al-Ḥārith ibn Kaʿb

Overview

Banū al-Ḥārith ibn Kaʿb are counted in Madhḥij, and so in the Qaḥṭānī line; the chain usually given runs al-Ḥārith ibn Kaʿb ibn ʿAmr ibn ʿUlla ibn Jald ibn Mālik, Mālik being Madhḥij. Their country in the sources is Najrān and its wadi, on the road between Yemen and the Ḥijāz, and Yāqūt names them there in his notice of the town. Their leading house is Banū al-Dayyān, which the sources treat as the chiefly line of the tribe. This page describes a historical tribe and makes no claim about any modern family.

Balḥārith, the contracted name

The sources far more often write Balḥārith than Banū al-Ḥārith, and this is not carelessness but a habit of speech in the south and among Madhḥij in particular: banū al- contracts to bal-. The same contraction produces Balʿanbar for Banū al-ʿAnbar and Balqarn for Banū al-Qarn, and it is worth knowing because a reader searching for the full form will miss most of what is written about the tribe. It also cuts the other way: a name beginning bal- in a text is very often a tribal name with the article swallowed inside it, not an unfamiliar word.

A very common ancestral name

al-Ḥārith in Lisān al-ʿArab is the one who tills and gathers and acquires, from ḥarth, and it was among the most frequent of Arab personal names. Groups called Banū al-Ḥārith are therefore recorded in several unrelated lines — in Quraysh, in al-Azd, in Hamdān and elsewhere — and the nisba al-Ḥārithī does not by itself point to this tribe or to any one house. That is the ordinary situation with common ancestral names, and it is the reason a nisba is a starting point for inquiry rather than a conclusion.

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.