Al-Nahdi

Overview

Al-Nahdi (al-Nahdī) is the nisba of Nahd, a tribe the genealogists reckon to Quḍāʿah through Zayd ibn Layth ibn Sawd and enter beside Juhayna, Jarm and Saʿd Hudhaym. Its remembered country is the Ḥijāz and the country eastward of it, and the southern sources — al-Hamdānī among them — follow sections of the name south toward Najrān and Ḥaḍramawt, which is why one nisba is recorded in two very different regions. That distance is worth holding in mind: the same written form in a northern and a southern context need not report the same body of people.

Names easily confused

There is no rival tribe here so much as a rival derivation. The root n-h-d is in Lisān al-ʿArab that of rising and of coming forward: nahada ilā ʿaduwwihi, he advanced against his enemy, and nahd of the strong high-fronted horse. A name of that shape is an ordinary and admired personal name, and a nisba can be built on any forebear who bore it with no reference to the tribe at all. So the form settles less than it looks to: it may report the Quḍāʿī tribe, or it may report a grandfather called Nahd.

The southern recording adds a second caution. Where the name is met in the Yemeni sources it is entered among the tribes of that country as they stood there, and a family should say which recording it is citing rather than merging the two.

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.