al-Mazar

The village stood on the flat, circular peak of Mount al-Mazar. The mountain sloped steeply on all sides except the southeast, where the land rose to join the peaks of the nearby Jaylun Mountains. AI-Mazar was linked by a dirt path to the village of Nuris below it (see Nuris, Jenin sub-disctrict) and by another path to two adjacent villages. It may have been named al-Mazar (Arabic for 'a shrine,' 'a place one visits') because it was the burial place for many of those who fell in the decisive battle of 'Ayn Jalut (1260), in which the Mamluks of Egypt triumphed over the Mongols. In the late nineteenth century, al-Mazar was a village built of stone on the summit of a mountain. Although the terrain was very rocky, a few olive trees were planted around the houses and a well had been dug to the southeast.

The people of al-Mazar were Muslims. They traced their origins to the al-Sa'diyyun nomads who in turn were descended from Shaykh Sa'd aI-Din al-Shaybani (d. 1224), a prominent Sufi mystic from the village of Jaba in the Golan, Syria. The village was inhabited by members of a Sufi order and was a place of Muslim pilgrimage. It was the home of Shaykh Farhan al-Sa'di, a prominent leader of the 1936 Palestinian revolt. AI-Mazar had a mosque in its eastern section.

The houses of al-Mazar occupied the peak of the mountain, surrounded by agricultural land. Agriculture, the backbone of the village economy, was based on grain, fruits, legumes, and olives. In 1944/45 a total of 5,221 dunums was allocated to cereals; 229 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards, of which 68 dunums were for olives.