The origins of the Alam al-Din family are uncertain. The historian Kamal Salibi proposed that the family was possibly descended from Alam al-Din Sulayman, one of a number of chiefs of the Druze Ma'n dynasty mentioned by the local Druze chronicler Ibn Sibat (d. 1521) as a chieftain of the Chouf in 1518; the other Ma'nid chief was Qurqumaz ibn Yunis, the ancestor of Fakhr al-Din II. Salibi argued that the omission of Alam al-Din Sulayman from later local histories, namely the works of Ahmad al-Khalidi (d. 1624) and Istifan al-Duwayhi (d. 1704) was due to their close association with the Ma'nid descendants of Qurqumaz. The 19th-century local histories of Haydar al-Shihabi and Tannus al-Shidyaq, respectively a member and an agent of the Ma'n's marital relatives and successors, the Shihab dynasty, may have had a similar interest in omitting the Alam al-Dins' possible Ma'nid origins. The Alam al-Dins posed a serious challenge to the Shihabs' paramount leadership of the Druze in Mount Lebanon until the demise of the Alam al-Dins in 1711.