Al-Bū Nimr

Overview

Al-Bū Nimr — written البو نمر — is reported in the Euphrates country of al-ʿIrāq. The reports arrange it in more than one way: sometimes as a group standing on its own, sometimes as a section within al-Dulaym, which has its own page here. This page keeps both arrangements as reports and settles neither. It describes a historical name as reported, and makes no claim about any modern family.

The formation of the name

Bū is the spoken reduction of Abū, and al-Bū Nimr is accordingly the people of the one styled Abū Nimr. The formation is used widely, and names built on it recur independently; the pattern by itself joins nobody to anybody.

The word, and an old name that resembles it

Ibn Manẓūr enters n-m-r for the animal, al-namir, and for the mottling from which the word is taken. Nimr and al-Namir are old in Arabic naming, and the classical genealogists record al-Namir b. Qāsiṭ, a tribe of Rabīʿa, which has its own page in this reference. That is a resemblance in one element of a name and nothing more: this grouping is not documented in the classical works, and no line runs from that old tribe to it in anything this reference is permitted to cite.

On sources

The classical works this reference cites — Ibn Ḥazm, al-Qalqashandī, al-Hamdānī, Yāqūt, Ibn Manẓūr and Ibn Khaldūn — do not document al-Bū Nimr. Its present shape is later than all of them by centuries, and what is reported about it comes from oral tradition and from later writing that lies outside the sources this reference is permitted to use. The page therefore records the name, the country it is reported in, and what the reports attach it to. It does not record a descent, and nothing on it should be read as one. The page keeps to the name and to what the classical works do and do not contain, and does not enter later history.

On lineage

Branch lists and affiliations here are given as reported, and the genealogists differ among themselves. Nothing on this page 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.