Al-Wadii

Overview

Al-Wadii (al-Wādiʿī) is the nisba of Wādiʿah, which the genealogists enter within Hamdān, with remembered diyār in the northern highlands of Yemen, in the country al-Hamdānī describes. Within Hamdān the nisba is one tier among several: al-Hamdānī and the division nisbas name the same line more broadly, and a family may be met under any of them. The root w-d-ʿ in Lisān al-ʿArab is leaving and setting down, whence wadāʿa for gentleness and wadīʿa for a thing entrusted.

Names easily confused

The confusion this name most needs guarding against is with Wadāʿah, reported under Qaḥṭān in the south of Najd, which this reference keeps on a separate page precisely because the two are constantly merged. They differ by a vowel and by nothing that unvowelled writing shows, and they are not the same name: one is a Hamdānī division of Yemen, the other a Qaḥṭānī section of Najd, and a reader who meets the bare form in a modern list cannot tell which is meant. The root supplies more near neighbours in turn — al-Wadāʿī, al-Wadīʿī and forms on a forebear named Wādiʿ or Wadīʿ — none of which carries a tribal sense at all.

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.