Al-Aws

Overview

Al-Aws is one of the two tribes that held Yathrib, the town later called al-Madīna, and one of the two that the sources join from the hijra onward under the name al-Anṣār. The genealogists reckon it to al-Aws ibn Ḥāritha ibn Thaʿlaba ibn ʿAmr ibn ʿĀmir, and through him to al-Azd, to Kahlān and so to Qaḥṭān. That is the line as they report it; they differ over several names in the middle of it, and Ibn Ḥazm and al-Qalqashandī do not give an identical chain. Its brother tribe in every list is al-Khazraj. This page describes a historical tribe and makes no statement about any modern family, surname or claim of descent.

The name

The root a-w-s in Lisān al-ʿArab carries giving and requital: āsahu yaʾūsuhu awsan is to give a man something, or to compensate him for a loss, and al-aws is the gift itself. The lexicographers also record al-aws as one of the names of the wolf, and naming after a beast was ordinary Arab practice. The lexicon supplies the sense of the word; it does not supply the reason a particular man was called by it, and the sources do not agree on one.

Banū Qayla

The genealogists commonly join al-Aws and al-Khazraj under a single name taken from a mother rather than a father: Banū Qayla, after Qayla, whom they name as the mother of both and reckon to Quḍāʿa. Arab tribal names run overwhelmingly through fathers, so a matronymic used at this level is worth pausing over — it is the sources telling a reader that the two tribes were understood as one people before they were understood as two. The compilers differ over Qayla's own filiation.

The sections the sources place under it

The lists set Mālik ibn al-Aws at the head and branch from him. Under Mālik they place Banū ʿAmr ibn ʿAwf, whom the accounts associate with Qubāʾ at the southern edge of the settlement, and the group they call al-Nabīt, a byname of ʿAmr ibn Mālik, under which they gather Banū ʿAbd al-Ashhal, Banū Ẓafar and Banū Ḥāritha. Other names appear in some lists and not others. Sections at this depth are exactly where the genealogists diverge most, and no list here should be read as closed.

Buʿāth

The sources record a long series of fighting days between al-Aws and al-Khazraj, of which Buʿāth is the last and best remembered, placed shortly before the hijra. Yāqūt records Buʿāth as a place in the outskirts of Medina, which is how a battle day took its name in Arabic usage. What the accounts make of it is a settlement so evenly divided that neither tribe could govern it — the condition in which the sources set the events that followed. The detail of who allied with whom is reported differently by different compilers.

Al-Anṣār is a designation, not a name of descent

The name al-Anṣār, the helpers, is from the root n-ṣ-r, aid and support. It is applied to the two tribes from the hijra onward and is a designation earned in history, not a name of lineage: the genealogical names remain al-Aws and al-Khazraj. The nisba al-Anṣārī came to be carried as a family name in countries far from Medina, and nothing follows from bearing it about a family's descent from these two tribes.

On lineage

Branch lists and affiliations here are given as reported by the classical genealogists, who themselves disagree. Nothing on this page establishes any living family's descent: a shared name may reflect descent, alliance (ḥilf) or clientage (walāʾ), and the sources usually say which only when they know. The Anṣārī nisba in particular is widely borne today and has been carried for reasons other than descent, so neither the tribal name nor the nisba attributes anyone to this tribe here.