Al-Dawsi

Overview

Al-Dawsi (al-Dawsī) is the nisba of Daws, a tribe the genealogists enter under Zahrān of al-Azd in the southern scheme, with its remembered country the high Sarāt above Tihāma in the south-west of the peninsula — al-Hamdānī describes that country in Ṣifat Jazīrat al-ʿArab. The root d-w-s is in Lisān al-ʿArab the treading of a thing underfoot, whence dāsa yadūsu; the name is entered in the books as a name and the sources do not explain the giving of it.

Names easily confused

Al-Dawsī and al-Dawsarī are not two spellings of one name. Al-Dawsarī is the nisba of al-Dawāsir, a name of its own with its own country in the south of Najd, and it has a separate letter, a separate derivation and a separate entry; modern writing runs them together, and the two should be kept apart on both sides. A family should establish which of the two its own record carries before reading either country into its name.

Two further cautions. Daws is also an ordinary personal name on the same root, so the form may be built on a forebear who bore it with no tribal sense. And the wider nisba of the grouping above it is al-Azdī: a page calling a Dawsī family Azdī is naming the tier, not a different attribution, and neither form identifies which of the recorded branches, if any, a line belongs to.

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.