Nasab: On the History of a Concept

The primary meaning of the Classical Arabic term nasab is ‘patrilineal descent’ or ‘genealogy on the patriline’, and it is usual in modern scholarship to regard this meaning as valid for all historical periods, including the nomadic societies of pre-Islamic Arabia. This study argues that this back-projection is not justified, resulting as it does from reliance on certain preconceptions of early Arabian nomadic society in the works of mediaeval Muslim authors. By offering an analysis of the quite different meanings of the term nasab (and related terms) in various contexts in a sample of premodern Arabic textual sources, the study proposes a much less direct semantic association between these terms and a lineal reckoning of agnatic descent in the form of systematic genealogies.