Al-Hajj

The word

Al-Hajj (al-ḥājj) is the active participle of ḥ-j-j. Lisān al-ʿArab gives the root's plain sense first: al-ḥajj is al-qaṣd, the setting out for something, and ḥajja ilayhi is he made for him and went to him repeatedly; only after that does the lexicon give the pilgrimage to the House, the sense that came to fill the word. From the same root it derives ḥujja, the proof or argument a man resorts to, and it gives ḥujjāj and ḥajīj as the plurals of the one who performs the ḥajj. In ordinary speech across much of the Arab world al-ḥājj also settled into a courteous way of addressing an older man, used of many who had made no journey at all.

From an act to a name

The byname was said of a man who had performed the pilgrimage, and it stayed on him afterwards — in registers, in deeds, in how his neighbours spoke of him — until in many households it stopped being said of one man and began to be written of his family. That is the whole of what the name records: an ancestor was called al-ḥājj. The pilgrimage is something a person does. It is not an office, nobody confers it, and it leaves behind no rank to be inherited. This is the plainest place in the whole class of title-names to say so, because here there was never an office in the first place.

Bearing the name

A family name of this kind records a title, an office or a form of address that was applied to an ancestor and then stayed with his descendants. It is not a lineage in itself, and it confers nothing: no one bearing it today holds an office, a rank, a religious standing or a descent by virtue of the name. It attaches to no tribe, and two families bearing it need have no connection to one another beyond the word itself.