Al-Imam

The word

ʾ-m-m is the root of intending and heading for, and Lisān al-ʿArab builds imām on it in its broadest sense: the imām is whatever a people take as their front and follow after, and the lexicon is careful to add that the word carries no verdict in itself — it is used of those on a straight road and of those who are not. The senses it then lists are concrete and various: the imām is the road itself; it is the string a builder stretches taut and lays his course against; it is a book or record by which a thing is known; and it is the man the ranks stand behind at prayer.

An office of the mosque, and a wider word

The last of those is what most readers hear first, and Ibn Khaldūn treats leading the prayer among the standing functions of a settled town. In later usage, and differently in different regions and communities, the word was also used as a title of religious standing and of scholarly precedence, and what it implies is not the same from one place to another. As a family name none of that travels: the name reports that an ancestor was called al-imām, most often because he led the prayer in his own quarter, and this reference reads nothing further into it.

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.