Dhū al-Kalāʿ

Overview

Dhū al-Kalāʿ is one of the Ḥimyarī houses, named in the same way as Dhū Ruʿayn: the dhū of the Yemeni lords, marking the holder of a place rather than a step in a pedigree. Al-Kalāʿ is a country in Yemen, which Yāqūt records as a district, and the sources use the one name for the district and for the house that held it without always marking which they mean. This page describes a historical house and makes no statement about any modern family.

The name

The lexicon is of little help here, and it is more honest to say so than to force a derivation. The root k-l-ʿ yields senses that sit awkwardly on a proper name, and the geographers simply record al-Kalāʿ as a country of Yemen without explaining it. Whether the house is named from the district or the district from the house is not settled anywhere in the classical books, and both directions are attested elsewhere among the Yemeni names — Ruʿayn is a fortress that gave its name to a house, while other districts carry the name of the people who held them.

In the reports

The bearer the akhbār return to is Samayfaʿ, called Dhū al-Kalāʿ, recorded as one of the Yemeni lords who came into Islam with a large following, and afterwards among the Yemeni troops settled in the Levant. The reports place his death at Ṣiffīn. This is transmitted material of the ordinary kind: the outline is steady across the sources, the detail is not, and it is set down here as what they report rather than as established fact. The house is remembered chiefly through him.

On lineage

Branch lists and affiliations here are given as reported by the classical genealogists, who themselves disagree. Nothing on this page 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.