Wādiʿah

Overview

Wādiʿah is entered among the divisions of Hamdān, and the books differ over which half it belongs to — some run it through Ḥāshid, others through Bakīl. Its country is placed in the north, in the country running out toward the desert edge, and a place on that northern margin carries the name still: the ordinary Yemeni pattern in which the ground takes the name of the people recorded on it. That is an association of place, with no lineage claim attached to it. This page describes a historical tribe and makes no claim about any modern family.

Why the lists disagree

The disagreement over Ḥāshid and Bakīl is worth explaining once, because it recurs across every Yemeni tribe in this reference. A genealogist writes down the arrangement he finds in his own time and place, and arrangements move: a section that fought beside one half is entered under it by a later writer; an alliance recorded as ḥilf by one book is written as descent by another that has forgotten the alliance; and a name common to two sections lets a copyist attach a branch to the wrong parent. None of this makes the books unreliable. It makes them books of report, which is exactly how they present themselves, and it is why the honest form of every such statement is that the sources place it thus, not that it is so.

The name

Ibn Manẓūr gives the root w-d-ʿ for leaving and for settledness: al-daʿa is ease and quiet, and a man described as wādiʿ is unhurried and at rest. The tribal name is the active participle of that sense. It should not be confused with al-wadīʿa, the thing left with someone in trust, which is the same root doing different work, nor with al-wadaʿ, the cowrie shells. The lexicographers give the senses; the connection between the sense and the naming is not stated by them and is not asserted here.

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.