Al-Tubi

Overview

Al-Tūbī is the family name attributed to al-Tūbī, a locality of the al-Qaṭīf oasis. The pair is unusual and the reader should be told why at once: the place-name is itself in the shape of a relative adjective, so the name of the place and the name borne by a family from it are the same word, letter for letter. In an ordinary pair the two are distinct — *al-Qaṭīf* against *al-Qaṭīfī*, *al-Shuwayka* against *al-Shuwaykī* — and the distinction does part of the reader's work. Here it does none, and only context can say whether a text means the ground or the people attributed to it.

The word

Read with tāʾ, the base is the root t-w-b, which Ibn Manẓūr gives with the sense of returning: *tāba* is to return from a fault, verbal noun *tawb*, *tawba* and *matāb*, and the intensive *al-tawwāb* stands on the same root; *tawb* is also reported as the plural of *tawba*. Whether the place took its name from that sense, or from a personal name of the same shape, the sources cited here do not say, and the page does not choose for them.

On sources

The classical works this reference is permitted to cite do not document the locality of the Qaṭīf oasis, and so they document nothing about a family name taken from it. The root is in the lexicon; the place and the name are not in these books. No founder, no date and no account of the name is offered here, because none is available in those sources.

Bearing the name

A toponymic family name records a place an ancestor was attributed to — born there, settled there, known by it — 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.