Nukra

Overview

Nukra is one of the names the genealogists enter immediately beneath Lukayz, without the intervening line through Wadīʿa and ʿAmr that carries most of the other sections of ʿAbd al-Qays. Ibn Ḥazm names it among the tribe's branches and al-Qalqashandī carries it after him. Its country is the tribe's country: the seaboard Yāqūt calls al-Khaṭṭ, with al-Qaṭīf among its towns, the coastal villages and the landing places of this shore, and Hajar with the oasis of al-Aḥsāʾ behind them.

The vowelling and the word

Nukra is vowelled with a ḍamma on the nūn and a sukūn on the kāf. The root n-k-r is one of the busiest in the language, and the reader will meet its derivatives constantly without any tribe being meant.

In Lisān al-ʿArab, al-nukr and al-nukrā are shrewdness and quick wit — a man described as nakir or nakur is sharp and hard to deceive — and the same root gives al-munkar, the reprehensible, against al-maʿrūf; ankara, to deny or fail to recognise; and al-nakira, the grammarians' indefinite noun, against al-maʿrifa. A reader who meets nakira in a book of grammar has met the term and not the tribe, and this is the commonest way the word is met at all.

None of these senses is a statement about the people who bear the name. The lexicographers enter the word without a tribe attached, and a proper name that coincides with a live word tells you nothing beyond the coincidence.

In the sources

The genealogists list Nukra and place it, and the reports say little more than that. It is a name that survives in the branch lists rather than in the akhbār, and a page that gave it a history would be inventing one. What can be said honestly is the placement — a section of ʿAbd al-Qays under Lukayz, as reported — and the country, which the geographers give for the tribe as a whole.

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.