Daws

Overview

Daws is entered by the genealogists among the Azd of the Sarāt, in the line of Zahrān — reported as Daws ibn ʿUdthān ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Zahrān, with the sources differing over the intermediate names as they differ over most Azdī chains. Ghāmid is entered beside Zahrān in the same section, which is why the three names keep company in the books. Its recorded country is the high Sarāt above the Tihāma slope in the south-west of the peninsula. This page describes a historical tribe and makes no claim about any modern family.

Daws and al-Dawāsir

The most useful thing this page can say is that Daws and al-Dawāsir are not the same name. Daws yields the nisba al-Dawsī; al-Dawāsir, a quite separate tribe of the southern Najd wadi, yields al-Dawsarī. Modern writing, and search in particular, merges the two constantly because the first three letters agree. The genealogists keep them apart, place them in different sections and in different country, and a family that carries one nisba has not thereby any attribution to the other.

In the accounts

Daws appears early in the biographical literature: the accounts of the delegations record men of Daws coming to the Prophet, and several of the best-known transmitters of the first generation are given the nisba al-Dawsī. That is a record of where a name appears in events and in the chains of transmission, not a claim about any later family's descent — the biographers wrote the nisba their informants used, and they distinguished descent from clientage only when they knew which it was.

The name

Ibn Manẓūr gives al-daws as treading a thing underfoot, and dāsa yadūsu in that sense, from which the threshing of grain also takes its name. The word is ordinary vocabulary; the lexicographers do not derive the tribal name from it. Because the written form of the tribal name and of the common verb are identical, a reader meeting the letters in an unvowelled text should check which is meant before drawing anything from it.

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 classical 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.