Al-Sayyad

The word

Al-Sayyad (al-ṣayyād) is the intensive of ṣāʾid, the one who takes game. Lisān al-ʿArab gives ṣāda al-ṣayd as catching or hunting it, and al-ṣayd both as the act and as what is taken. The word covers the creatures of the land that are hunted and those of the sea that are caught alike, and the Qurʾān speaks of ṣayd al-baḥr, the catch of the sea, with the same word. The ṣayyād of the lexicon is therefore the hunter and the fisherman at once; it does not divide him in two.

Hunter or fisher

On a coast the name is easily read as "fisherman", and in the usage of the Gulf it often meant that. But the word itself is wider, and the name records only that an ancestor took game, of whatever kind; whether he did it with a net or with a bow, the name alone does not say. Where the trade was fish and nothing else, the narrower name is al-sammāk. The same letters also give al-aṣyad, said of one who holds his head high and does not turn it, and so of a king — a different word from the trade, and not the source of the name.

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.