Fahm

Overview

Fahm is reckoned to ʿAmr ibn Qays ʿAylān and is named in the sources beside ʿAdwān, the two treated as brother-tribes. Its diyār are placed in the highlands and passes around al-Ṭāʾif and along the Sarāt toward the Tihāma road — broken country, which is part of why it is remembered as it is. This page describes a historical tribe and makes no statement about any modern family.

In the sources

Fahm's place in the literature is out of proportion to its size, and it owes that to poetry rather than to war or office. Taʾabbaṭa Sharran, one of the best known of the ṣaʿālīk — the brigand-poets who lived outside the protection of a tribe and made a genre of it — is recorded as of Fahm. Poetry of that kind travels far better than genealogy does, and a tribe named in it stays legible for centuries while larger neighbours fade from the record.

The name

Fahm is also the ordinary Arabic word for understanding, and the lexicographers treat it as such without reference to any tribe. The consequence is practical: a text containing fahm is overwhelmingly likely to mean the noun rather than to name this tribe, and the two cannot be distinguished by spelling.

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.