Banū al-Naḍīr

Overview

Banū al-Naḍīr are recorded as one of the three Jewish tribes of Yathrib, with Banū Qaynuqāʿ and Banū Qurayẓa. The geographers place their strongholds and their palm-groves in the country around Medina rather than inside the town, and it is chiefly through those place-names that the tribe enters the geographical literature at all. The sources record al-Naḍīr, with Qurayẓa, as bound by alliance to al-Aws, while Qaynuqāʿ is recorded with al-Khazraj — an alliance as the sources give it, not a descent. This page describes a historical group and makes no statement about any modern family.

In the sources

The historical accounts record the tribe's departure from Medina in the fourth year after the hijra, and name Khaybar and the Levant as the countries its people went to; some of the transmitters have part of them settle at Khaybar and part go on northward. These are accounts of the sīra and maghāzī literature, transmitted narrative rather than documented record, and the compilers differ over date, numbers and destination. Some genealogists pair al-Naḍīr and Qurayẓa as brother groups descended from one ancestor and call the two together al-Kāhinān; others do not, and the reference records the disagreement rather than resolving it.

Reading the name

The lexicographers refer al-naḍīr to the root n-ḍ-r, whose sense is radiance and freshness — a face said to be naḍir is one with the bloom of health on it — and they record al-naḍr and al-naḍīr as names for gold. Whether the name of the tribe was understood from that root by those who bore it, or is a foreign name that Arabic simply accommodated, the dictionaries do not say, and the question of whether the Jews of Yathrib were Israelite or Arab in descent is left unsettled by the classical writers.

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.