Al-Makki

Overview

Al-Makki (al-Makkī) is the nisba to Mecca in the Ḥijāz. Yāqūt gathers the names the town is known by — Makka, Bakka, Umm al-Qurā among them — and passes on the derivations the lexicographers give for the first from the root m-k-k, which in Lisān al-ʿArab is the drawing of the marrow out of a bone. The reports explaining how that sense reached the town differ, and the geographers relay them without settling between them.

How the name was carried

This is the point on which the whole family of place-names turns, and Mecca is where it shows most plainly. The classical biographical literature is full of men called al-Makkī who were born elsewhere and came to the town to settle, to neighbour it (mujāwara) or to study, and the nisba attaches to them as firmly as to a man born in it; the same holds in reverse for a man born there who left and was still known by it. A toponymic nisba records an association with a place, and the written form does not say which association — birth, residence, long neighbouring, or a teaching seat.

Names easily confused

Makkī is also an ordinary personal name, so al-Makkī may be a house's attribution to an ancestor who bore it and have nothing to do with the town. Nothing in the written form distinguishes the two cases.

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.