Safiyya

Meaning and root

Ṣafiyya belongs to the root ṣ-f-w (ص-ف-و). Lisān al-ʿArab gives the root two related but distinct developments. The first is ṣafāʾ, clearness as against turbidity: ṣafā al-māʾ, the water ran clear. The second is ṣafwa — the choice, unmixed part of a thing: ṣafwat al-māl is the best of the property, and from it comes iṣṭafā, to select something for oneself as the best of what is there. Ṣafiyya is a faʿīla form carrying a passive sense: the one selected, al-muṣṭafāt.

The distinction readers miss

Ṣafiyya and Ṣāfiya are not the same word doing the same work. Ṣāfiya is the active participle of the first sense — clear, unclouded, free of sediment. Ṣafiyya is from the second — chosen, picked out as the best. A reader who glosses the name as 'pure' has taken the neighbouring sense rather than the one the form carries.

The ṣafiyy of the spoils

The strongest evidence for that second sense is a legal term, not a poetic one. The lexica record al-ṣafiyy (feminine al-ṣafiyya, plural al-ṣafāyā) as what the chief of a raiding party takes for himself out of the spoils before the division is made — a horse, a sword, a captive. The word therefore names an institution of pre-Islamic and early Islamic practice, and the name means what that institution meant: the part set apart because it was the best part. The same root gives al-Muṣṭafā, borne as a laqab of the Prophet, and Ṣafiyy Allāh, used of Ādam.

Elsewhere in the root

The lexicographers also file under ṣ-f-w al-ṣafā, the broad smooth stone — the sense behind al-Ṣafā at Mecca, the hill of the saʿy. And al-ṣafiyy is used of a she-camel abundant in milk and a palm heavy with fruit: the choice one of the herd or the grove, the same idea again.

Attestation

Ṣafiyya is attested from the earliest period. Ibn Ḥazm records Ṣafiyya among the daughters of ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib — a paternal aunt of the Prophet, and the mother of al-Zubayr ibn al-ʿAwwām. That is also the usual way a woman enters the genealogical books at all: not as a link in the column of descent, which the nassāba draw through men, but as the named mother of a man recorded in it. The name has stayed in continuous use across the Arab world since.