With their wealth they successfully acquired leadership in the Janissary corps, the right to collect certain taxes, property in the city and countryside, the government’s gratitude for their help in winning the war, and continuing alliances for access to local resources.
[5]Along with the al-Umari and Tasin al-Mufti families, the Jalilis formed an "urban-based small and medium gentry and a new landed elite", which proceeded to displace the control of previous rural tribes.
As Gertrude Bell recounted of one of the Jalilis during her travels through Iraq in 1910: I sat long in the guest chamber of a third acquaintance, the head of the greatest family in Mosul.
The governor was appointed with the rank of Paşa, and oversaw the extensive administrative framework required to ensure the continued development of local resources and trade, the collection of taxes and the provision of security within Mosul as well as key rural areas and villages surrounding the capital.
[14] Due to their social and economic influence, and the credibility they had secured with local constituents as indigenous Maslawi rulers who had reinvested substantial wealth back into the city's buildings and wider infrastructure, the Jalilis and other ruling elites were perceived by the central Ottoman government "as a threat to their interests".
As a result, new governors "would attain power and legitimacy not by their connections to the people of the city or their sponsorship of urban life and local economies, but exclusively from their appointments by the Ottoman Sultan.
"[18] Without this power base, such Pashas remained dependent upon families such as the Jalilis to "intercede on their behalf" with local Maslawis in order for them to accomplish "even their most basic tasks of collecting taxes and providing security".
[18] Education was a keystone for investment in Jalili Mosul, with over 20 schools offering "a wide spectrum of courses ranging from Coranic exegesis to arithmetic and from grammar to astronomy.
The prestige and reputation of some Mosuli teachers (Haddadi, Rabtaki, Wa’iz) also attracted students and scholars from Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad and other important places of learning.
Mosul was populated by a significant diversity of religions, highlighted by the Jalilis themselves: a historically Christian family, who ruled on behalf of a Muslim Turkish sultan, in a predominantly Sunni Arabic city.
[23]As well as religious tracts, Jalili Mosul was home to the widespread discussion of philosophy, history and literature, the recitation and creation of poetry, and the in-depth "study of language, philology and literary criticism, presented in numerous short treatises as well as in encyclopedic works dealing with allegory, metaphor, metonymy, rhetoric, grammar, syntax etc.".
Firstly, the coffee-houses (which numbered over 120 in Mosul), in which Janissary leaders would sit and liaise with royal envoys and elite families, form political alliances and trade contracts, and recite poetry and mawawil.
Although in 1555 the Ottomans and Safavids signed the Treaty of Zuhab (or Qasr’i Shirin) in 1639, a peace accord based on accepting the legitimacy of each other's empires, in 1732 Nadir Shah launched a new initiative to reconquer Iraq, leading to four separate invasions between 1732 and 1743.