Banū ʿAmr

Overview

Banū ʿAmr is reported as one of the sections under Masrūḥ, the division of Ḥarb, with its country placed in the Ḥijāz, about Medina and westward toward the coastal country. This page describes a historical section as reported and makes no claim about any modern family — and with this name above all, the caution has to be doubled.

A name that identifies nothing on its own

ʿAmr is one of the two or three commonest ancestral names in the whole Arabic genealogical tradition. Open Ibn Ḥazm or al-Qalqashandī at almost any page and a Banū ʿAmr is there — under Qaḥṭānī tribes and ʿAdnānī ones, in the Ḥijāz, in Yemen, in Najd, in the Levant, in centuries far apart, and with no relation among them beyond the ordinariness of the name. A Banū ʿAmr in one book is therefore no evidence whatever about a Banū ʿAmr in another, and it is no evidence about this section of Ḥarb. This is the most useful thing the page carries. Anyone tracing a family or joining two records across this name must do it on evidence the name itself does not supply.

The name

Ibn Manẓūr enters the root ʿ-m-r for life and long living and for the inhabiting of a place. ʿAmr as a personal name is written with a final wāw in the nominative and genitive to distinguish it in script from ʿUmar — one of the small conventions of Arabic orthography that exists precisely because both names were so common. The lexicon explains the word, not the naming.

On sources

The classical works this reference cites do not document this section of Ḥarb. The arrangement in which it appears — Ḥarb divided into Masrūḥ and Banū Sālim, with sections beneath each — belongs to reports later than all six of them. Yāqūt can be cited for Medina and the Ḥijāzī country as places, and it is the place that is cited, not the section. What is reported about Banū ʿAmr of Masrūḥ comes from oral tradition and from modern writing outside the permitted sources. The page records a name and a reported country, and no descent.

On lineage

Branch lists and affiliations here are given as reported, and the genealogists differ among themselves. 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.