Abdallah was the scion of a leading family of the Egyptian wujuh, the Arab settler community that dominated affairs in the province in the first centuries of the Islamic era. His grandfather Mu'awiyah ibn Hudayj al-Tujibi was an early Egyptian settler following the Muslim conquest and a leading partisan there of the Uthmanids and Umayyads, while his father Abd al-Rahman served as both a judge (qadi) and chief of security (sahib al-shurtah) in the province.[1]