 His son Shibli was a poet who adopted the Bedouin poetic style and whose poems were recited by tribesmen spanning the area between the Hauran and the Sinai Peninsula.In the 1850s, Ismail rivaled the Hamdan sheikh Wakid al-Hamdan for supremacy in Jabal Hauran, the volcanic mountainous region in eastern Hauran where Druze settlement was concentrated.Wakid and his clan were backed Bani Amer, Azzam, Hanaydi, Abu Assaf and Abu Fakhr clans in the power struggle with the Bani al-Atrash, whose only major ally among the prominent Druze clans was the Qal'ani family.