Al-Ashqar

The word

Lisān al-ʿArab gives al-shuqra as a colour in which a clear red shows through a paleness, and it settles the sense first on horses: al-ashqar among them is the one whose red is unmixed, and the lexicon is careful to hold it apart from the neighbouring coat-names it could be confused with. That care is not incidental — the horse and its colour were named constantly in early verse, and the coat-words are among the most finely divided in the language. Said of a person, the word is used of a redness in the hair. From the same root the lexicon gives shaqir and shaqāra for red desert flowers, so the colour is fixed in Arabic by things seen rather than by any defined shade.

A byname, then a name

Applied to a man, al-ashqar did the work a second name does: it told one man from another who shared his given name, in a market, in a register, in the speech of his own quarter. Names of this kind became family names in the ordinary way — the byname outlived the man it described, was written after his son's name, and settled there. What survives is the word, not the description. A family carrying it records only that someone in it was once called by a colour, and how far back that was is usually past recovering.

Bearing the name

A family name of this kind records a byname that was applied to one ancestor and then stayed with his descendants. It reports how he was called, not a lineage, and it says nothing about the body, the character or the standing of anyone who bears it now. It attaches to no tribe, and two families bearing it need have no connection to one another beyond the word itself.