Al-Nakhai

Overview

Al-Nakhai (al-Nakhaʿī) is the nisba of al-Nakhaʿ, entered by the genealogists under Madhḥij and so within the southern scheme, with early diyār in Yemen. The name itself they explain as a byname rather than a given name: intakhaʿa ʿan qawmihi, he took himself off from his people, is the derivation the sources report. The tribe is recorded settling al-Kūfa in strength after the conquests, and it is the Kūfan biographical literature, not the Yemeni geography, that carries the bulk of the nisba.

Names easily confused

Because the Kūfan presence dominates the record, the form is met through the garrison town and through walāʾ as freely as through descent; the biographical writers apply al-Nakhaʿī to a tribe's mawālī without any mark separating them from its ṣarīḥ members, and the form on its own does not tell the two apart. The root n-kh-ʿ in Lisān al-ʿArab is the nukhāʿ, the cord of marrow in the spine, whence nakhaʿa for reaching it — so a nisba may equally rest on the word or on a forebear named Nakhīʿ, with no tribal sense at all. In unpointed writing the skeleton is shared with nisbas on neighbouring roots, and vocalizations differing from al-Nakhaʿī are recorded without marking a different line.

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.