تاریخ و ورثہHistory & Heritage

1۔ ہمارے لیے یہ کیوں اہم ہے؟1. Why This Matters to Us?

Every community carries a story of where it came from, and ours is held with real pride. Although our historical heartland was the Punjab, Arains today are found across Pakistan, in several regions of India and in a diaspora that reaches as far as Britain (see Section 6). Wherever we live, the account of Syrian ancestry and the link between “Arain” and al-rāʿī is widely repeated among us.

Our traditions deserve to be taken seriously and taking them seriously means testing them against the evidence. A tradition that stands on firm ground loses nothing by being examined; one that does not is better understood honestly than repeated without question. In my research I found it essential to separate three claims that are often run together: first, that rāʿī is an ancient Arabic word; second, that Syrian soldiers accompanied Muḥammad ibn al-Qāsim to Sind; and third, that we Arains descend from a particular group of those soldiers. The first two have clear support in the sources. The third depends on a genealogical link that, on my findings, the sources do not independently establish.

In what follows I look in turn at the meaning of the Arabic word, at what the early historians say about the conquest of Sind, at how the British recorded our community, at where Arains live today, and at the genealogy that first joined all these elements together. I close with what, in my view, we can and cannot say with confidence.

2۔ "الراعی” کا مطلب2. What al-Rāʿī Means?

On this point we can be confident. The word rāʿī (رَاعِي), with the definite article al-rāʿī (الرَّاعِي, pronounced ar-rāʿī), comes from the Arabic root r-ʿ-y (ر ع ي). Its primary meaning is a shepherd or keeper of livestock. Ibn Manẓūr’s Lisān al-ʿArab, the most comprehensive of the classical Arabic dictionaries, defines the keeper of livestock as its guardian (wa-rāʿī al-māshiya: ḥāfiẓuhā), but it also records that a governor is called rāʿī, and that whoever has charge of the affairs of a people is their rāʿī and they are his raʿiyya (Ibn Manẓūr, n.d., vol. 6, pp. 180–181). The same entry lists the plurals ruʿāh, riʿāʾ and ruʿyān, and preserves al-Azharī’s remark that ruʿāh is used chiefly of rulers and ruʿyān of those who tend sheep (Ibn Manẓūr, n.d., vol. 6, p. 180).

So, the word describes a role rather than a family or tribe: looking after animals became a metaphor for governing and protecting people. Its original association is with herding, and we should be careful not to read back into it the crop-growing and market-gardening for which our community was known in the colonial Punjab (see Section 5).

Our religious texts use the word in both senses. In Qurʾān 28:23, when Moses arrives at the waters of Madyan, the two women tell him they cannot water their flocks “until the shepherds” (al-riʿāʾ) have driven theirs away; riʿāʾ is one of the plural forms of rāʿī listed in the Lisān (Quranic Arabic Corpus, n.d.; Ibn Manẓūr, n.d., vol. 6, p. 180). In a ḥadīth narrated by ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿUmar and preserved in the Book of Judgments (Kitāb al-Aḥkām) of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, the Prophet ﷺ describes each person as a guardian (rāʿī) responsible for those in his or her care, the ruler over his people, a man over his household, a woman over her husband’s house and children, and a servant over his master’s property (al-Bukhārī, n.d., ḥadīth 7138).

These texts show how old and how broad the word is. What they do not do is tie it to Syria in any special way: neither presents rāʿī as the name of a Syrian people or tribe. And because the word is so common, a surname derived from it cannot, on its own, point to a single ancestral group.

3۔ کیا ہمارے نام کا سراغ "الراعی” تک ملتا ہے؟3. Can Our Name Be Traced to al-Rāʿī?

This is a question of language history as much as of family history. The similarity in sound between al-rāʿī and “Arain” is a fair place to start, but to prove that one became the other we would need dated examples of the name in its in-between forms, and an explanation of how an Arabic word with its definite article came to be reshaped in Punjabi. In the sources I examined, I found the connection asserted rather than documented in this way. Koul (2017b, pp. 24, 82) records that Jalandhari described “Arain” as a local conversion of the Arabic al-Rai, but that is a statement of the claim, not a proof of it. My conclusion here is a modest one, an Arabic origin for our name remains possible and worth investigating, but resemblance in sound alone cannot settle it.

4۔ فتحِ سندھ میں شامی سپاہی4. Syrian Soldiers in the Conquest of Sind:

This part of our story does have real support. The main early Arabic account of the conquest is al-Balādhurī’s ninth-century Futūḥ al-Buldān. In the English extract published in Elliot’s History of India series, al-Balādhurī reports that al-Ḥajjāj “ordered six thousand Syrian warriors to attend Mohammad, and others besides” (Elliot, 1907, p. 7). He also names individual participants by their Arab tribes; for example, Abū’l-Aswad Jahm ibn Zaḥr al-Juʿfī is named as commander of the advance guard (Elliot, 1907, pp. 7–8). We should remember, though, that al-Balādhurī was writing more than a century after the events he describes.

We should also understand what “Syrian” meant at the time. It refers to Bilād al-Shām, a broad region of the western Fertile Crescent which, as the historian R. Stephen Humphreys puts it, was “a name, not a country” with fixed borders, and which stretched well beyond today’s Syria (Humphreys, 2010, pp. 506–540). It does not point to any single village, tribe or family.

Importantly, the account names no Arain or al-rāʿī contingent among these troops. That silence does not rule out the possibility that some of our ancestors were among the six thousand, the historian did not list them all by name, but it does mean this text cannot be offered as direct proof of our descent from them.

5۔ برطانوی ریکارڈ میں ہماری برادری5. How the British Recorded Our Community?

For our community in British Punjab, the evidence is much firmer. Sir Denzil Ibbetson’s Panjab Castes (1916) reprints the chapter on “The races, castes and tribes of the people” from his report on the 1881 census of the Punjab, first published in 1883. In Section 485 he notes that Baghban, the Persian word for a gardener, was commonly used for the Arain in the west of the province. In Section 486 he describes the Arains as found in great numbers across the northern, central and western parts of the Eastern Plains and throughout the Rawalpindi and Multan divisions, as “almost without exception” Muslims, and as having their strongholds in the Jalandhar, Amritsar and Lahore divisions, with the highest proportions in Jalandhar, Lahore and Kapurthala State (Ibbetson, 1916, §§485–486). He also describes the Arains as admirable cultivators, skilful and industrious (Ibbetson, 1916, 486).

Ibbetson made one further observation that matters for any question of common ancestry. West of Lahore, he wrote, the name must be taken to refer, except on the Satluj, “to an occupation rather than a caste” in the Satluj valley and the Eastern Plains the Arains were probably a true caste, but in the western Punjab the names Arain, Maliar and Baghban were commonly used for one and the same occupation (Ibbetson, 1916, 485–486). If, in some districts, the name was applied to market gardeners whatever their descent, we cannot simply assume that everyone who carried it shared a single ancestry.

On the question of origins, Ibbetson recorded several different local traditions, among them the claim of the Arains of Firozpur and Lahore to have come from Uchh or Multan and concluded cautiously that it was “probable that the Arains originally came from the lower Indus” and spread up the rivers of the Punjab. He noted the common belief that Arains and Kambohs were closely related but doubted whether it had any basis beyond both having come from the west and having a similar social and agricultural standing (Ibbetson, 1916, 486, 492). These were careful guesses, not findings, and the official standing of a census report does not turn a guess into proof. The British records tell us a great deal about how our community lived and was classified in their time; they tell us much less about our ancient ancestry.

6۔ پنجاب سے باہر ارائیں6. Arains beyond the Punjab:

Although the British sources treat us as a Punjab community, Arains were never confined to its core districts, and we are spread more widely still today. Within the colonial province itself, Ibbetson and Rose recorded Arains in Ambala and Hissar districts that now lie in the Indian state of Haryana and noted that in the Jumna (Yamuna) valley the name took the form “Rain” (Ibbetson, 1916, 486; Rose, 1911, s.v. “Arain”). Rose also records that “many of the Arains emigrated across the Ganges and settled near Bareli and Rampur” (Rose, 1911, s.v. “Arain”).

That eastward movement has been studied by Asad and Jilani (2017, chs. 1–3), who date the migration of Arains from the Punjab into Rohilkhand to the late eighteenth century, beginning around 1780 and continuing over the following decades, and link it to famine and insecurity in the Sirsa and Ghaggar tract. They place the descendants of these migrants in the Bareilly, Pilibhit and Rampur districts of Uttar Pradesh and in the Nainital and Udham Singh Nagar districts of Uttarakhand.

Since the partition of 1947, most of our community has lived in Pakistan, in the Punjab and in parts of Sindh (Asad and Jilani, 2017, ch. 1). Our presence in Sindh is illustrated by Ali Asghar Chaudhry, the Arain historian from Sanghar district whose work I discuss in Section 7 (Koul, 2017b, p. 257). Beyond South Asia, research on Pakistani families in Britain, notably Alison Shaw’s study of Oxford, identifies Arains as a significant presence among British Pakistanis (Shaw, 2000, cited in Asad and Jilani, 2017, ch. 1).

One word of caution. In parts of northern and eastern India, the name “Rain” or “Rayeen” has also been adopted by the Kunjra, a community of vegetable sellers whom Asad and Jilani (2017, ch. 1) treat as distinct from the Arains; India’s official Central List of Other Backward Classes for Uttar Pradesh records the entry “Kunjra or Rayeen” (National Commission for Backward Classes, n.d.). So, where the name is found is not always where our community is found, which underlines a point running through this whole article: sharing a name does not, by itself, prove sharing an ancestry.

7۔ ہمارے شامی نسب نامے کا ماخذ7. Where Our Syrian Genealogy Comes From

The specific genealogy that links us to the conquest of Sind comes from Salim al-tavarikh, a history of our community written by Maulvi Muhammad Akbar Ali Sufi Jalandhari and published at Amritsar in 1919 (Jalandhari, 1919, cited in Koul, 2017b). As the historian Ashish Koul explains, the book traces a line from Shaikh Salim al-Rai, through his son Habib al-Rai, to his grandson Halim al-Rai, who is said to have joined Muḥammad ibn al-Qāsim’s army before the conquest of Sind; these Syrian-Arab soldiers later settled in the Punjab, where they came to be called Arain, “a local corruption of the Arabic al-Rai” (Koul, 2017b, pp. 82–84). In Jalandhari’s account, Salim al-Rai was a Muslim who migrated to Syria during the reign of the caliph Yazīd I (Koul, 2017b, p. 260).

Koul places the book in its setting: a time when Arain leaders in colonial Punjab were working to secure the standing of our community, and when British writers often portrayed Arains as low-status market gardeners. He reads Salim al-tavarikh as a sophisticated response to those portrayals and a means of claiming the respect our community was due (Koul, 2017a; 2017b). Notably, Jalandhari claimed Arab descent without claiming descent from the Prophet ﷺ, so that our community’s path was to assert an Arab ancestry rather than to imitate high-caste groups (Koul, 2017b).

It is worth knowing that this genealogy was questioned by one of our own. Ali Asghar Chaudhry, an Arain schoolteacher from Sanghar district in Sindh, whose history of the Arains was first published in Lahore in 1963, kept the broad story of Arab soldiers serving under Muḥammad ibn al-Qāsim but rejected Jalandhari’s particular line of descent. He proposed instead that our ancestors came from families related to the Banū Umayya who had settled at Ariha, which he identified as Jericho (Chaudhry, 1963, cited in Koul, 2017b, pp. 257–259). Chaudhry pointed out that, on Jalandhari’s own genealogy, Salim al-Rai would have lived three generations before the Prophet ﷺ and so could not have been a Muslim; that his own reading of the early sources found no soldier or commander named Halim al-Rai; and that Jalandhari gave no sources for Salim’s relatives (Koul, 2017b, p. 260).

Salim al-tavarikh is therefore a valuable record of how our community understood and presented its ancestry in the early twentieth century. As evidence for what happened in the eighth century, however, it is only as strong as the earlier authorities it can point to, and an Arain historian of the next generation found those authorities wanting.

8۔ شواہد کا منصفانہ جائزہ8. Weighing the Evidence Fairly:

Fairness cuts both ways here. Showing why a genealogy was written, and what it achieved, does not prove that every part of it is invented, genuine family memories can be reshaped over time to meet the needs of the day. At the same time, the fact that a story is widely accepted among us cannot take the place of independent evidence. The fair tests are whether the dates hold together, whether the sources can be identified, and whether records from outside our own community histories confirm the account.

Measured against those tests, my findings leave the link unresolved. The Arabic sources establish the word, but not how it reached the Punjab as the name of a community. Al-Balādhurī confirms that Syrian troops took part in the conquest but names no Arain ancestor. Ibbetson documents our community in his own time, but records differing traditions and notes that the name was sometimes used for an occupation. And the 1919 genealogy, the only source that joins all these pieces together, was challenged on grounds of dates and evidence by a later Arain historian. Neither the British guesses nor the later genealogy justify claiming one single, certain origin for all Arains.

9۔ ہم کس بات پر اعتماد سے کہہ سکتے ہیں9. What We Can Say with Confidence

Arab ancestry in some Arain families is consistent with the historical record of the conquest; nothing in my findings rules it out. But being consistent with the evidence is not the same as being proven by it. Other explanations also remain open, that our community took shape locally around farming, that it drew together people of more than one origin, or that an Arabic name was adopted at a later stage. Telling these possibilities apart would require early written examples of our name, dated family trees, and supporting inscriptions or legal and revenue records. Present-day families with the surname al-rāʿī may suggest lines of enquiry, but they cannot bridge the centuries on their own.

To sum up my findings: the classical Arabic meaning of rāʿī is well established, and so is the presence of Syrian troops in the conquest of Sind. The precise ancestral history of our community, however, remains open to further evidence. If any reader holds old family genealogies (shajra), land or revenue records, or other dated documents, they may hold exactly the kind of evidence that could take this enquiry further, and I would welcome hearing from them. Keeping our record correct is a task we can share.

حوالہ جاتReferences

1. Asad, M.R. and Jilani, S. (2017) The Arain Diaspora in India: A Historical Perspective. Available at: https://www.araincouncilcanada.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Arain-Book.pdf (Accessed:
2. al-Bukhārī, M. (n.d.) Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, Kitāb al-Aḥkām, ḥadīth 7138. Available at: https://sunnah.com/bukhari:7138 (Accessed: 13 October 2026).
3. Elliot, H.M. (1907) ‘Arab conquest of Sind’ [extracts from al-Balādhurī, Futūḥ al-Buldān], in Jackson, A.V.W. (ed.) History of India, Vol. V: The Mohammedan Period as Described by Its Own Historians. London:
4. Humphreys, R.S. (2010) ‘Syria’, in Robinson, C.F. (ed.) The New Cambridge History of Islam, Vol. 1: The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.
5. Ibbetson, D. (1916) Panjab Castes: Being a Reprint of the Chapter on ‘The Races, Castes and Tribes of the People’ in the Report on the Census of the Panjab Published in 1883. Lahore: Superintendent, Government Printing,
6. Ibn Manẓūr (n.d.) Lisān al-ʿArab, entry ‘رعي’. Islamweb digital library edition, vol. 6, pp. 180–181. Available at: https://www.islamweb.com/ar/library/content/122/3202/رعي (Accessed: 13
7. Koul, A. (2017a) ‘Making new Muslim Arains: reform and social mobility in colonial Punjab, 1890s–1910s’, South Asian History and Culture, 8(1), pp. 1–18. doi:10.1080/19472498.2016.1260348.
8. Koul, A. (2017b) Making New Muslim Arains: Reform, Law, and Politics in Colonial Punjab, 1890s–1940s. PhD thesis. Vanderbilt University. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/1803/13623 (Accessed: 13
9. National Commission for Backward Classes (n.d.) Central List of OBCs for the State of Uttar Pradesh. New Delhi: NCBC. Available at: https://www.ncbc.nic.in/Writereaddata/cl/up.pdf (Accessed: 13 October
10. Quranic Arabic Corpus (n.d.) Verse (28:23): word by word. University of Leeds. Available at: https://corpus.quran.com/wordbyword.jsp?chapter=28&verse=23 (Accessed: 13 October 2026).
11. Rose, H.A. (1911) A Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province, Vol. II: A–K. Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press, s.v. ‘Arain’.

Works cited through secondary sources

1. Chaudhry, A.A. (1963) Mujahid-e-azam hazrat Muhammad bin Qasim ke rafiq: yaani pak-o-hind ki qaum arain ki dastaan. Lahore: Ilmi Kitab Khana. Cited in Koul (2017b).
2. Jalandhari, M.A.A.S. (1919) Salim al-tavarikh: yani tarikh qaum arain hind-o-sindh. Amritsar. Cited in Koul (2017b).
3. Shaw, A. (2000) Kinship and Continuity: Pakistani Families in Britain. London: Routledge. Cited in Asad and Jilani (2017).