Al-Hanzali
A family name (nisba) attributed to Banū Ḥanẓala of Tamīm — a parent name under which the genealogists place Dārim, Yarbūʿ and others, so it fixes no single branch.
- Type
- Tribal nisba
- Attributed to
- Banū Ḥanẓala of Banū Tamīm
- Root
- ḥ-n-ẓ-l (ḥanẓal, the colocynth)
- Note
- A parent name — Dārim and Yarbūʿ are placed under it
Overview
Al-Hanzali (al-Ḥanẓalī) is attributed to Banū Ḥanẓala, one of the wide divisions of Banū Tamīm in the genealogists' arrangement, recorded in Najd and the country east of it. Ḥanẓal in Lisān al-ʿArab is the colocynth, the bitter desert gourd that the Arabs made proverbial for bitterness, and Ḥanẓala is the personal name formed from it.
Names easily confused
The difficulty of this nisba is not a rival spelling but its width. Ibn Ḥazm places Dārim, Yarbūʿ and the group called al-Barājim all under Ḥanẓala, so al-Ḥanẓalī gathers several limbs into one word and settles nothing about which of them a family stands on; a writer who says al-Ḥanẓalī and a writer who says al-Dārimī or al-Yarbūʿī may be describing the same people at two depths of detail. Ḥanẓala is besides an ordinary personal name — the sources record men so called in more than one genealogy — and a family named after such an ancestor carries the identical nisba with no tie to the Tamīmī division at all.
Bearing the name
A tribal nisba records what a family is called, not who its ancestors were. It may follow descent (ṣarīḥ), alliance (ḥilf) or clientage (walāʾ), and only a family's own documented record tells those apart.
Sources
- ابن حزم الأندلسي، جمهرة أنساب العرب، 456هـ — أنساب تميم — حنظلة وما تحته من دارم ويربوع والبراجم؛ يُراجَع ويُوثَّق قبل إثبات التفاصيل
- ابن منظور، لسان العرب، 711هـ — مادة: حنظل
This page is an educational, historical reference compiled from published sources. It is not an authority on lineage. Where sources differ, we report the difference without taking a position. Corrections are welcome via our contact page.
Last reviewed: 2026-09-07