Al-Bahili

Overview

Al-Bahili (al-Bāhilī) is the nisba of Bāhila, which the genealogists place under Qays ʿAylān and Muḍar, with its remembered range in Najd and, in the later sources, in Iraq and Khurāsān. Bāhila is reported to be named for a woman, Bāhila, whose name the descendants of her husband's line took — as reported; the sources differ. In Lisān al-ʿArab the root b-h-l is letting loose and leaving unrestrained: a nāqa bāhil is a she-camel left without a tie, and from the same root comes ibtihāl, unreserved supplication.

What the old books carry, and what it is

The classical adab and lexicography carry a standing hostility toward Bāhila, repeated from book to book and recorded by the lexicographers themselves as a fixed topic. It is named here only so that a reader who meets it in the old literature knows what he is meeting: a literary set-piece copied forward, of the kind the same books apply elsewhere as a genre of invective, and not a report about any people. It is not repeated here and it is not endorsed. A nisba is a name, and a name is not a character. A further point worth keeping straight is that Bāhila is reckoned directly to Qays ʿAylān alongside Hawāzin and Ghaṭafān, not as a branch of either, though modern writing often files it under one of them.

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.