Banū Ḥajūr

Overview

Ḥajūr is entered among the divisions reckoned to Ḥāshid, one of the two halves of Hamdān, though as with most Yemeni divisions the chains the genealogists give differ from book to book — one list makes a name a son where another makes it a grandson, and the same section may be entered under either. Its country is the western highlands, in the broken land descending toward Tihāma. This page describes a historical tribe and makes no claim about any modern family.

The mikhlāf that carries the name

Yemen was not divided into provinces in the northern manner. Its unit was the mikhlāf, and the makhālīf were commonly named after the tribes that held them, so that Yāqūt can enter Ḥajūr as a mikhlāf of Yemen in the same breath as he enters towns and wādīs. This matters for reading the sources correctly. When a geographer writes that something happened in Mikhlāf Ḥajūr he has named a country, not made a statement about anyone's descent, and he has not said who held that ground in any century but his own. The place name outlives the arrangement that produced it — which is precisely why place is weaker evidence of lineage than it looks.

The name and the names near it

Ibn Manẓūr gives the root ḥ-j-r for barring and withholding: ḥajr is prevention, al-ḥijr the forbidden thing, and the sense runs through the vocabulary of enclosure and protection. Ḥajūr is recorded as a proper name without a derivation attached to it, and this reference adds none. Worth separating from it are the names that look alike in unvowelled writing: Ḥajr, the old town of al-Yamāma, and Ḥajr in Ḥaḍramawt are different names of different places, and the nisbas al-Ḥajūrī and al-Ḥajrī are accordingly not one nisba. Modern writing merges them freely, and a reader who accepts the merger will pull two unrelated attributions into one file.

On lineage

This page describes a historical tribe as the classical sources record it, and makes no claim about any modern family. Branch lists and affiliations are given as reported by the genealogists, who themselves disagree. Nothing here 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.