Tamīm

A large Arabian lineage group; the clans of Tamīm resided in central and eastern Arabia before Islam, and they formed a major power bloc in Iraq during early Islam.

According to Muslim-era genealogists, the Tamīm are a tribe descended from an eponymous ancestor, Tamīm ibn Murr, and the tribe’s clans are classified into three sub-groups, named after his three sons, Zayd Manāt, ʿAmr and al-Ḥārith. However, these large-scale lineages are not attested as functioning social groups in pre-Islamic Arabia: the Tamīm never acted as a unified entity, and the operative groups were much smaller clan-level organisations. Likewise, Tamīm are not identified by name in extant pre-Islamic South Arabian inscriptions, and hence the cohesiveness of the pre-Islamic Tamīm is uncertain; the many clans which were later grouped together as members of the Tamīm display considerable autonomy from each other in the pre-Islamic period. The rise of Islam and reorganisation of Arabian groups in Muslim towns in Iraq assisted clan amalgamations into more cohesive tribal structures: Tamīm was a prestigious Umayyad-era lineage, and this may have encouraged and enhanced various clans’ assertions of Tamīm identity which were then recorded by subsequent Muslim genealogists.

The clans classified by Muslim genealogists as ‘Tamīm’ occupied a wide area in pre-Islamic Arabia between the central Arabian Najd and eastern al-Yamāma. Some groups were nomadic, others settled in oases, including the important caravan and agricultural centre of Hagar (modern al-Ḥasāʾ). Today, the primary extant records of these peoples are fragments of pre-Islamic poetry, where most groups are identified by their clan names only, not the over-arching label ‘Tamīm’. Nonetheless, there are some poetic references to ‘Tamīm’, and thus while the precise contours of the pre-Islamic identity of Tamīm are unclear, the name appears to have connoted some sense of groupness between at least some clans, and the continued reference to those same clans in Umayyad-era poetry by Tamīm partisans indicates a certain and continuous social memory associated with Tamīm since a century before Islam.

Muslim-era accounts of pre-Islamic history portray clans of the Tamīm involved in numerous internal Arabian and wider conflicts. Many salient stories have a folkloric feel: e.g. the hundred Tamīmīs immolated in a ditch by the Lakhmid king ʿAmr ibn Hind, Ḥājib’s offer of his bow as a security pledge to the Sasanian Shah Khosrow Parviz, the caravan raids of al-Naṭif, and the exploits of ʿUrwah al-Raḥḥāla in Kinda (see Ibn Nubāta Sarḥ 54-55, 90-93, 431-435). But these stories denote deeper political significance, as the Tamīm occupied a middle ground between the Sasanian Empire and their Lakhmid Arabian allies and the Ḥimyar empire and their Arabian allies, the Kinda. Some clans of the Tamīm guarded Sasanian caravans, other clans had an honoured position in the Lakhmid court (known as ridāfa ‘regency’), and some groups served as elite Sasanian cavalrymen.

When the Islamic state extended into eastern Arabia during the latter years of the Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime, various clans of Tamīm appear to have sought alliances, though the exact process is obscured by subsequent layers of storytelling (Landau-Tasseron 1986). After the Prophet’s death, the Caliphate attacked some clans, such as Mālik ibn Nuwayra’s Yarbūʿ, for apostacy, but this is clouded in contested history too (Ibn Nubāta Sarḥ 86-89). Following the Muslim Conquests, the Tamīm rose to great prominence in the new Iraqi towns of Basra and Kufa and in Khurasan: the Tamīm’s leaders, such as al-Aḥnaf ibn Qays, became proverbial as eminent politicians of the early Caliphate, and their Umayyad-era poets, notably al-Farazdaq, immortalised the memory of Tamīm in Arabic literature.

Peter Webb

References and suggested reading

Sources

• Al-Balādhurī, Aḥmad. 1997. Ansāb al-ashrāf vol. 7.1. Ed. by Ramzī Baʿalbakkī. Beirut: Orient Institut.
• Ibn Nubāta, Jamāl al-Dīn. 1967. Sarḥ al-ʿUyūn. Ed. by Muḥammad Abū al-Faḍl Ibrāhīm. Cairo: Dar al-Kitāb al-ʿArabī.

Studies

• Kister, M.J. 1965. Mecca and Tamīm (aspects of their tribal relations). JESHO 8: 63–113.
• Landau-Tasseron, E. 1986. Process of redaction: the case of the Tamīmite delegation to the Prophet Muḥammad. BSOAS 49: 253–270.

_{Alternate spellings: Tamîm, Tamim}