Awlād Dulaym

Overview

Awlād Dulaym is reported as a grouping of the western Sahara. Its name is built on the pattern that names a group after a single named forebear — Awlād so-and-so, the children of a man — which is the ordinary way such names are formed in the western desert and says nothing in itself about how old the group is or where it came from. This page describes a historical grouping and makes no claim about any modern family.

The word

Dulaym is a diminutive personal name. Ibn Manẓūr enters the root d-l-m for deep blackness: al-adlam is the very dark, said of a man, of a rock and of a night, and al-dulma is that darkness. Diminutives of names on such roots are ordinary. The lexicon explains the word and nothing further; it does not mention any group of this name.

On sources

The classical works this reference cites — Ibn Ḥazm, al-Qalqashandī, al-Hamdānī, Yāqūt, Ibn Manẓūr and Ibn Khaldūn — do not document Awlād Dulaym. The grouping's present shape is later than all of them, and what is reported about it, including any account of its descent, comes from oral tradition and from modern writing outside the sources this reference is permitted to use. The page therefore records the name and the country it is reported in. It does not record a descent, and it does not enter later history.

On lineage

This page describes a historical tribe as the classical sources record it, and makes no claim about any modern family. Branch lists and affiliations are given as reported, and the genealogists differ among themselves. Nothing here 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.