[1] Throughout his rule, Aqil remained at least nominally in service to the Ottoman Empire, which paid him for protecting the roads of northern Palestine from Bedouin raids and for maintaining the security of this region.

As a consequence of this frayed relationship, Aqil's employment would frequently be terminated when his activities or influence perturbed the authorities and then reinstated when his services were needed.

Besides anecdotes provided in the writings of European consuls, most of the information on Aqil's life indirectly traces back to a history of the man written by Mikha'il Qa'war, a Nazareth clergyman.

[6] The Hawwara of the Galilee were actually from the Ainawiyeh tribe of the Lower Egyptian desert region who had entered the service of Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar while the latter was based in Egypt in the late 18th century.

[6] Aqil's father, Musa Agha al-Hasi, himself a commander of Hawwara irregulars in the service of Acre's Ottoman governors, had left Egypt for Gaza in 1814.

[3] Aqil defected from Ibrahim Pasha's army[1] and joined local rebels in the 1834 peasants' revolt against Egyptian conscription and disarmament measures, leading his Hawwara irregulars in the Galilee.

[1] Aqil angered the kaimakam (district governor) of Acre, Muhammad Kubrisi, for his intervention in a dispute between two factions of the Catholic Church in Nazareth.

When Sheikh Yusef decided to take matters into his own hands by raising a group of armed partisans in Nazareth, the church was compelled to restore his employment.

Aqil was deeply insulted by Kubrisi's words and actions, and subsequently left for Transjordan where he sought the protection of Emir Fendi Al-Fayez of the Beni Sakhr tribe.

Lynch's first encounter with Aqil was in the divan of Said Bey, the Ottoman kaimakam of Acre, and is recorded as follows:But what especially attracted my attention was a magnificent savage enveloped in a scarlet cloth pelisse richly embroidered with gold.

His complexion was of a rich mellow indescribable olive tint, and his hair a glossy black; his teeth were regular and of the whitest ivory, and the glance of his eye was keen at times, but generally soft and lustrous.

With the tarboosh upon his head which he seemed to wear uneasily, he reclined, rather than sat upon the opposite side of the divân, while his hand played in unconscious familiarity with the hilt of his yataghan.

'[20][21]In this meeting, Said Bey had attempted to dissuade Lynch of his plans to travel to the Dead Sea, with Aqil remarking that the Bedouin of the Ghor (Jordan Valley) would "eat them up".

Lynch's reply was that "they would find us difficult of digestion," but he suggested that as Aqil seemed to hold influence with these tribes, he would be prepared to pay him to make the trip a more peaceable one.

Along with his alliance with the two powerful tribes of the region, the Beni Sakhr and the Anizzah, Aqil's autonomy in the Galilee was further strengthened, although he was nominally subordinate to the Ottoman authorities.

He based himself in the Zaydani fortress of I'billin, a mixed Muslim-Christian village between Acre and Nazareth that was previously fortified by the family of Zahir al-Umar.

[24] At the time of Aqil's escape, the Ottomans were engaged in the Crimean War with the Russian Empire, which left a domestic security void in its provinces due to the large number of provincial troops deployed to Crimea.

[24] Meanwhile, scores of Bedouin tribesmen from Faiyum with kinship ties to Aqil's tribal irregulars had migrated to the Levant as a result of their suppression by Sa'id Pasha of Egypt.

[27] In 1857, the Beirut-based governor of Sidon Eyalet agreed to Shamdin's request to eliminate Aqil, who, to the consternation of the Ottoman authorities, was ruling the Galilee autonomously by that time.

[24] When Aqil visited Beirut to pay his respects to the governor of Sidon, he traveled with "the air of a sultan", according to the American missionary Henry H. Jessup, bringing with him a large and heavily armed Bedouin entourage.

[33] In gratitude for protecting the Christians in Nazareth and Acre, Napoleon III of France presented Aqil a gun and the Legion of Honor medal in April 1861 aboard his French vessel docked at Haifa Bay.

[15][37] The Ottoman imperial government adopted its Tanzimat modernization reforms in 1862 and originally entrusted Aqil with enforcing the new law of the land in northern Palestine.

Aqil was given orders to prevent them from setting up camps in the cultivated lands of the Galilee and forbade the collection of khuwwa tolls from the local inhabitants.

Hasan Effendi lodged complaints to the provincial governor in Beirut, Kapuli Pasha, about the misconduct of Aqil's men who extorted the local peasantry.

Indeed, Aqil's protection was generally limited to those who could pay for his services or otherwise benefit his interests, including merchants, travelers, monks, pilgrims, Christians and Jews.

[31] The Tanzimat proved unpopular with large segments of the population and a Bedouin revolt broke out,[1] with Transjordanian tribes launching raids against Tiberias and its countryside in the summer of 1863.

To that end, he had Jewish notables from Tiberias and the French consul of Beirut lobby on his behalf, but without success, as Kapuli Pasha, content to see the elimination of a local power such as Aqil, accepted his resignation.

However, Kapuli Pasha determined that he could not keep a large, permanent military contingent in the Galilee and decided to reinstate Aqil to his former position after lobbying from the British consul of Haifa.

Fearing his arrest or death in light of the Ottomans' subsequent deployment of 200 Kurdish irregulars to Tiberias and the presence of military forces from Acre and Beirut in the western Galilee,[35] Aqil fled to Salt in the Balqa area of Transjordan.

[45] Aqil's death marked the removal of "the last obstacle to the implementation of full centralized Ottoman rule" in northern Palestine, according to historian Mahmoud Yazbak.