Al-Maafiri

Overview

Al-Maafiri (al-Maʿāfirī) is the nisba of Maʿāfir, which the genealogists in the commonest report reckon to Ḥimyar — a point worth stating, since modern lists often file the nisba among the Kindī names it keeps company with in Egypt and the west. A mikhlāf in the south of Yemen carried the name, and al-Hamdānī and Yāqūt describe it as a country as readily as a people. After the conquests the form is dense in the Egyptian and Andalusian biographical literature, where it travelled alongside al-Tujībī and al-Sakūnī.

Names easily confused

The word has a second life that has nothing to do with descent: the maʿāfirī is a cloth, a garment the lexicographers and geographers name from the district, and a reference to it in an old text is not a reference to anyone's ancestry. Because a country as well as a people carries the name, the nisba may be territorial — a bearer settled in the mikhlāf could take it without a line into the tribe. Its usual filing beside the Kindī nisbas is a matter of shared geography and shared migration, not of a shared ancestor; the reports place Maʿāfir in Ḥimyar. The root ʿ-f-r in Lisān al-ʿArab is the dust-coloured earth, whence aʿfar and ʿafrāʾ.

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.