Al-Taghlibi

Overview

Al-Taghlibi (al-Taghlibī) is attributed to Taghlib ibn Wāʾil, reckoned to Rabīʿa and the brother line of Bakr, whose long quarrel with Bakr fills a good part of the pre-Islamic akhbār; the sources place their country in al-Jazīra and the upper Iraqi marches, and later along the Syrian side. Taghlib is a verb form from the root gh-l-b, prevailing.

Names easily confused

This is a page about pointing rather than about descent. Three names are written on the same skeleton and are separated only by their dots.

Al-Taghlibī, with tāʾ and ghayn, is the nisba to Taghlib.

Al-Thaʿlabī, with thāʾ and ʿayn, is the nisba to Thaʿlaba — a different word from a different root, thaʿlab being the fox — and Thaʿlaba is a name the genealogies carry in several places, Bakr ibn Wāʾil among them. That last point is what makes the slip so easy: a Thaʿlabī of Bakr and a Taghlibī of Taghlib are distant cousins in the arrangement, and each is constantly written for the other.

Al-Thaʿālibī is a third form again, built on the plural, and belongs to a separate line of nisbas entirely.

Older script, which often goes unpointed, does not separate the three; nor does a hurried modern hand. Where an old chain of names turns on one of them, the reading has to be established from the context and not from the letters.

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.