Maʿāfir

Overview

Maʿāfir is one of the older Yemeni names, entered by most compilers under Ḥimyar, though the chains they give differ and some run the name up through the lines the genealogists gather under Kahlān instead. The disagreement is recorded here rather than resolved, because it is not resolved in the sources. What is not in dispute is the country: a mikhlāf of Yemen in the highlands running down toward the coastal plain of Tihāma carried the name, and both al-Hamdānī and Yāqūt describe it as settled and cultivated country. This page describes a historical tribe as the classical sources record it, and makes no claim about any modern family.

The name and the nisba

Lisān al-ʿArab enters Maʿāfir under the root ʿ-f-r as a tribe of Yemen, and adds the point that matters for anyone reading a name list: the nisba is maʿāfirī, with a fatḥa on the mīm, and the lexicographers note that one does not say muʿāfirī. This is one of the small facts a reference is for. The word looks to a modern eye like a participle beginning with a prefixed mīm, and it is not one.

The cloth

The maʿāfirī garment is named in the early sources often enough that the tribe's name entered the vocabulary of the whole peninsula through it, in the same way that the khaṭṭī spear carried the name of a stretch of the eastern coast. A cloth named for a district is a geographical attribution, not a genealogical one, and this is the practical caution the page exists to give: a man called al-Maʿāfirī in the biographical literature may be attributed to the district, to the trade in its cloth, or to the tribe, and the compilers separate these only where they knew.

In the genealogical tradition

The branches given under Maʿāfir differ between compilers, as does its own placement, and where a branch is given here it is given as the sources report it. The name recurs in the accounts of the conquests among the Yemeni contingents that settled in Egypt, where the nisba is well attested.

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.