Al-Qallaf

The word

Al-Qallaf (al-qallāf) is the faʿʿāl of q-l-f. Lisān al-ʿArab gives qalafa al-safīna as sewing a ship's planks together with palm fibre (līf) and working pitch (qār) into the gaps between them; the qallāf is the man who does it, and the craft is al-qilāfa. It is a shipbuilding word in the strict sense: not the felling and shaping of timber, which is carpentry, but the closing of the hull so that the sea stays out. In the usage of the Gulf coast the word widened to the builder of boats generally; the lexicon's sense is the narrower one, the seams.

Caulker and carpenter

Ibn Khaldūn treats the building of seagoing ships as a branch of the carpenter's craft. The phrase "possessed of planks and dusur" is the Qurʾān's own (54:13), and Lisān gives the disār — the singular behind that dusur — as a cord of palm fibre with which a ship's planks are bound, or, on another account, the nail. Al-najjār is the general name for the worker in wood. Al-qallāf is narrower, and belongs to the shore: a carpenter may work in any town, a caulker where boats are drawn up. The two names are not variants of one another, and a family called by one has nothing to do with a family called by the other.

Bearing the name

An occupational family name records what an ancestor did, as the name was applied to him — not a lineage. It attaches to no tribe, and two families bearing it need have no connection to one another beyond the word itself.