Tujīb

Overview

Tujīb is entered by the genealogists as a section of al-Sakūn, and through it of Kinda. What makes the entry remarkable, and what the compilers themselves stop to explain, is that the name is a woman's. The report is that Tujīb was the mother of ʿAdī and Saʿd, sons of Ashras ibn Shabīb ibn al-Sakūn, and that her children were called after her — so a tribal name that behaves in every later text like a father's name is, in the sources' own account, a matronymic. Her own descent is given to Madhḥij, as reported, which places the name at a junction of two Yemeni lines. This page describes a historical tribe as the classical sources record it, and makes no claim about any modern family.

What that means for reading a genealogy

The standing assumption a reader brings to an Arab nasab is that every name in the chain is a father. Tujīb is the counterexample the classical books hand you themselves, and it is worth more than a curiosity: it shows that a tribal name records whatever the tribe found worth recording, and that the chain is a transmitted account and not a register. Where the genealogists knew a name to be a mother's they said so; where they did not know, they did not always say.

The name

The compilers treat Tujīb as a proper name and do not derive it. That is the honest position, and this reference keeps it: a name without a settled derivation is better left without one than given an invented root. The nisba built from it is al-Tujībī.

Where the name travelled

In the accounts of the conquests, Tujīb is one of the Yemeni groups recorded settling in Egypt, where al-Qalqashandī, himself an Egyptian, places a quarter of Fusṭāṭ carrying the name. From Egypt the nisba al-Tujībī spreads westward through the biographical literature of the Maghrib and al-Andalus. This is exactly the case where a nisba is least reliable as evidence of descent: once a quarter of a city carries a tribal name, residence, alliance (ḥilf) and clientage (walāʾ) all produce the same word, and the compilers separate them only where they knew.

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.