Ḍanā Muslim

Overview

Ḍanā Muslim is the second of the two headings under which the sections of ʿAnazah are commonly arranged, the other being Bishr. Like Bishr it is a moiety-name rather than a tribe in the ordinary sense: a heading that sections are entered under. Those most often entered under it are al-Jalās, with al-Rāwalah inside it, and Wuld ʿAlī — and the accounts differ over which name belongs at which level. The country reported for those sections runs from northern Najd northward and westward into the desert of the Levant.

This page describes a tribal grouping as it is reported, and makes no claim about any modern family.

What Ḍanā does

The first word is the useful part of the name. Ḍanā stands in bedouin usage where banū and āl stand in the classical books: it is put before the name of a man and means the people reckoned from him, so Ḍanā Muslim is read as the offspring of a man called Muslim. Behind it the lexicographers record ḍinʾ for a man's child and his progeny, which is the sense the form carries, though in speech the hamza is dropped and it is written with alif. Recognising the word matters more than the derivation: a reader who meets Ḍanā in front of a name is meeting a construction like banū, not a separate tribal name.

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.