Al-Mulla

The word

Al-Mulla (al-mullā) is a title that became a family name. The form is later than the classical dictionaries: Lisān al-ʿArab does not give it, and the usual account connects it with Arabic mawlā, which passed into Persian and Turkish usage and came back as mullā — a form of address for a man of letters and learning. This page states that account as the usual one and goes no further.

What the lexicon does give is mawlā, under w-l-y, and it gives it a spread of senses that point in opposite directions: the lord, the master and the owner, and the one who frees a slave and the one freed; the helper, the ally, the neighbour and the paternal cousin. A word that falls on the patron and on the one under patronage alike carries no fixed rank in itself — one more reason not to read a rank into the later title.

Mullā and malaʾ

The name is sometimes confused with al-malaʾ, from m-l-ʾ, which Lisān gives as the notables of a people, the leading men whose word is referred to. The two are different words on different roots, and neither leads to the other: al-Mullā is a form of address, not an assembly and not a council.

Bearing the name

A family name of this kind records a title 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. The name is not connected here to any person, and it designates no religious office today.