Al-Fidʿān

Overview

Al-Fidʿān is a section reported within ʿAnazah and entered under Bishr. The country reported for it is the steppe between northern Najd and the middle Euphrates, which places the name in the accounts of Iraq and of the Levant alike. As with the rest of this arrangement, the reports differ over the sub-sections entered under it and over the level at which each name belongs.

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

The name

The lexicographers give the root f-d-ʿ for a twist or crookedness in a joint: al-fadaʿ is such a distortion, and afdaʿ is said of the one who has it. That is what the dictionary supplies — the sense of a word, not the reason a people came to be called by it. The classical genealogies do not carry the name at all, so the derivation explains the letters and nothing beyond them.

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.