Al-ʿAmārāt

Overview

Al-ʿAmārāt is a section reported within ʿAnazah and entered under Bishr, one of the two headings the sections are arranged by. The country reported for it runs from northern Najd northward into the steppe of Iraq. Al-Dahāmishah is reported as a section within it, though as elsewhere in this arrangement the accounts differ over the level at which a name belongs.

This page describes a tribal section as it is reported, and makes no claim about any modern family.

Not the genealogical tier

One confusion is worth heading off. The classical genealogists use al-ʿimārah as a technical term: it names one of the ranked tiers into which they divide a people — shaʿb, qabīlah, ʿimārah, baṭn and so on downward. The section name al-ʿAmārāt is a plural of a different shape and a different thing, and a reader who meets it should not read the tier into it or conclude anything about where the group stands in that scheme. The two are separate words that happen to share a root.

On sources

The classical works this reference cites — Ibn Ḥazm's Jamhara, al-Qalqashandī's Nihāyat al-Arab, Yāqūt's Muʿjam al-Buldān and al-Hamdānī's Ṣifat Jazīrat al-ʿArab — do not document this section. The arrangement the name sits in is reported in its present form only from centuries after the latest of those works, and what is said about it comes from later writing and from oral tradition rather than from the sources cited here. This page therefore records the name, the country and the affiliation as they are commonly reported, and does not set out a descent. Where a place is cited below, the citation is for the place, not for the group; and where the lexicon is cited, it is cited for the word, not for the people who carry it.

On lineage

Branch lists and affiliations on this page are given as reported, and those who report them differ among themselves: one account makes a name a division and another makes it a section inside one. Nothing here establishes any living family's descent. A shared name may reflect descent, alliance (ḥilf) or clientage (walāʾ), and the sources say which only when they know.