Genealogy in Medieval Muslim Societies

Abstract

Once the backbone of Arabic genealogy, in the shape of the authoritative tomes of this discipline, had been standardized and consolidated, all subsequent additions to the system had to take that already existing stem into consideration, and choose a link to it at some convenient and plausible enough point. The immensely popular standard works on Arabic genealogy, especially the Jamharahs of al-Kalbi and Ibn Hjazm respectively, served as a skeleton onto which all later manufactured family pedigrees could easily be attached at the most commodious point. This process of grafting ever new lineages and families, often non-Arabic too, onto the standardized mediaeval genealogical stem has become the very essence of all subsequent genealogical pretensions in the Islamic cultural sphere. The process, which has been very aptly termed 'genealogical parasitism' by the author of a recent historical work ('), will be dealt with and illustrated at more length in the remainder of this study. Let it suffice here to emphasize the fact that genealogical parasitism, if particularly much utilized since the high Middle Ages all over the Islamic world, was already operative during the formative period of Arabic 'ilm al-nasab, being indeed the method most frequently used in the creation of most of the elaborations on the basic core of the patchwork of the Arabic