Al-Sharqiyyūn

Overview

Al-Sharqiyyūn — written الشرقيون, the nominative plural of sharqī, and given as al-Sharqiyyīn in the oblique — are reported on the eastern seaboard of the lower Gulf, on the coast that faces the Gulf of ʿUmān and in the valleys running back from it into the mountains. This page describes a historical tribe as reported, and makes no claim about any modern family.

A directional name, borne by more than one group and by districts too

The name says only "the easterners", and directional names of this sort are given independently wherever there is an east to be east of. Groups and districts called al-Sharqiyyah or al-Sharqiyyūn are reported in ʿUmān, in eastern Arabia and elsewhere, with no relation asserted between them; al-Sharqiyyah is in the first place the name of a wide region of ʿUmān, not a lineage. A name of this kind identifies almost nothing on its own, and a resemblance between two such names is no evidence of a common ancestor. The page keeps them apart.

The name

Ibn Manẓūr enters the root sh-r-q for the rising of the sun and for the east, al-mashriq, and gives sharqī for what belongs to it. Yāqūt's dictionary carries a series of places called al-Sharqiyyah in more than one land, told apart only by what is added after the name. The lexicon explains the word and the place-book locates the places; neither mentions 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-Sharqiyyūn. Al-Hamdānī describes ʿUmān and Yāqūt names its places and its coast, but a citation for a coast is not a citation for a tribe on 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 and the reported country, not a descent. 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.

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.