Sheikh simply means elder, yet it names emirs, mystics and merchant families alike
At root, the Arabic word sheikh comes from a three-letter stem tied to growing old. That humble meaning now stretches remarkably far: it is borne by Gulf royals, Sufi masters, Somali clerics and South Asian trading families. Saudi royals, tellingly, skip it altogether and call themselves princes instead.
Built on the letters shīn, yā' and khā', the word carries senses of leader, elder and noble. In the Arabian Peninsula it became the usual title of a Bedouin tribal chief in recent centuries, and it appears three times in the Qur'an. Because the ruler of each emirate in the United Arab Emirates is also chief of his tribe, nearly every man in the ruling families of Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE is a sheikh, and nearly every woman a sheikha. The Al Nahyan and Al Maktoum, for instance, head the Bani Yas tribe. The Al Saud of Saudi Arabia are the exception, preferring amir, or prince.
Religion carried the title much further. In Sufism a sheikh is the spiritual guide who founds or leads an order, as Abdul Qadir Jilani did for the Qadiriyya. Sunni and Shia communities both use it for religious leaders, and one prominent Saudi family, Al ash-Sheikh, takes its name from Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. In Iran it honoured learned elders such as Avicenna, while scholars descended from the Prophet were called sayyid instead.
Local histories reshaped its meaning. In Lebanon it once marked independent rulers, such as the Al-Chemor family who held Koura and Zgharta from 1211 until 1747, but under the Ottomans, who invaded in 1516, it became a noble rank handed down from above. Somalis reserve it for senior clerics and often shorten it to Sh. In South Asia it turned into an occupational label for Muslim trading families, adopted by many converts, and in Indonesia it is spelled syech and usually given to elderly scholars.
Women have held the feminine form, shaykhah, for centuries, from the 10th-century scholar Fakhr-un-Nisa Shuhdah onward. In 1957 Al-Azhar University granted the title to the Indonesian education activist Rahmah el Yunusiyah, the first woman it had so honoured.
Source: Sheikh
