Banū ʿUqayl

Overview

ʿUqayl is recorded as a son of Kaʿb ibn Rabīʿa ibn ʿĀmir. Of the branches counted from Kaʿb it is the one the later sources follow furthest: groups of the name are placed first in Najd with the rest of Banū ʿĀmir, then eastward into the country the geographers call al-Baḥrayn and northward into lower Iraq. Khafāja and al-Muntafiq are among the sections the classical lists report under it, though the genealogists differ over how they attach; groups later called by such names are outside anything this page can establish. This page describes a historical tribe and makes no claim about any modern family.

ʿUqayl and ʿAqīl

The tribal name is ʿUqayl, on the diminutive pattern. It is not ʿAqīl, which is a separate personal name of the same three letters and is far better known to most readers. Unvowelled Arabic cannot tell them apart, so the two are merged routinely in modern writing and in transcription into other scripts. Where a document gives the name without vowels, the only safe reading is that it is ambiguous.

The name

Ibn Manẓūr treats ʿ-q-l as the root of two families of meaning that the Arabs held together: ʿaql, the restraining faculty of the mind, and ʿiqāl, the cord with which a camel's foreleg is bound — both turning on holding something back from wandering. ʿUqayl is the diminutive formed from it, in the same way as Qushayr and Numayr elsewhere in this house.

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.