Al-Asari

Overview

Al-Asari (al-ʿAṣarī) is the nisba of ʿAṣar, which the genealogists record among the branches of ʿAbd al-Qays, the tribe traced under Rabīʿa and remembered on this seaboard — the coast the geographers call al-Khaṭṭ, taking in al-Qaṭīf and the region of al-Baḥrayn. The nisba is met in the older books in that sense, and it is narrower and therefore more informative than the tribe's general nisba al-ʿAbdī.

The vowelling, and what the reports do not settle

The name is ʿAṣar, on the pattern with two fatḥas, and it should be kept from being read as ʿAṣr, the ordinary word for a time or an age, which is written the same way unvowelled. The chains the genealogists give for the section differ from one another, and beyond the placement within ʿAbd al-Qays the classical reports say little about it. Nothing further is asserted here than what they carry.

The word

The root ʿ-ṣ-r in Lisān al-ʿArab gives pressing and squeezing out, and from it the senses of time, refuge and shelter. A byname built on any of these arrives at the same written form as the tribal nisba and cannot be distinguished from it on the page.

Bearing the name

A tribal nisba records what a family is called, not who its ancestors were. It may follow descent (ṣarīḥ), alliance (ḥilf) or clientage (walāʾ), and only a family's own documented record tells those apart. This page describes a name and a historical section, and makes no claim about any family bearing it.