It is widely accepted that the Ayyubids were of Kurdish origin and they trace their lineage to the noble Rawadiya tribe of Azerbaijan. However, if you search into the history of this supposed tribe, you encounter something interesting: almost everything you find relates to the Rawadid dynasty, a dynasty of Arab origin that was eventually kurdfied. The Rawadids are traced to Rawwad ibn al-Muthanna al-Azdi, an early Abbasid governor of Azerbaijan who possessed a fief from Tabriz to al-Badh. His descendants are mentioned in historical events as late as the caliphate of al-Mutawakkil, after which they disappear from the sources until the emergence of the Rawadid dynasty. Some questioned the connection between the two because of the century long gap in the historical record. However, there are details that make the connection difficult to dismiss. The first Rawadid ruler emerged as an emir controlling ahar and Varzuqan, two towns within Rawwad’s original fief. Furthermore, the local poet Qatran praised the Rawadid emir Wahsudan and mentioned his Arab ancestry.Adding to this, several Ayyubid emirs either denied being Kurds or claimed Arab ancestry themselves. Although none of these claims explicitly connected the Ayyubids to the Azd tribe, they could reflect a distant ancestral memory rather than a completely fabricated genealogy.What I find odd is that, no modern academic historian has brought these pieces of evidence together to reveal the origin of the Ayyubids. It is understandable that medieval Arabic historians might not have recognise it, given that the Rawwadids were a relatively obscure dynasty in Azerbaijan descended from an equally obscure Arab governor. But why does the distant Arab origin of the ayyubids seem to have received so little attention in modern scholarship, when the scattered pieces of evidence fit so well?
