Banū al-Dīl (of ʿAbd al-Qays)

Overview

Banū al-Dīl are entered among the sections of ʿAbd al-Qays, and the chains most commonly given run them beneath Lukayz through Wadīʿa and his son ʿAmr. Their country is the country of the tribe: the coast Yāqūt calls al-Khaṭṭ, with al-Qaṭīf among its towns, and the villages and landing places along it — al-Zāra, Dārīn — with Hajar and the oasis of al-Aḥsāʾ inland. As with every section of this tribe, the compilers differ over the middle names of the chain, and the page gives the common form as a report rather than as a settled fact.

Names of one shape

This is what the page is really for. Arabic carries several tribal names built on the letters d-ʾ-l or d-y-l, the genealogists distinguish them by vowelling and by line, and later writing collapses them.

Al-Dīl, with a kasra and a plain yāʾ, is the name here — the section of ʿAbd al-Qays on this coast.

Al-Duʾal is the name in Kināna: al-Duʾal ibn Bakr ibn ʿAbd Manāt ibn Kināna, an entirely separate tribe in the northern scheme, and the line to which the early grammarian known as Abū al-Aswad al-Duʾalī is reckoned. That nisba is itself a standing problem in the books: the transmitters give it as al-Duʾalī, with the vowel of the middle radical altered in the relative form, and it is also written al-Dīlī, which is exactly how the Kinānī name comes to be read as this one.

A third name of the same shape, al-Diʾl, is recorded elsewhere again, and the compilers disagree over its vowels. And al-Daylam is not a member of this set at all: it is the name of a people beyond the Gulf, a word the lexicographers enter separately, and no relation of the Arab tribal names above — but its resemblance draws it into the same confusion in loose writing.

In Lisān al-ʿArab the underlying words are separate entries. Al-duʾil is given as a small animal of the country, like an ichneumon or a weasel, and the Kinānī eponym is said to be named for it; the other forms are treated in their own places. The upshot for a reader is simple: a source that writes al-Dīlī or al-Duʾalī without naming a country or a father has not told you which of these lines it means, and a great many later citations do exactly that.

The country as the test

Where the vowels fail, the country usually decides. A man of this name placed at al-Qaṭīf, on al-Khaṭṭ, at Hajar or in the coastal villages is being placed among ʿAbd al-Qays; one placed in the Ḥijāz or among the Kināna country is not. That is the practical rule the sources themselves follow, and it is more reliable than the spelling.

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 by the genealogists, who themselves disagree. 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.