Al-Ḥasanah

Overview

Al-Ḥasanah is a section reported within ʿAnazah. The common account places it with the sections entered under Ḍanā Muslim, and the reports differ over that placement as they differ over the rest of the arrangement. The country reported for it is the desert of the Levant and the steppe reaching back toward northern Najd.

This page describes a tribal section as it is reported, and makes no claim about any modern family: no surname, family or house is attributed to it here.

The name is borne by more than one group

The name reaches a reader by three different routes and they should not be confused. It is reported of sections in more than one tribe, so a group called al-Ḥasanah elsewhere is not thereby this section. It also arises as a family name from the given name Ḥasan, with no tribal attribution attached to it at all. And unpointed, al-ḥasanah is simply the ordinary Arabic word for a good deed or a good thing, so the written form met in a text may not be a name at all. Nothing but the context of a particular source can tell these apart, and the page cannot do it for the reader.

On sources

The classical works this reference cites — Ibn Ḥazm's Jamhara, al-Qalqashandī's Nihāyat al-Arab, Yāqūt's Muʿjam al-Buldān and al-Hamdānī's Ṣifat Jazīrat al-ʿArab — do not document this section. The arrangement the name sits in is reported in its present form only from centuries after the latest of those works, and what is said about it comes from later writing and from oral tradition rather than from the sources cited here. This page therefore records the name, the country and the affiliation as they are commonly reported, and does not set out a descent. Where a place is cited below, the citation is for the place, not for the group; and where the lexicon is cited, it is cited for the word, not for the people who carry it.

On lineage

Branch lists and affiliations on this page are given as reported, and those who report them differ among themselves: one account makes a name a division and another makes it a section inside one. Nothing here establishes any living family's descent. A shared name may reflect descent, alliance (ḥilf) or clientage (walāʾ), and the sources say which only when they know.