Banū Hāshim

Overview

Banū Hāshim is one of the houses of Quraysh at Mecca. The genealogists reckon it to Hāshim ibn ʿAbd Manāf ibn Quṣayy, and a step further up to ʿAbd Manāf and to Quraysh under Kināna. Ibn Ḥazm treats it inside the chapter of Qurashī genealogies rather than as a tribe standing on its own, which is what the sources make of it — a house within a tribe, not a tribe set beside one. This page describes a historical house and makes no statement about any modern family, surname or claim of descent.

The name

The root h-sh-m in Lisān al-ʿArab is the breaking of something dry or hollow, and hashama al-tharīd is to crumble bread into broth. The accounts report that the man's given name was ʿAmr and that Hāshim was a byname that stayed with him after a year of dearth in which he is said to have crumbled bread for the pilgrims at Mecca. That is how the sources explain it. The lexicon supplies the sense of the word, not the reason a particular man was called by it.

The offices recorded for it

In the division of the Meccan offices after Quṣayy, the sources place the siqāya, the watering of the pilgrims, and the rifāda, their provisioning, with the sons of ʿAbd Manāf, and record them held by Hāshim and after him by ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib, while the ḥijāba, the liwāʾ and the assembly house remained with Banū ʿAbd al-Dār. The accounts further attribute to Hāshim the arrangement of the two trading journeys, one of winter and one of summer. These are offices of the pre-Islamic tribe as the sources record them, and the compilers differ over the detail of how they were shared.

Hāshim and al-Muṭṭalib

The compilers habitually treat Banū Hāshim and Banū al-Muṭṭalib together, as two houses acting as one, and set them apart from ʿAbd Shams and Nawfal in the well-known division of Quraysh into the Muṭayyabūn and the Aḥlāf. A reader following the accounts will find the pair moving together far more often than either moves alone.

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. Hāshim was also a common Arab personal name, so the name by itself attributes nobody to this house. Claims of descent from it — whether carried by a family name or by an honorific title — are not matters a reference page settles, and none is affirmed or denied here.