Al-Jalās

Overview

Al-Jalās is reported as one of the two divisions entered under Ḍanā Muslim within ʿAnazah, and al-Rāwalah is entered inside it — though the accounts differ over that arrangement, and over whether the name marks a division or a section within one. The country reported for it is the same as that reported for the sections under it: the desert north of Najd, extending into the Levant.

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

The name is borne by more than one group

This is the most useful thing the page can say. Al-Jalās is not a name peculiar to one people: sections and families of the name are reported in more than one tribe and in more than one region, and nothing connects them beyond the word itself. A reader who finds the name in a source, a document or a family account has not thereby found this grouping, and this page is about the name as it is reported within ʿAnazah, not about every bearer of it.

On the word

The lexicographers give the root j-l-s for sitting and for staying in a place, and also use al-jals of high, hard ground — a sense in which Najd itself is spoken of. The lexicon accounts for the word, not for the naming of a people by it, and nothing about the grouping follows from the derivation.

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 grouping. 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 the lexicon is cited below, 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.