Al-Maʿāwil

Overview

Al-Maʿāwil — written المعاول, the plural of Miʿwal, with the nisba Maʿwalī — are reported in the interior of ʿUmān, in the valleys and villages behind the western mountains, and are commonly reckoned of the Azd of ʿUmān, though nothing in the classical works documents that reckoning. This page describes a historical tribe as reported, and makes no claim about any modern family.

A plural name

The name is a plural of a personal name, Miʿwal, and names of that shape describe a people as the descendants or the company of a man so called, without saying who he was. Where the man is not documented, the plural documents nothing beyond itself: it tells you the form the name took, not the line it stands for. The page therefore gives the singular and the nisba, which is what can be said with certainty, and leaves the ancestor where the sources leave him. Later writing often sorts the tribes of ʿUmān into two alignments, Ghāfirī and Hināwī; that is a political alignment of the eighteenth century, not a genealogy, and it lies outside every source this reference cites, so it is not used here as a way of classifying anybody.

The name

Ibn Manẓūr enters the root ʿ-w-l with several senses, and gives al-miʿwal for the iron tool with which stone and hard ground are broken — a pattern of the kind Arabic uses for instruments — and records Miʿwal as a man's name. The lexicon explains the word; it does not say why a people came to be called by it, and it does not mention this tribe.

On sources

The classical works this reference cites — Ibn Ḥazm, al-Qalqashandī, al-Hamdānī, Yāqūt, Ibn Manẓūr and Ibn Khaldūn — do not document al-Maʿāwil. Al-Hamdānī describes ʿUmān and the Azd settled in it, and Yāqūt names its places, but neither names this tribe, and a citation for a country is not a citation for a people in it. The tribe's present shape postdates all six works, and what is reported about it comes from oral tradition and from modern writing outside what this reference may use. The page records the name, the reported country and the affiliation as reported; it does not record a descent.

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.