Al-Aswad

The word

Lisān al-ʿArab opens s-w-d with sawād as the opposite of whiteness, and then gives a set of senses that have little to do with colour. Al-sawād is the shape a man sees at a distance before he can make it out — one says he saw his sawād. It is a great number of people, the sawād of a town being its common body. It is the settled countryside of Iraq, called al-sawād, which the lexicographers explain by the density of its palms and trees, dark to the eye of someone approaching. From there the word runs into deep green: vegetation is called aswad when it is so green and so thick that it reads black. The lexicon also gives al-aswad as a name for the great serpent, and it treats sāda and suʾdad — to become the head of a people — within the same root, so that mastery and blackness stand in one entry. The pair al-aḥmar wa-l-aswad is recorded in the old language as an expression for the whole of mankind.

A byname, then a name

As a byname the word distinguished one man from another who shared his name, and it became a family name in the ordinary way: it outlived the man, was written after his son, and ceased to describe anyone. The word is old and widespread in Arabic naming, and families bearing it are as a rule unconnected to one another.

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.