Al-Dulaym

Overview

Al-Dulaym — written الدليم, commonly vowelled al-Dulaym — is reported as a grouping of the Euphrates country of al-ʿIrāq, in the district of al-Anbār and Hīt and the steppe behind them. Reports attach it to Zubayd, and Zubayd is an old name that the classical genealogists do record; but the attachment of this grouping to it is itself a report of much later date, and the page gives it as a report and not as a fact. It describes a historical tribe as reported, and makes no claim about any modern family.

The name

Ibn Manẓūr enters the root d-l-m for deep blackness: al-adlam is said of a man, of a mountain and of a rock that is intensely dark, and dulaym has the shape of a diminutive built on it. Yāqūt's dictionary of places gives al-Anbār and Hīt on the Euphrates, and describes their country; the lexicon explains the word and the place-book locates the places, and neither of them mentions this grouping or explains why a people came to be called by the name.

On sources

The classical works this reference cites — Ibn Ḥazm, al-Qalqashandī, al-Hamdānī, Yāqūt, Ibn Manẓūr and Ibn Khaldūn — do not document al-Dulaym. 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.