Ruhāʾ

Overview

Ruhāʾ is one of the sections the genealogists count within Madhḥij, and so within the Qaḥṭānī line. The chain usually given for it runs Ruhāʾ ibn Munabbih ibn Ḥarb ibn ʿUlla ibn Jald ibn Mālik, Mālik being Madhḥij; the sources differ over some of the intermediate names, as they do throughout the Madhḥijī chains, and the reader should take the list as a scholarly reconstruction rather than a register. Like the rest of Madhḥij, Ruhāʾ is described first in the Yemeni highlands, and groups of the name are recorded afterwards in the towns of Iraq. This page describes a historical section and makes no claim about any modern family.

A nisba that points two ways

The most useful thing to know about this name is that its nisba is not its own. al-Ruhāwī is the nisba of Ruhāʾ of Madhḥij, and it is also the nisba of al-Ruhā, the town of the Jazīra that Yāqūt describes near Ḥarrān and that produced a long line of scholars and transmitters. A biographical notice reading al-Ruhāwī may therefore be placing a man in a tribe or in a town, and nothing in the word itself decides between them. Where the sources want to be clear they add the qualifier — al-Ruhāwī al-Madhḥijī for the one, a mention of the Jazīra for the other — but they are not always careful, and a reader who assumes the tribe will misread a good number of notices.

The word

Lisān al-ʿArab gives rahāʾ for wide level ground, from the same field as rahw, the still and the unhurried, and a rahw is also the low place where water gathers and stands. Whether the ancestral name was understood in that sense is not recorded; the lexicographers give the word, not the motive behind the naming, and this reference does not supply one where the sources are silent.

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.