EBRĀHĪM ĪNĀL (or Yenāl; d. 451/1059), early Saljuq leader. The name Īnāl/Yenāl comes originally from an old Turkish title already attested in the early 4th/10th century by the traveler Aḥmad b. Fażlān, confirmed by Moḥammad Ḵᵛārazmī’s mention (p. 120) of yenāl-tigin as a title of the Oḡuz (Bosworth and Clauson, pp. 6, 10-11; Doerfer, Elemente IV, pp. 196-99). Ebrāhīm Īnāl is described as a uterine half-brother of Ṭoḡrel and Čaḡrī Beg, but his father may also have been a member of the Saljuq ruling family. He was the leader of a band of Turkmen called the Yenālīān by Bayhaqī (e.g., ed. Fayyāż, pp. 695, 755). They were separate from the followers of Ṭoḡrel, Čaḡrī, and Mūsā Yabḡū and had been driven out of Ḵᵛārazm in the early 420s/1030s, but took part in the overrunning of Khorasan, where Ebrāhīm Īnāl received the surrender of Marv later in that decade. These rather mysterious Yenālīān were obviously not a tribal group, but Ebrāhīm Īnāl may have had a claim to leadership of his own band of followers through his inheritance of the old Oḡuz title of Īnāl; their status remains, however, obscure. Such an inheritance would, however, explain Ebrāhīm’s subsequent discontent with a subordinate position in the new Saljuq sultanate. When in 442/1050 Ṭoḡrel took over Isfahan from the local dynasty of the Kakuyids, Ebrāhīm Īnāl was allotted Yazd and Abarqūh as his personal fiefs. But he became restive on several occasions, and in 451/1059, when Ṭoḡrel was occupied with the affairs of Iraq, he and the two sons of his brother Ertāš rebelled; the revolt was suppressed, and Ebrāhīm Īnāl was strangled on the battlefield.
Minorsky surmised that the line of petty rulers at Āmed in Dīārbakr during the 6th/12th century, the Inalids, descendants of the amir Ebrāhīm (? b.) Īnāl Torkomānī, may have been descendants of the original Ebrāhīm Īnāl and thus owed their favor with the Saljuq sultans to their forebear.
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(C. Edmund Bosworth)
Originally Published: December 15, 1997
Last Updated: December 6, 2011
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