Al-Yamani

Overview

Al-Yamani (al-Yamānī) is the nisba to al-Yaman. The word is from y-m-n: in Lisān al-ʿArab al-yaman is the right hand side for one who faces the sunrise, with al-Shām on his left, and the geographers explain the country's name from that. A second sense of the root is yumn, blessing and good fortune, and the lexicographers relay reports connecting the country's name to it as well; they set the two accounts side by side without deciding.

How far the country reaches

This is the useful point. Al-Yaman in the classical books is much larger than the modern state of that name: the geographers carry it northwards to take in Najrān, a long stretch of the Sarāt highlands and a share of the Tihāma lowland below them, and where it ends and the Ḥijāz begins is drawn differently by different authors. Al-Hamdānī, describing the Peninsula from within it, sets out the Yemeni lands and their tribes on a reckoning of his own. So a family attributed to al-Yaman is attributed to a region of the geographers, not to a modern border.

The other sense, and the form

In the books of genealogy Yamānī also means a man of the southern Arabs — the Qaḥṭānī side of the great division, set against the ʿAdnānī or Qaysī side — and it is used of tribes long settled far from Yemen itself. A page saying al-Yamānī may therefore mean a place or a bloc. Note also that the grammarians make the nisba yamanī, and yamānin with an alif standing in for one of the two yāʾs, while yamānī with the yāʾ doubled is treated as a poetic licence; all three shapes are met, and they are the one attribution.

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 place itself.