Dabbāb

Overview

Dabbāb is entered among the branches of Banū Sulaym in the accounts of the Arab movement west of the fifth century AH. Banū Sulaym themselves are reckoned to Qays ʿAylān under Muḍar, with their old country the volcanic ḥarrah land of the northern Ḥijāz — as reported by the classical genealogists. Ibn Khaldūn names Dabbāb beside Labīd among the Sulamī groups that stopped in the eastern part of the North African coast rather than continuing west with the Hilālī branches. This page describes a historical tribe and makes no claim about any modern family.

The word and the name

Dabbāb is an intensive form of an entirely ordinary verb, and the difference matters when reading a text. Ibn Manẓūr enters the root d-b-b for crawling and for slow movement: dabba is said of a child, of an animal, of an army moving quietly, and dābba is anything that moves on the earth, the word later narrowed in common use to a riding beast. The pattern dabbāb intensifies it. A reader meeting these letters in an unvowelled manuscript may be looking at the ordinary word, at a personal byname, or at this tribal name, and only the context decides. This page uses the name only where the sources use it as a name.

Recorded country

The country given for Dabbāb is the eastern stretch of the Maghrib coast and the steppe behind it — the region the Arabic geographers call Barqa and the country west of it toward Ifrīqiya. That places the Sulamī branches between Egypt and the Hilālī branches further west, which is what the accounts of the movement describe: Sulaym moving on the same road and stopping earlier. The reports do not fix any section in one district, and they differ over which sections belong to Dabbāb and which to its neighbours.

In the genealogical tradition

Ibn Ḥazm and al-Qalqashandī give Sulaym and its Arabian branches as genealogy; Ibn Khaldūn gives what the branches did in North Africa. Where a section is named here it is named as reported, and where the two kinds of source disagree the disagreement is left standing.

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, and the genealogists differ among themselves. 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.