Al-Masri

Overview

Al-Masri (al-Miṣrī) is the nisba to Miṣr. Before it is a proper name the word is a common noun: in Lisān al-ʿArab a miṣr is a boundary or a partition between two things, and it is also the great settled town that gathers people to it, with the plural amṣār; maṣṣara al-qawm al-makān is for them to found such a town. That plural is the same word met in the account of al-Baṣra and al-Kūfa, which are called amṣār for exactly this reason.

The word, the town and the land

The double sense works through the sources. In the early books Miṣr very often names the capital settlement itself — al-Fusṭāṭ — so that a man said to have gone to Miṣr may have gone to the town rather than into the country, and Yāqūt is explicit that the name is used both ways. The land the geographers describe under the name is also not the state a modern reader has in mind; its bounds are given by the Nile, its two shores and the deserts on either hand, and they change from author to author. A family name attributed to Miṣr does not choose among these readings.

Names easily confused

The common noun keeps its life outside the proper name, so miṣrī can be read as belonging to a great town in general, and the classical texts sometimes use it that way. Beyond that, the nisba is characteristically given from outside — nobody within the country is usefully distinguished by it — so it fixes on families after a move, and is borne in the Levant, the Ḥijāz and Iraq as readily as at home.

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.