Al-Hanafi

Overview

Al-Hanafi (al-Ḥanafī) is the regular nisba to Banū Ḥanīfa, the settled tribe of al-Yamāma in eastern Najd, cultivators of the valley that still carries the name. The shortening is a rule of the language and not an accident: Arabic drops the medial yāʾ when it builds a nisba on a name of this pattern, so Ḥanīfa gives Ḥanafī as Rabīʿa gives Rabaʿī. In Lisān al-ʿArab the root ḥ-n-f turns on inclining — al-ḥanīf is one who inclines away from error toward the upright religion, whence the phrase millat Ibrāhīm ḥanīfan.

Names easily confused

The difficulty here is not a rival spelling. It is that one word carries two origins with nothing in common between them.

The first is tribal: al-Ḥanafī, the man of Banū Ḥanīfa of al-Yamāma.

The second is doctrinal: al-Ḥanafī, the man who follows the school of law taught by Abū Ḥanīfa, whose kunya gives the school its name. That epithet stood after a scholar's name for centuries, and in many places it settled into an inherited family name. Borne on that account it carries no reference to al-Yamāma, to Bakr ibn Wāʾil, or to any tribe whatever; the resemblance is two senses of one root arriving at a single form.

The error runs in both directions. A family bearing al-Ḥanafī from the school need have no tie to the tribe; and a man of Banū Ḥanīfa is al-Ḥanafī by his tribe whichever school he follows, so the name settles nothing about his madhhab either. A register that folds the two into one line, or that reads a legal epithet in an old chain of names as a tribal attribution, has made a substantive error and not a spelling one. Where a chain is being reconstructed, the useful question at every al-Ḥanafī in it is which of the two the writer meant; the context of the entry — a listing of jurists on one side, of tribes on the other — usually answers where the form cannot.

A third reading is smaller but real: ḥanīf is itself a word and a given name, and a family called after a forebear so named arrives at the same nisba again.

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.