Al-Bahrani

Overview

Al-Bahrani (al-Bahrānī) is here the nisba of Bahrāʾ, a tribe the genealogists reckon to Quḍāʿah through ʿAmr ibn al-Ḥāf and enter in the same tier as Balī and Mahra. Its remembered country is the northern steppe toward Ḥimṣ and the Syrian marches, with sections later recorded in Egypt; the sources report the tribe as largely Christian before Islam. The nisba is irregular in the way Arabic often builds from a name ending in the extended alif: from Bahrāʾ comes Bahrānī, not Bahrāʾī, and that irregularity is the whole source of the difficulty below.

Names easily confused

Al-Bahrānī of Bahrāʾ and al-Baḥrānī of al-Baḥrayn are two different names. They differ by one letter — hāʾ against ḥāʾ — and by their whole derivation: the first is from the tribal name Bahrāʾ, the second from the region Yāqūt describes on the western shore of the Gulf, the country that took in al-Aḥsāʾ and al-Qaṭīf. What makes them collide is that the second is irregular too: Lisān al-ʿArab notes that the nisba to al-Baḥrayn is Baḥrānī and not Baḥraynī, so both names arrive at nearly the same written shape from opposite starting points. In careless handwriting, and in typing that drops the dot, they become indistinguishable. Neither can be inferred from the other, and a family should establish which letter its own record carries before reading either history into its name.

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.