Al-Dari

Overview

Al-Dari (al-Dārī) is one written shape reached by three unconnected routes, and this page exists to lay all three out rather than let any one of them stand for the name. Its companion page, al-Dārīnī, is the nisba to Dārīn, the anchorage on the island of Tārūt off the eastern coast; that page separates itself from al-Dārī and points here. Read from this side, the shorter form is the harder one, because nothing in it says which of its origins is meant.

The perfumer

The first route is a trade. In Lisān al-ʿArab al-dārī is the ʿaṭṭār, the seller of perfume, and the lexicographers derive the trade-name from Dārīn and its musk: the ships bringing musk from the east put in at that harbour, misk Dārīn became proverbial for the best of it, and the man who dealt in the stuff took his name from where it was landed. So a man called al-Dārī in an old book may be described by his occupation and not by his birthplace at all — and the occupation is the same word whether he ever saw the eastern coast or lived at the other end of the Muslim world.

Banu al-Dar of Lakhm

The second route is a lineage, and it has nothing to do with the island. Al-Dārī is the nisba of Banū al-Dār, a house the genealogists reckon to Lakhm, of the Qaḥṭānī side; Tamīm al-Dārī is reported from them in the early literature, and it is chiefly through that report that the name is familiar. The country remembered for Lakhm is not this coast. Where a source means this, al-Dārī is a tribal nisba and the harbour is irrelevant to it.

Dar, the dwelling

The third route is the plainest. Dār is the ordinary Arabic word for a house, a dwelling, and by extension a country or an abode — Ibn Manẓūr enters it under d-w-r with a long range of such uses — and a relative adjective can be built on it directly, as bynames are built on ordinary words everywhere. Al-Dārī on this route means nothing more than something to do with a dwelling, and carries no place and no lineage in it at all.

Reading the name

Three routes, one shape. No feature of the written word separates them: only a source that says which is meant will do it, and many sources do not say. The reference records this rather than choosing, and notes that the extended form al-Dārīnī is the one variant that points at the port unambiguously. Beside these, al-Dārimī is a nisba to the personal name Dārim, a different word again and not a variant of any of the three.

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. Where this particular name is concerned the caution is doubled, since it is not certainly toponymic at all.