Fazāra

Overview

Fazāra is reckoned to Dhubyān ibn Baghīḍ, and so to Ghaṭafān and to Qays ʿAylān above it. Its diyār are placed in northern Najd and the country running toward Wādī al-Qurā and Taymāʾ, on the seam between the desert and the Ḥijāz road, and it appears in the sources as one of the strongest of the Ghaṭafānī tribes. The nisba recorded for it is al-Fazārī. This page describes a historical tribe and makes no statement about any modern family.

In the sources

Much of what is recorded of Fazāra belongs to the long feud between ʿAbs and Dhubyān known as the war of Dāḥis and al-Ghabrāʾ, in which Fazāra is reported as the heaviest weight on the Dhubyānī side. Its leading house is given as Banū Badr, and the poets and akhbār name Ḥudhayfa ibn Badr, his son Ḥiṣn, and ʿUyayna ibn Ḥiṣn, who appears again in the sīra and the accounts of the ridda. These are the names the transmitters attach to the tribe; the sources report them, and no line from any of them to a later family is drawn here. As with most of the pre-Islamic record, this reaches us as transmitted narrative and poetry rather than documented history.

Reading the name

The genealogists keep Fazāra of Ghaṭafān distinct from other bearers of the name, and the lexicographers treat fazr as an ordinary root rather than a tribal one. A nisba alone therefore settles nothing: al-Fazārī in a biographical dictionary may mark descent, alliance or clientage, and the compilers say which only when they know.

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.