Bishr (of ʿAnazah)

Overview

Bishr is one of the two headings under which the sections of ʿAnazah are commonly arranged, the other being Ḍanā Muslim. It is worth being plain about what the word is doing here: in this usage Bishr is not a tribe in the ordinary sense but a moiety-name, a heading that a number of sections are entered under and that is reported as the name of an ancestor. The sections most often entered under it are al-ʿAmārāt, al-Fidʿān and al-Sabaʿah, and the lists differ between accounts. The country reported for those sections runs from northern Najd northward into the steppe of Iraq and the Levant.

This page describes a tribal grouping as it is reported, and makes no claim about any modern family: no surname, family or house is attributed to it here. The name is borne elsewhere too: Banū Bishr, reported under Qaḥṭān, is a different group entered on its own page.

The name

The lexicographers give the root b-sh-r for the open and cheerful face: bishr with a kasra is that cheerfulness, while the same letters read bashar are mankind and basharah is the skin. The title is vowelled here because the unvowelled form is one of the commonest words in Arabic, and a reader meeting it in running text has no way of telling the two apart. The lexicon gives the sense of the word; it does not explain why a people was called by it, and no conclusion about the grouping follows from the derivation.

On sources

The classical works this reference cites — Ibn Ḥazm's Jamhara, al-Qalqashandī's Nihāyat al-Arab, Yāqūt's Muʿjam al-Buldān and al-Hamdānī's Ṣifat Jazīrat al-ʿArab — do not document this grouping. The arrangement the name sits in is reported in its present form only from centuries after the latest of those works, and what is said about it comes from later writing and from oral tradition rather than from the sources cited here. This page therefore records the name, the country and the affiliation as they are commonly reported, and does not set out a descent. Where the lexicon is cited below, it is cited for the word, not for the people who carry it.

On lineage

Branch lists and affiliations on this page are given as reported, and those who report them differ among themselves: one account makes a name a division and another makes it a section inside one. Nothing here 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.