Dhuhl

Overview

Dhuhl is a name of the Bakr ibn Wāʾil genealogy, and its chief interest is that it appears there twice. The genealogists record Dhuhl ibn Thaʿlaba ibn ʿUkāba, and also Dhuhl ibn Shaybān ibn Thaʿlaba — a descendant of the first through Shaybān, as reported. The two are commonly told apart as the elder Dhuhl and the younger, and the ansāb literature preserves the question a careful man would ask on being told that someone was of Banū Dhuhl: which of the two?

That question is the whole use of this page. A source that says Banū Dhuhl without a chain has not said enough, and a reader who supplies the wrong one has moved a group several generations along a different line while keeping the name intact. The same trap is set by every repeated name in the genealogies, and this is one of the clearest instances of it.

The name

The lexicographers give dhahala ʿan al-shayʾ as leaving a thing off, whether by inattention or deliberately, and Dhuhl as a personal name formed on that root. Nothing follows from the meaning about the people who carried it.

Country and accounts

Both Dhuhls are placed in the country of Bakr: the eastern margin of Arabia between al-Yamāma and the lower Euphrates, and later the districts up toward al-Jazīra. Sections of the name appear in the pre-Islamic day-accounts alongside the other Bakrī sections, and the reports about them are told with the same disagreement in detail that attends everything from that period.

A note on the nisba

Al-Dhuhlī in a biographical entry is a nisba to one of the two Dhuhls, and unless the compiler gives the chain the entry does not say which. Nor does the nisba say by itself how its bearer came by it: the compilers record such names carried by descent, by alliance (ḥilf) and by clientage (walāʾ), and they mark the difference only when they know 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 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.