Al-Baghdadi

Overview

Al-Baghdadi (al-Baghdādī) is the nisba to Baghdad. Yāqūt sets out the spellings the name is written in — Baghdād, Baghdān, Maghdād and others — and reports that the word is not Arabic. He passes on the derivation the philologists give from Persian, in which the first part is read as an idol or a garden and the second as a gift, and notes that some scholars disliked the sense and preferred the town's foundation name, Madīnat al-Salām, which is the name its official documents used.

A nisba of residence

Baghdad drew people to it from every direction, and the nisba attached to them there. A man born far away who lived in the town, studied in it or held a post in it is al-Baghdādī in the books as firmly as one born in it, and families kept the name after leaving. So the attribution is common far from Iraq, and it records a stay rather than a stock.

Names easily confused

The same attribution is also written al-Baghdādlī, built with a non-Arabic adjectival ending current in the eastern Mediterranean and in Turkish usage. It is not another place and not another family: it is this name in another shape, and a house may appear under both forms in different papers or different generations.

Bearing the name

A toponymic family name records a place an ancestor was attributed to — born there, settled there, known by it — as the name was applied to him, not a lineage. It attaches to no tribe, and two families bearing it need have no connection to one another beyond the place itself.