Al-Rāwalah

Overview

Al-Rāwalah is a section reported within ʿAnazah. The affiliation commonly given for it enters it under al-Jalās, one of the two divisions of Ḍanā Muslim, though the accounts differ over the level at which the name sits: what one report makes a section inside al-Jalās another sets alongside it. The country reported for it is the desert north of Najd and the steppe running west and north into the Levant, and the name is met in accounts of both ends of that country.

This page describes a tribal section as it is reported, and makes no claim about any modern family: no surname, family or house is attributed to it here.

On the name

The classical lexicons and the classical genealogies do not record al-Rāwalah as the name of a people, and this page offers no derivation for it. Supplying an etymology for a name the sources do not carry invents a fact rather than reporting one.

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.