Rural notables, as individuals, or the rural notability as a collective, was a social class of local notables (known in Arabic as a'yan-, wujaha'-, zu'ama- rifiyya, qarawiyya, mahaliyya) in late Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine, with equivalent groups developing throughout the Levant.[1] Most rural notables originated in, and belonged to, the fellahin/peasantry class, forming a lower-echelon land-owning gentry in Palestine's post-Tanzimat countryside and emergent towns.[2] Numerically, rural notables form the majority of Palestinian elites, although certainly not the richest.[3]
In contrast to urban elites traditionally made of city-dwelling merchants (tujjar),[4] clerics ('ulema), ashraf, military officers, and governmental functionaries,[5][6][7] the rural notability was composed of rural sheikhs, village or clan mukhtars. Rural notables took advantage of changing legal, administrative and political conditions, and global economic realities, to achieve socio-economic and political ascendancy using households, marriage alliances and networks of patronage.[3] Over all, they played a leading role in the development of modern Palestine into the late 20th century.[8]