Al-Qadi

The word

Q-ḍ-y is one of the widest roots in the lexicon. Lisān al-ʿArab lists its senses side by side: to decide and separate two disputants, which is the judicial sense; to finish or discharge a thing, as a man discharges his need; to make known, to decree, and to make outright — the lexicon reads the Qurʾānic fa-qaḍāhunna sabʿa samāwāt as fashioning and completing; and to die, as in qaḍā naḥbahu. The thread running through all of them is bringing a matter to its end, which is what a judgment does to a dispute.

An office, then a name

The qāḍī is the man appointed to settle disputes, and Ibn Khaldūn describes the judgeship as one of the offices a settled polity cannot dispense with, distinguishing it from the giving of legal opinions and from the market oversight beside it. Holders of the office were known by it, and their sons were known as sons of the qāḍī until the word hardened into a family name in town after town, independently and with no connection between the households that ended up carrying it. The name is a record of what somebody was called; it appoints nobody, and it grants no standing to judge anything.

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.