Al-Ghifari

Overview

Al-Ghifari (al-Ghifārī) is the nisba of Ghifār ibn Mulayl, reckoned by the genealogists to Bakr ibn ʿAbd Manāt of Kināna, with a remembered range on the coastal side of the Hijaz along the road between Mecca and Medina. In this corpus the tribe page stands under the name Banī Ghifār. The root gh-f-r is in Lisān al-ʿArab covering and screening — whence maghfira, and the mighfar, the mail hood drawn over the head — and the tribal name is read within that sense.

Names easily confused

The confusion that runs through the writing is with al-Ghaffārī, doubled, which is built on the given name ʿAbd al-Ghaffār and is a family name of an entirely different origin; unpointed and unvowelled the two are one line on the page, and only a source that vocalises separates them. Al-Ghāfirī, from Ghāfir, is a third name again, borne in the southeast of the peninsula and not to be folded into either. Within the tribal reading itself the nisba does not settle much on its own: the early literature carries al-Ghifārī through clientage (walāʾ) as well as through descent, so a bearer may stand in the sources as a client of the tribe rather than of its stock. In the classical ordering Ghifār sits under Ḍamra, so a single line may be met as al-Ghifārī in one book and al-Ḍamrī in another without contradiction.

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.