Wuld ʿAlī

Overview

Wuld ʿAlī is a section reported within ʿAnazah, entered by the common account under Ḍanā Muslim alongside al-Jalās, with the reports differing over that arrangement as they differ over the rest. The country reported for it lies about Khaybar and the northern Ḥijāz and northward into the desert of the Levant, which is why the name is met in accounts of two regions rather than one.

This page describes a tribal section as it is reported, and makes no claim about any modern family.

The name

Wuld ʿAlī is not one word but a construction. Walad in the lexicon is a man's child and his offspring taken together, and in bedouin naming wuld does the work that banū and āl do in the classical books; the name therefore says the sons of a man called ʿAlī, and nothing further. Names built this way arise independently wherever the given name is common, so a group of the same name recorded in another region or under another tribe is not thereby these people. The form on its own establishes no connection, and this page covers the section reported under ʿAnazah only.

On sources

The classical works this reference cites — Ibn Ḥazm's Jamhara, al-Qalqashandī's Nihāyat al-Arab, Yāqūt's Muʿjam al-Buldān and al-Hamdānī's Ṣifat Jazīrat al-ʿArab — do not document this section. The arrangement the name sits in is reported in its present form only from centuries after the latest of those works, and what is said about it comes from later writing and from oral tradition rather than from the sources cited here. This page therefore records the name, the country and the affiliation as they are commonly reported, and does not set out a descent. Where a place is cited below, the citation is for the place, not for the group; and where the lexicon is cited, it is cited for the word, not for the people who carry it.

On lineage

Branch lists and affiliations on this page are given as reported, and those who report them differ among themselves: one account makes a name a division and another makes it a section inside one. Nothing here establishes any living family's descent. A shared name may reflect descent, alliance (ḥilf) or clientage (walāʾ), and the sources say which only when they know.