Al-Nakhaʿ

Overview

Al-Nakhaʿ is entered by the genealogists among the sections of Madhḥij, reckoned through ʿAmr ibn ʿUlla ibn Jald ibn Mālik — as reported, and the compilers differ over the intermediate names as they do through the whole Madhḥijī chapter. Its original country is placed in Yemen with the rest of Madhḥij, in the highlands and the wadis running east toward the Jawf. This page describes a historical tribe as the classical sources record it, and makes no claim about any modern family.

The name

The genealogists report that al-Nakhaʿ is a byname and that the man's given name was otherwise, and they explain the byname from the root n-kh-ʿ: intakhaʿa ʿan arḍihi, in Lisān al-ʿArab, is to go far off from one's land. The explanation the compilers give is that he moved away from his people and the name stayed with him. It is a report about a name, not an event that can be dated, and the sources offer it as such.

The root also gives the ordinary words for the spinal marrow and for cutting an animal through to it, which is why the shape of the word is familiar to a reader who has never met the tribe. Nothing follows from that resemblance.

In al-Kūfa

What distinguishes al-Nakhaʿ in the literature is where the sources find it afterwards. Sections of the tribe are recorded settling in al-Kūfa in Iraq at the founding of the garrison, in numbers large enough that the nisba al-Nakhaʿī becomes a common one in the biographical registers of that town in the following generations, especially among its jurists and traditionists. This is worth noticing for its own sake: much of what survives of ʿilm al-ansāb was collected and written down in al-Kūfa and al-Baṣra, so a tribe that settled there is over-represented in the record relative to tribes that stayed in the Yemeni highlands. Density in the sources is not the same as size on the ground.

In the genealogical tradition

The compilers name sections under al-Nakhaʿ and disagree over their arrangement. Where a branch is given here it is given as the sources report it, not as a settled fact. The accounts of the delegations record a party of al-Nakhaʿ coming to the Prophet from Yemen, which is where many readers first meet the name.

On lineage

Branch lists and affiliations here are given as reported by the classical genealogists, who themselves disagree. 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.