Banū Ḥassān

Overview

Banū Ḥassān — Dhawī Ḥassān in the older phrasing — are entered by Ibn Khaldūn among the sections of Banū Maʿqil, whose own descent he reports as disputed and does not settle. Their country in his account is the southern and western march of the far Maghrib and the desert beyond it, where the Maʿqilī sections are described as holding the desert roads. That much is in a source this reference may cite. This page describes a historical group and makes no claim about any modern family.

The name

Ḥassān is an ordinary Arabic personal name, and a common one, borne by men of many tribes in every period. Groups called Banū Ḥassān or Awlād Ḥassān therefore arise independently in different places from different men of the name, and the coincidence of the name is not evidence of one line. Ibn Manẓūr enters the letters under two roots that the classical grammarians themselves dispute — ḥ-s-n, from beauty, and ḥ-s-s — and reports the disagreement without resolving it, which is a fair picture of how much a name of this kind can be made to carry.

On sources

Ibn Khaldūn's notice of the section is brief and is the last thing the permitted sources say about it. Everything reported of the name in the western desert after his lifetime — the groups that carry it, the form of Arabic commonly named after it, the traditions of descent told by those who bear it — is later than all six works this reference cites, and comes from oral tradition and from modern writing outside what this reference is permitted to use. The page therefore records the classical notice, and treats the name as the classical sources record it. It does not enter later history.

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, and the genealogists differ among themselves. 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.