Āl Faḍl

Overview

Āl Faḍl is a name entered by al-Qalqashandī in his survey of the Arab tribes remaining in his own time. He places it among Ṭayyi', in the Syrian desert and the steppe running from the country of Ḥimṣ eastward toward the Euphrates, and reports that the amirate over the Arabs of that desert lay with the bearers of this name in the century he wrote in. Unlike most names in this batch, then, this one is genuinely in the permitted sources, and the page can follow them. What the page will not do is carry the account past the point where those sources stop: it describes a historical group of the eighth and ninth centuries of the Hijra, and makes no claim about any modern family, house or grouping.

Where the genealogists place them

Ṭayyi' is reckoned by Ibn Ḥazm and by al-Qalqashandī among the Yemeni Arabs, of Kahlān, and its old country was the two mountains Ajaʾ and Salmā in northern Najd, which Yāqūt describes at length as the mountains of Ṭayyi'. Both genealogists then follow the northward movement of Ṭayyi' groups into the Syrian desert and the Jazīra, where al-Qalqashandī finds them settled in his own day. Āl Faḍl he reports from the stock of Rabīʿa of Ṭayyi', as the genealogists of his time reported it; and, as always, they differ among themselves, and he sometimes says as much. The name itself is a personal name of the ordinary kind — Ibn Manẓūr enters the root f-ḍ-l for excess, surplus and merit — and its commonness is one reason a name of this shape recurs across unrelated groups.

The amirate the source describes

Al-Qalqashandī, who wrote as a chancery man and knew the protocol for addressing the Arabs of the desert, describes an amirate over the Arabs of the Syrian desert held in his period by this group, with the offices and the correspondence that went with it. That is a fact about his century, reported by him. This reference records it as he records it, without naming any family as its heirs, without carrying it forward to any later or present-day house, and without connecting it to anyone living. Between his day and ours lie six centuries of movement, division and renaming, and none of the works this reference is permitted to cite covers them.

Not to be confused with al-Fuḍūl

The name Āl Faḍl and the section name al-Fuḍūl are related in the reports, and are frequently run together by later writers. This reference keeps them as two entries, and treats the connection between them as a report rather than an established descent. That the sources relate two names is not the same as the two being one thing, and readers tracing either should note which of them a given source is actually speaking about.

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.