Al-Sakūn

Overview

Al-Sakūn is one of the two great divisions the classical genealogists enter under Kinda, the other being al-Sakāsik. Ibn Ḥazm reckons it al-Sakūn ibn Ashras ibn Thawr ibn Murtiʿ ibn Muʿāwiya ibn Kinda — as reported, and the sources differ over the intermediate names in that chain as they differ over most such chains. The country recorded for it is Ḥaḍramawt and the valleys behind it, where the settled sections of Kinda are placed, and the geographers set its people among cultivators and townsmen as often as among camel-herders. This page describes a historical tribe as the classical sources record it, and makes no claim about any modern family.

The name

The lexicographers give the root s-k-n for stillness and for dwelling: sakana is to settle in a place, and al-sakan is the people of a house. Lisān al-ʿArab also lists al-Sakūn among the tribes of Yemen, which is how the genealogists write it. The word and the tribal name share a root; the lexicon supplies the sense of the word, not the reason a people was called by it, and no conclusion about the tribe follows from the meaning.

In the genealogical tradition

Among the sections the compilers enter under it, the best known is Tujīb, reckoned to the two sons of Ashras ibn Shabīb ibn al-Sakūn and named for their mother rather than their father — an unusual arrangement that the genealogists note explicitly. Other sections are given under ʿAdī and Saʿd, and the lists differ from book to book: one compiler makes a name a son where another makes it a grandson, and the same section may be entered in either place. Where a branch is given here it is given as the sources report it, not as a settled fact.

Where the name travelled

In the accounts of the conquests, Kindī contingents out of Ḥaḍramawt are recorded settling in the garrison towns — al-Kūfa in Iraq, Ḥimṣ in the Levant, and Fusṭāṭ in Egypt — and the nisba al-Sakūnī appears in the biographical literature of all three. A nisba carried in a garrison town is a weak guide to descent. The compilers themselves separate a man who is Sakūnī by plain descent (ṣarīḥ) from one who is so by alliance (ḥilf) or by clientage (walāʾ), and they say which only when they know it.

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.