Al-Ashjai

Overview

Al-Ashjai (al-Ashjaʿī) is the nisba of Ashjaʿ ibn Rayth, reckoned by the genealogists to Ghaṭafān under Qays ʿAylān and so to Muḍar, with a remembered range in Najd and, in the reports of the early period, on the Hijazi side toward Medina. The root sh-j-ʿ is in Lisān al-ʿArab courage and boldness of heart — shajāʿa, and shujāʿ, the brave man, a word the lexicon also gives to a kind of serpent — and Ashjaʿ is the elative built from it.

Names easily confused

Because ashjaʿ is an ordinary elative and a ready personal name, a nisba built on a forebear so called carries no tribal sense at all, and the written form does not distinguish that use from the tribal one. Other Ashjaʿ groups are recorded in the books besides the Ghaṭafānī one and yield the same nisba from lines of their own. Al-Shujāʿī and al-Shajʿī are different formations, built directly on shujāʿ rather than on the elative, and attribute to nothing tribal; in careless writing they are run together with al-Ashjaʿī. Within the tribal reading the parent nisba al-Ghaṭafānī and the sister nisbas beneath it sit at the neighbouring tier, and a single line may be met under a wider or a narrower name in different books.

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.