The al-Bāʿūnī family originated in the village of Bāʿūna, in what is now northern Jordan. During the Mamlūk and Ottoman periods, the house of al-Bāʿūnī gained fame and social capital in Damascus and neighbouring cities. Al-Maqrīzī reports, on his meeting with Aḥmad al-Bāʿūnī, that their ancestor Nāṣir b. Khalīfa b. Faraj (or Faraḥ), who is said to have been a tailor, moved from his home village to Nazareth when their homeland went through a religious conversion, in which Christian hamlets became Muslim. Nāṣir's eldest son,