Saʿd al-ʿAshīra

Overview

Saʿd al-ʿAshīra is counted among the sons of Madhḥij, and it is under him that the genealogists gather the greater number of the Madhḥijī sections. Ibn Ḥazm names him beside ʿAns, Murād and Jald as sons of Mālik ibn Udad — Mālik being the man the sources call Madhḥij — and lists beneath him such names as Juʿfī, al-Ḥakam, Ṣudāʾ and Anas Allāh, with Zubayd reckoned through his son Ṣaʿb. The name therefore behaves like a gathering rather than a tribe anyone is called by today: a reader meets the branch names far more often than the parent. This page describes a historical grouping and makes no claim about any modern family.

The byname

In Lisān al-ʿArab the ʿashīra of a man is his nearest kin, those he lives among and is supported by, from the same root as muʿāshara, the keeping of company. The genealogists transmit an account of why the word was fixed to Saʿd's name: that he would ride out surrounded by a great number of his own sons and grandsons — three hundred, in the usual telling — and would call them his ʿashīra rather than number them, disliking to have them counted. This is transmitted narrative rather than record, and the tellings differ in their details. What is not in doubt is that the byname stuck, so firmly that the sources rarely write Saʿd without it.

Country and later dispersal

al-Hamdānī places the country of Madhḥij in the high land reaching from the Yemeni plateau towards Najrān, and the sections counted from Saʿd al-ʿAshīra are described there. With the conquests the picture widens: Madhḥijī groups are recorded settling in the garrison towns of Iraq, so from the first Islamic century onward the same section names appear in an Iraqi setting as well as a Yemeni one. Where a section is recorded in two countries, the sources are usually reporting movement, not two separate lines of the same name — but they do not always say which, and the distinction cannot be supplied from outside them.

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.