[3] Zizia was part of the Balqa subdistrict of Jund Dimashq (the military district of Damascus) during the early Islamic period.

The Umayyad caliph al-Walid II (r. 743–744) is held to have distributed food at Zizia for Muslim pilgrims returning to Syria from the Hajj in Mecca.

[2] The son of the Druze strongman Fakhr al-Din II, Ali Ma'n, took refuge in Zizia around 1613, to escape the pursuit of the Sardiyya tribe, which had been commissioned by the governor Ahmed Hafiz Pasha to capture him.

The first Western account of Zizia was the description of the site by Henry Baker Tristram, who remarked that it had been "one of the most important places of Roman Arabia" and noted the existence of a large fort there.

In 1881, the head sheikh of the powerful Beni Sakhr tribe, Sattam Al-Fayez, made Zizia the headquarters of a subdistrict which he founded.