Banū ʿAbd al-Ashhal

Overview

Banū ʿAbd al-Ashhal is one of the houses of al-Aws at Medina. The genealogists reckon it to ʿAbd al-Ashhal ibn Jusham ibn al-Ḥārith ibn al-Khazraj ibn ʿAmr ibn Mālik ibn al-Aws — and the al-Khazraj in that chain is the Awsī ancestor of the name, not the tribe of al-Khazraj, a distinction it is easy to lose. With Banū Ẓafar and Banū Ḥāritha they make up the group the sources gather under the byname al-Nabīt, which they attach to ʿAmr ibn Mālik. This page describes a historical house and makes no statement about any modern family, surname or claim of descent.

The name

The name is built on the pre-Islamic pattern of ʿabd joined to the name of a venerated thing, the pattern of ʿAbd Shams and ʿAbd Manāf among Quraysh and of ʿAbd al-Qays and ʿAbd Wudd elsewhere. The sources report al-Ashhal as an object of veneration among them before Islam. As a word, the root sh-h-l in Lisān al-ʿArab is a colour: shuhla is a darkness in the eye tinged with blue or red, and ashhal is the man whose eye has it. The lexicon gives the sense of the word; it does not tell us why the object bore the name, and the sources are not agreed.

The āṭām of Medina

A reader of the accounts of Yathrib meets a word that does not belong to the desert tribes: uṭum, plural āṭām, a fortified tower of stone that a house built for its own protection and for storing its harvest. Yathrib was an agricultural settlement of palm groves and wells, and its quarters were fortified in this way — the sections of al-Aws and al-Khazraj each held their own. Banū ʿAbd al-Ashhal are among the houses the sources name in connection with them. It is a useful reminder that these are not nomadic tribes at all, but the sections of a settled town.

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 chain given above passes through a man named al-Khazraj who is not the tribe of that name, and no reading of it should treat this house as Khazrajī.