Banū Ḥāritha

Overview

Banū Ḥāritha is one of the houses of al-Aws at Medina. The genealogists reckon it to Ḥāritha ibn al-Ḥārith ibn al-Khazraj ibn ʿAmr ibn Mālik ibn al-Aws, and gather it with Banū ʿAbd al-Ashhal and Banū Ẓafar under the byname al-Nabīt. Their quarter and their fortified towers lay on the eastern side of the settlement, in the direction of the ḥarra. This page describes a historical house and makes no statement about any modern family, surname or claim of descent.

A name that appears twice

The father of both al-Aws and al-Khazraj is named in every list as Ḥāritha ibn Thaʿlaba. This house is named for a different and much later Ḥāritha, a descendant of al-Aws several generations down. So the same name stands at the head of the whole Anṣārī genealogy and at the head of one small house inside it, and a reader who meets Banū Ḥāritha without a chain attached cannot tell from the name which is meant. This is the ordinary condition of Arab genealogy rather than a defect in it: personal names were reused within families deliberately, and it is the chain, not the name, that identifies a man.

The name

The root ḥ-r-th in Lisān al-ʿArab is tillage, and beyond it acquisition: iḥrath is to work the ground, and the lexicographers extend the root to gaining and gathering generally, so that a man's ḥarth is what he works for. Ḥāritha and al-Ḥārith are both formed from it and both were extremely common. Ḥāritha was also borne by houses in other tribes entirely, so the name locates nobody by itself.

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. Given how often Ḥāritha recurs both inside this genealogy and outside it, an attribution to a Banū Ḥāritha is not an attribution to this house unless the source supplies the chain.