Al-Muzani

Overview

Al-Muzani (al-Muzanī) is the nisba of Muzayna, placed by the genealogists under Muḍar through Udd ibn Ṭābikha, with a remembered range in the Hijaz on the roads about Medina and the coast below it. The books report Muzayna as the name of the mother of ʿUthmān and Aws, sons of ʿAmr ibn Udd, which came to stand for their descendants — so the name attached to the line is, as reported, a matronymic and not a father's name, which is worth knowing before a chart is drawn from it. The root m-z-n is in Lisān al-ʿArab the muzn, the rain-bearing cloud, muzna its single one.

Names easily confused

The nisba is formed al-Muzanī: the diminutive ending is dropped and the base returns, exactly as classical usage requires. A family written al-Muzaynī is therefore on a different formation, and the two should not be silently merged; the same holds for al-Māzinī, which belongs to Māzin, a separate name borne in more than one tribe. Al-Muzn and Āl Muzn, in the bare article-plus-noun shape, are family names rather than nisbas and carry no attribution to Muzayna at all. And because the name of the line is a mother's name in the reports, a bearer is being placed by a maternal designation that later became the ordinary tribal label, not by a claim about a father named Muzayn.

Bearing the name

A tribal nisba records what a family is called, not who its ancestors were. It may follow descent (ṣarīḥ), alliance (ḥilf) or clientage (walāʾ), and only a family's own documented record tells those apart.