granted the village, then known as Deir al-Bi'ina or Deir al-Khidr (deir is Arabic for monastery and al-Khidr is a name used in Arabic to refer to St. George) soon after his conquest of the coastal cities of Syria from the Mamluks in 1516. Shaykh al-Asad was originally from the village of Hammara in the Beqaa Valley, moved to Damascus where he became a student of the Sufi sage Ibn Arraq, a follower of Ibn Arabi's school of thought, before settling in Deir al-Bi'ina by at least 1510, before the Ottoman conquest. Although local folklore attributes the name Asad (Arabic for lion) to his taming of a lion, Layish surmises that the name was already established; by his summation, Shaykh al-Asad was possibly a kinsman of Asad al-Sham Abd Allah al-Yunini (d. 1220) from Younin in the Beqaa Valley, who was a Sufi mystic and warrior in the army of Saladin in the wars against the Crusaders, or a descendant of Saladin through the latter's son al-Aziz Uthman. Selim spent two months in Damascus and likely became acquainted with Shaykh al-Asad through Ibn Arraq. Al-Burini's account holds that Shaykh al-Asad was granted the village to settle in with his children and Sufi devotees and that its original Christian inhabitants were expelled by the sultan's order; Layish theorizes that the sultan intended for the village to become a Muslim nucleus in order to strengthen Islamic control of the "security sensitive" area whose proximity to the coast left it vulnerable to European Christian penetration. Shaykh al-Asad was concurrently appointed the imam of the mosque established in the monastery of St. George and as the administrator of the waqf property. His son Ahmad (d. 1601) later founded a Sufi lodge in Safed, although according to a family tree preserved by Shaykh al-Asad's descendants, he did not have a son by this name, but rather an agnate grandson, Ahmad ibn Mahfuz. His other sons continued to reside in Deir al-Bi'ina, which became known as Deir al-Asad by dint of its association with Shaykh al-Asad. Shaykh al-Asad died in 1569. The descendants of his four sons are known as the Asadi clan and their original area of residence forms the core of Deir al-Asad. Other Muslim clans in the village moved there to find refuge and were given the protection of the Asadi clan. The attraction to Deir al-Asad during the early Ottoman era may