Al-Madani

Overview

Al-Madani (al-Madanī) is the nisba to al-Madīna in the Ḥijāz, the town the sources call Yathrib before Islam. The word beneath it is a common noun: in Lisān al-ʿArab a madīna is a settled walled town, and the lexicographers differ over its root — some take it from madana bi-l-makān, to stay in a place, while the plural madāʾin is built as though the word came from d-y-n. Yāqūt enters al-Madīna definite for the Ḥijāzī town and records other places carrying the same word.

Al-Madani and al-Madini

The nisba to the Ḥijāzī town takes the form al-Madanī, with the yāʾ dropped, and that is the form the grammarians assign to it. Al-Madīnī, keeping the yāʾ, is the form the biographical literature uses for men attributed to other towns called madīna — one in the Iranian lands, one in the Iraqi — and some writers use it for the Ḥijāzī town as well. The distinction is easily lost: the two differ by one letter in Arabic and by nothing at all in most transliteration, so a bearer of either cannot be assigned to a place on the form alone.

A later reading of the word

Modern Arabic also uses madanī as an adjective for the settled or the civil, set against badawī. That use is later than the family name and is not what the name records; a house called al-Madanī is attributed to a town, not described as townsfolk.

Bearing the name

A toponymic family name records a place an ancestor was attributed to — born there, settled there, known by it — as the name was applied to him, not a lineage. It attaches to no tribe, and two families bearing it need have no connection to one another beyond the place itself.