In the last couple of years, the Hadids have grown to become a household name. Literally everyone, young and old, knows of the supermodel siblings Gigi, Bella and Anwar Hadid, but did you know that they've practically descended from royalty? While the Hadids have been a well-off family with patriarch Mohamed Hadid's million-dollar real estate business, there's more to the family's reputation than just that.
Mohamed is a Palestinian refugee and extremely proud of his roots. He never passes up on an opportunity to let the world know of his heritage and how far he's come, and it truly is an admirable success story. He was born in the Biblical city of Nazareth in present-day Israel, at a time when the district was well-known for its religious fellowship with various inter-faith communities — Muslims, Christians and Jews — living in harmony. However, after the 1948 war, millions of Palestinians were displaced from their homes and Mohammed Hadid's family was among those that migrated to Syria.
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Mohamed's father, Anwar, did not want the family to live in a war-stricken Nazareth under Israeli occupation. When they lived in Safed (present-day Israel), the family sheltered a Polish family that was Jewish in faith when everyone else had refused to take them in.
Two years later, the Polish family kicked them out making them refugees. In Syria, Mohamed's father worked for the United States Information Agency and Voice of America as a writer, editor and translator, which eventually allowed the family to migrated to the US.
So while Mohamed has definitely strived all his life for the real-estate magnate throne that he now sits upon, once upon a time a relative of his did in fact reign over his hometown of Palestine.
Mohamed is a descendent of an autonomous Arab ruler of northern Palestine in the mid 18th century, while the area was still ostensibly a part of the Ottoman Sultanate.
Zahir al-Umar al-Zaydani or Daher-al-Omar (1685-1775), Prince of Nazareth and Sheikh of Galilee was his great-great-grandfather from his mother, Khairiah Daher's side of the family.
The monarch was the first Arab ruler of Nazareth, Haifa and Jaffa in Palestine who gave the Jews, Muslims, and Christians a handwritten mandate to live harmoniously under his rule.
Even four centuries later, Daher-al-Omar is still one for the most beloved kings to ever rule the lands and an essential part of Palestinian royal history. He was very instrumental in developing the city of Galilee in terms of its infrastructure, including building the ports at Akko (then, Acre) and Haifa and fortifying the former, making it a center of the cotton trade between Palestine and Europe.
If one were to venture around Galilee today, they would discover that various infrastructure that he built still stands to this day, for example, the walls of Tiberias, in the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. During his rule, he brought the Jews to Tiberias and they fought alongside the Arabs for independence against imperial foreign powers.
His territories prospered under his watchful rule where he instilled security, order, and justice. His tolerance for religious minorities and the favorable economic, as well as administrative conditions, encouraged an influx of immigrants into his domain, where they settled on the uninhibited lands and he personally oversaw its development.
Subsequently, the communities flourished under his rule and stimulated the local economy, leading to the expansion of the Christian communities in Acre and Nazareth as well as the Jews in Tiberias.
Daher-al-Omar came from a family of local potentates and multazims or tax farmers, who eventually broke away from his family's practice. He rebelled against his Ottoman bosses to hold local autonomy for only a few years, until the Ottoman navy attacked his fort in Acre, killing him and his tribe.
After his death, the Zaydani clan continued his legacy and built several commercial buildings, houses of worship and undertook fortifications throughout Galilee.
Today, Daher-al-Omar is viewed as a national hero among Palestinians for founding a virtually autonomous state in Palestine. His family continues to live in Northern Palestine to this day as the al-Zawahirs. His descendants have traveled and spread across Syria and Palestine and show immense pride in being related to him by ancestry.
Gigi, Bella and Anwar have time and again expressed their pride in being Muslims and acknowledged their middle-eastern roots. However, there have also been times when the siblings have come under fire for cultural appropriation and only acknowledged their heritage when it was convenient for them, like Gigi's Vogue Arabia cover.
Many criticized the supermodel for not representing the women of the region in the right light to which she clapped back saying: "When I shot the cover of Vogue Arabia, I wasn't 'Arab enough' to be representing those girls, even though I’m half-Palestinian. I'm as Palestinian as I am Dutch. Just because I have blonde hair, I still carry the value of my ancestors and I appreciate and respect that."
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