Banū al-Buṭūn

Overview

In the genealogists' handling of Saʿd ibn Zayd Manāt of Tamīm, al-Buṭūn stands opposite Muqāʿis as the second of two headings under which the sections of Saʿd are gathered. It is recorded as a collective title rather than the name of a single ancestor, and that is unusual enough in this literature to be worth stating plainly. The sections it covers are named differently from book to book. This page describes a historical grouping as the classical sources record it and makes no claim about any modern family.

A name that is also a technical term

Al-buṭūn is the ordinary plural of baṭn, one of the ranks in the scholarly scheme of descent, where it names a subdivision below the ʿimāra. The two uses are written identically, so a sentence about the buṭūn of a tribe is almost always about its sections in general and not about this Tamīmī grouping. Context is the only guide: where the word stands beside Muqāʿis, and where Saʿd ibn Zayd Manāt is the subject, the proper name is meant. Elsewhere it is the common noun. This collision is a good illustration of why a tribal attribution copied out of a source without its surrounding sentence is worth very little.

What it covers

The books name sections of Saʿd under this heading and do not agree on the list, which follows from the nature of a collective title: it is defined by what it is not, namely what has not been placed under Muqāʿis, and the two headings are drawn slightly differently by different authors.

Homeland

As with Saʿd generally, the diyār are placed in eastern Najd along the Dahnāʾ towards al-Yamāma, and afterwards among the Tamīmī settlement in Iraq.

On lineage

The branches and affiliations set out above are given as reported by the classical genealogists, who differ among themselves: the ordering of the sections, and which section is reckoned under which, are not settled in the sources. Nothing on this page establishes any living family's descent — a shared name may reflect descent, alliance (ḥilf) or clientage (walāʾ), and the sources say which only when they know. This page describes a historical tribe as the early writers recorded it, and makes no claim about any modern family.