Al-Sharat

Other principal towns in the district included Tabuk, Ma'an (Mu'an), Madyan, Aynunah (on the northern Red Sea coast), Wayla (Ayla) and Maab (Rabba).

[3] In 985, during the late Abbasid period, the Jerusalemite geographer Al-Muqaddasi described Al-Sharat as its own district, neither belonging to Dimashq nor Filastin, in the larger province of Bilad al-Sham (Islamic Syria).

[2] Though information about the Fatimid administration over the Levant is vague, Caliph Al-Aziz (975–996) may have made Al-Sharat (south of Wadi Mujib) its own province which lasted until the Crusader invasion in the early 12th century.

During Ayyubid rule, Syrian geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi (d. 1229) noted that Al-Sharat was a mountainous region through which the Hajj caravan road from Damascus to Mecca passed.

By the mid-19th century, Bedouin from the Huwaytat tribe were encroaching into the southern parts of Bilad al-Sharat, and amid the Bedouin-induced anarchy in the region, Christians from Tafilah and al-Karak began fleeing to the north.