Al-Qaysi

Overview

Al-Qaysi (al-Qaysī) is the nisba of Qays ʿAylān, one of the great gathering names of the northern scheme, under which the genealogists place Hawāzin, Ghaṭafān, Sulaym and Bāhila among others, with a remembered range across Najd and the Hijaz. Because it names a tier of the classical ordering rather than a tribe, it settles almost nothing on its own: a family bearing it is attributing itself to a grouping, not to a house, and it is the branch nisbas — al-ʿĀmirī, al-Ghaṭafānī, al-Sulamī and the rest — that place a line within it. The root q-y-s is in Lisān al-ʿArab the measuring of one thing against another, whence qiyās.

Names easily confused

Qays is also an ordinary personal name, and a nisba may be built on any forebear who carried it with no grouping sense at all. Two further Qayses in the classical books yield the same written form from different lines: Qays ibn Thaʿlaba, reckoned to Bakr of Rabīʿa, and ʿAbd al-Qays, likewise of Rabīʿa, whose usual nisba is al-ʿAbdī. The medieval sources use al-Qaysī in a further sense again, of the Qaysī side in the Qaysī–Yamanī factional divisions of the early Islamic Levant, where the label marks an allegiance rather than a descent. The form on its own therefore distinguishes very little.

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.