Al-Muallim

The word

ʿ-l-m carries both knowing and marking, and Lisān al-ʿArab keeps them together: al-ʿalam is the sign, the mark and the raised landmark, and a mountain is called ʿalam because it is what one steers by. To know a thing is to have its mark. Muʿallim is the participle of the second form, the man who makes another know, and the word is transparent in a way that most trade-names are not.

Two trades under one word

Ibn Khaldūn treats teaching itself as a craft, learned and transmitted like the others, which is exactly how the word behaves. In the Levant, Egypt and Iraq al-muʿallim is heard at least as often of the master of a workshop — the man who has finished his training, keeps the tools and takes apprentices — as of a teacher of children, and in that use it sits directly beside the trade-names: the smith, the carpenter, the builder. A family name written al-Muʿallim can therefore descend from a schoolroom or from a workshop, and the word alone does not say which; the region it was written in is the better clue, and it is only a clue.

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.