Al-Udhri

Overview

Al-Udhri (al-ʿUdhrī) is the nisba of ʿUdhra, a tribe the genealogists reckon to Quḍāʿah through Saʿd Hudhaym ibn Zayd ibn Layth, with its remembered country north of Medina — Wādī al-Qurā and the road toward Taymāʾ. The root ʿ-dh-r is in Lisān al-ʿArab that of ʿudhr, the excuse or the accepting of one, and of al-ʿadhrāʾ; the tribal name is entered in the books as a name, and the sources do not settle what sense of the root it was given for.

Names easily confused

The most useful distinction on this page is not between two tribes. ʿUdhrī is also an adjective built from this tribe's name, which the classical critics applied to a manner of loving and to the verse that carries it. Used that way the word qualifies poetry and a way of loving; it is not a family name, and it attaches to no line. A family called al-ʿUdhrī is connected with that tradition only by the name the critics borrowed, and a page or a book using ʿudhrī of verse is not speaking of anyone's ancestry.

Second, the form can be territorial rather than tribal. Muʿjam al-Buldān records more than one settlement whose name is built on this root, among them ʿAdhrāʾ in the Ghūṭa of Damascus, and a nisba taken from such a place can come to be written in the same way as the tribal one. Which is meant has to be said, not assumed.

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.