Al-Sakāsik

Overview

Al-Sakāsik is entered by the genealogists as the second great division of Kinda beside al-Sakūn. The commonest report makes the two brother lines, al-Sakāsik ibn Ashras ibn Thawr ibn Murtiʿ ibn Muʿāwiya ibn Kinda; other compilers give the name a different place in the chain, and the disagreement is recorded rather than resolved in the books themselves. What the sources agree on is the pairing: where one of the two is named, the other is usually named beside it. This page describes a historical tribe as the classical sources record it, and makes no claim about any modern family.

The name

Lisān al-ʿArab enters al-Sakāsik and al-Sakāsika under the root s-k-s-k as a tribe of Yemen, and reports that it is the name of the ancestor. The form is worth a note for a reader working from the shape of the word alone: it looks like a broken plural, of the pattern that gives masājid and dakākīn, so the name reads as though it were a plural of a group rather than one man's name. The genealogists nonetheless treat it as a single eponym, and the nisba they build from it is al-Sakāsikī or al-Saksakī.

The country recorded for it

Al-Hamdānī, describing the districts of Yemen, records a mikhlāf carrying the name of al-Sakāsik in the uplands behind the coast, and Yāqūt repeats it in the same terms. This is the most useful thing the geographers give: a district named for a tribe fixes the tribe on the map, but it also means that later people bearing the nisba may be attributed to the district and not to the descent. The two are not distinguishable by the name alone.

In the genealogical tradition

The compilers name a number of sections under it and disagree over their arrangement, as they do throughout the Kindī chapters. Where a branch is given here it is given as the sources report it. In the accounts of the conquests, sections of al-Sakāsik are recorded moving with the rest of Kinda into the garrison towns, and the nisba appears in the biographical literature of Ḥimṣ and Fusṭāṭ.

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.