al-Ashʿarūn

Overview

The Ashʿarūn — the tribe of al-Ashʿar — are entered by the genealogists in the line of Udad, beside Madhḥij and the branch from which Lakhm and Judhām are reckoned, within the Kahlān grouping of Qaḥṭān. This is as reported, and the sources differ over the intermediate names as they differ over most such chains; some works enter al-Ashʿar directly under Saba. This page describes a historical tribe and makes no claim about any modern family.

Their recorded country is the Tihāma of Yemen: the low coastal strip inland of the sea, in the district the geographers associate with Zabīd, where al-Hamdānī places them among the coastal tribes rather than in the highlands. ʿAkk is their neighbour on that coast in nearly every notice, and the two names are usually mentioned together.

A nickname, not a father's name

Al-Ashʿar is not an ordinary personal name but an epithet: Ibn Manẓūr gives al-ashʿar as the man thick with body hair. The genealogists relate that the ancestor was so called for a circumstance of his birth, and the story is told in more than one form. Explanations of this kind are transmitted narrative attached to a name after the fact, not a record of how the name was given; this reference reports both the lexical sense and the fact that a story is attached, without treating the story as evidence.

The nisba and the school

The nisba is al-Ashʿarī, and it is the source of a confusion worth stating plainly. The same nisba is carried by the school of theology called Ashʿarī, which is named after a scholar and not after the tribe's country. A man described as al-Ashʿarī in a book of doctrine is being placed in a school of thought; a man so described in a book of genealogy or of the early generations is being placed in a tribe. Nothing but the context distinguishes them, and the two have no necessary connection with each other.

The accounts of the early delegations record a body of the Ashʿarīs coming to Medina, and the nisba is common in the biographical literature of the first generations for that reason. That is a record of where the name appears in events, not a claim about the descent of anyone bearing it now.

On lineage

This page describes a historical tribe as the classical sources record it, and makes no claim about any modern family. Branch lists and affiliations are given as reported by the classical genealogists, who themselves disagree. Nothing here establishes any living family's descent: a shared name may reflect descent, alliance (ḥilf) or clientage (walāʾ), and the sources usually say which only when they know.