Jordanian policy in 1988, the West Bank comprised three of Jordan’s eight provinces, while over half of the Jordanian population claimed Palestinian origin. Relations between King Hussein and the Palestinians were difficult from the very start: his father was murdered by a Palestinian extremist. Jordan lost the West Bank after the Six-Day War of 1967, and gained thousands of Palestinian refugees who fled across to Jordan. Many of them joined one of the myriad of guerrilla groups organised under the umbrella title of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (the modern PLO is a coalition of seven main factions, the largest of which is Al-Fatah headed by the PLO’s overall leader Yasser Arafat).

Ajloun Reserve: Jordan

Ajloun Reserve was first established in 1988 and is located in the Ajloun Highlands in northern Jordan, around the village of Umm al-Yanabi’ north of Ajloun. It is a area of rolling hills covered by dense woodlands of evergreen oak, interspersed with pistachio, carob, and wild strawberry trees. The trees have been important to local people for their wood, scenic beauty, and quite often for medicine and food. These woodlands are like the original forest animals, including herds of wild boar.

A captive-breeding programme for the locally extinct roe deer was initiated and an enclosure has been built on site, so they can be released into the forest in the near future. The roe deer is adapted to local forest habitat, and feeds on a variety of trees, shrubs and grasses. The rich Mediterranean-like forests that covered the Ajloun area provided an ideal habitat for millennia. However, deforestation and desertification over the past 200 years led to the decline in numbers of the roe deer.

Three roe deer were introduced to the captive breeding enclosure in Ajloun in 1988, from a similar habitat in Turkey. Today, there are sixteen roe deer at Ajloun. The Persian Fallow Deer is another species that was once common in Jordan. This animal probably became extinct by the beginning of the 20th century and its re-introduction is now being pursued

Birdlife International declared the area an Important Bird Area.
The reserve (13 square kms) is located in an area named Eshtafeena. The reserve management provided a special area for camping and has set up two hiking trails and:

Easy trail

Scenic viewpoint trail: (2 km), taking 1-2 hours, leading from the campsite to the summit of a nearby hill overlooking the reserve. The area surrounding the trail is rich in wildflowers in the springtime. It is an excellent spot for a picnic. Not far from the campsite an old stone wine press is found. The return trip goes past the breeding enclosures of the roe deer and back to the Visitors’ Centre.

Ajlun: Jordan

Ajlun (alternative spelling Ajloun) is a hill town in the north of Jordan with an impressive 12th century castle. It is the capital city of Ajlun Governorate. 73 km north of Amman, and a short journey northwest from Jerash, through a beautiful pine-forest and olive groves, brings you to the town of Ajloun, where Hadrian stayed over the winter of 129-30 AD, and built himself an arch well outside the town, leaving unbonded its sides for future city walls to come out to meet it.

Here you will find the Castle of Ajloun or Qalaat Errabadh (Arabic for “Hilltop Castle"), from which there is a splendid view westwards into the Jordan Valley. It looks like a Crusader fortress, but it was built by Muslims in 1184-85 as a military fort and buffer to protect the region from invading Crusader forces. It was built on the orders of the local governor, Ezz Eddin Osama bin Munqethe, a nephew of the Ayyubid leader Salahuddin Al-Ayyoubi (Saladin), as a direct retort to the new Latin castle of Belvoir (Kawkab El-Hawa) on the opposite side of the valley between the Tiberias and Besan, and as a base to develop and control the iron mines of Ajloun.

This superb example of Arab and Islamic architecture was built as a rectangle with four square towers and an entrance on the south side dominating a wide stretch of the north Jordan Valley and passages to it. From its hilltop position, the Castle of Ajloun protected the communication routes between south Jordan and Syria, and was one of a chain of forts, which lit beacons at night to pass signals from the Euphrates as far as Cairo.

Two years after it was completed the fortress’s original purpose had already been outlived, for Salahuddin defeated the Crusaders at the battle of the Horns of Hattin in 1189, which marked the beginning of the end of their occupation of the Holy Land.

In 1214-15 the Castle of Ajloun was enlarged by Aybak bin Abdullah, majordomo of the Caliph Al-Muazham Isa; in 1260 it fell to the Mongols, but was later rebuilt by the Egyptian Mamluks. No longer needed for military purposes, it was used as an administrative center responsible to Damascus.