The Abbas Pasha Manuscript (APM), in its English translation, has nineteen mentions of a Bedouin community named “the people of the north”. These mentions are often associated with names of tribes that seem to form part of this “people of the north”, such as the tribes of al-Sirhan (pages 501, 508, 511), al-Sardiyah (page 311, 449), and al-Issa (page 369). It turns out that these three tribes formed the core of the “People of the North”, a loose alliance formed around 1750 by tribes long established in the areas of al-Balqaa (northern Transjordan) and the Hauran (southern Syria), to fend off the relentless advance of the ‘Anazah tribes from Central Arabia towards the north. The alliance was first led by the Sardiyah, a small but very noble tribe that is an offshoot of the Bani Lam and which the Ottomans had put in charge of securing the pilgrimage route from Damascus to Medina. The “People of the North” alliance also included the smaller al-Issa, al-Sirhan, and al-Fuhailiyyin tribe, as well as the larger Bani Sakhr tribe, itself then a newcomer from Central Arabia but an enemy of the ‘Anazah. The alliance first succeeded in pushing the first Anazah waves, led…
Check out this excellent article about the modern Bani Lam tribe, a subset of the medieval tribe of same name. Some sections splintered, reformed, absorbed sections from other tribes, and become the modern day tribes of al-Dhafeer, al-Fudul, Aal Mughirah, and Aal Kathir. The remainder of the tribe retained its tribal name, and: Pushed out of northern Hejaz in the 9th/15th century, they moved to the lower Tigris-Euphrates region about 950/1550 (Oppenheim, II, pp. 320, 324; III, pp. 18-19). Late in the 10th/16th century they migrated to the east bank of the Tigris. They are now settled in the ‘Amarah district of eastern Iraq and the Khuzistan province of Iran. I guess they are the source of the Iranian Asils, at least in part. That would make a lot of sense, given that some of the strains of today’s Iranian Asils like Wadnan and Hamdani were originally Bani Lam strains. Some Iranian Wadnans below. You may be wondering why the focus on the Bani Lam on this blog over the past few entries. I feel I am onto something, in terms of the beginning of Arabian horse strains, and that such beginning may be connected to both the Sharifs of…