Banū ʿAṣar

Overview

Banū ʿAṣar are named among the sections of ʿAbd al-Qays, and the nisba built on the name, al-ʿAṣarī, is met in the older literature. The country is the tribe's country: the coast Yāqūt calls al-Khaṭṭ, al-Qaṭīf and the villages along the shore, the landing place of Dārīn, and Hajar with the oasis of al-Aḥsāʾ inland.

In the sources

This section is thin, and the page says so rather than filling the gap. The genealogists list ʿAṣar among the branches of ʿAbd al-Qays; the chains they give above it are not identical from book to book, and the reports do not carry the kind of narrative that attaches to the larger sections of the tribe. What this page records, therefore, is the name, its vowelling, its placement as reported, and the country the geographers give the tribe — and it stops there. A longer page would be a manufactured one.

The vowelling and the word

ʿAṣar is vowelled with two fatḥas, ʿa-ṣa-r, and the misreading ʿAṣr is easy because the ordinary noun is more familiar than the name.

The root ʿ-ṣ-r in Lisān al-ʿArab is pressing: ʿaṣara the grapes, to press out their juice, and from it al-ʿaṣīr. From the same root come al-ʿaṣr for an age or a stretch of time, and for the later part of the day and the prayer named from it; al-ʿuṣra, a refuge a man resorts to; and al-iʿṣār, the whirlwind that carries dust up into the air. The word therefore turns up constantly in prose that has nothing to do with any tribe, and a bare ʿaṣar in a text is far more likely to be one of these senses than the name.

As elsewhere in ʿAbd al-Qays, a name that coincides with a live word carries no statement about the people who bore it, and the lexicographers make no such statement.

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.