Bahrāʾ

Overview

Bahrāʾ is reckoned by the genealogists to ʿAmr ibn al-Ḥāf ibn Quḍāʿah, which places it beside Balī and Mahra in the same tier of the Quḍāʿī arrangement. Its diyār are given on the northern edge of the Arabian steppe and the country toward Ḥimṣ and the Syrian marches, and sections of it are named in the conquest-era accounts as having moved on into Egypt and the Ṣaʿīd. The nisba recorded for it is al-Bahrānī, which is one of the traps on this page and is dealt with below. This page describes a historical tribe and makes no statement about any modern family.

In the sources

Bahrāʾ belongs to the group of Quḍāʿī tribes that the sources place on the Byzantine frontier before Islam — with Kalb, Salīḥ and Tanūkh — and, like them, it is recorded as having been largely Christian. It appears in accounts of the Syrian campaigns and afterwards among the Arab settlement of Egypt. What survives is mostly of this kind: the tribe is named where an army, a district or a settlement is being described, rather than being the subject of a narrative of its own, and the genealogists give it a place in the scheme without the branch detail they supply for the larger tribes.

Reading the name

The nisba recorded from Bahrāʾ is al-Bahrānī, and it should not be read back onto the historic region of al-Baḥrayn in eastern Arabia, whose own nisba is written the same way in unvowelled script. The two are different words for different things, and a bearer of the nisba in a biographical dictionary may belong to either, or to neither. That caution is the useful content of this page: as with every nisba, it may mark descent, alliance (ḥilf) or clientage (walāʾ), and the compilers say which only when they know.

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.