Banū Hināʾa

Overview

Hināʾa is among the sections the genealogists count to Mālik ibn Fahm most consistently, and it is named with Salīma, Farāhīd and Maʿwala among the Azd recorded in ʿUmān. The nisba taken from it is al-Hināʾī. Its consistency across the lists is worth noting for what it is: agreement among later compilers rather than an independent record, since these lists were assembled long after the generations they describe. This page describes a historical section and makes no claim about any modern family.

The name

The lexicographers refer the word to the root h-n-ʾ and give it more than one line of sense: hannaʾa is to congratulate, and hanīʾ is what is wholesome and comes without trouble, while al-hināʾ is the tar with which mange is treated, whence hanaʾa al-ibil, to daub camels with it. Both senses are in the dictionaries; neither is put forward there as the reason the name was borne, and this reference does not choose between them.

Names that are also places

In ʿUmān as elsewhere, section names and place names run into each other: the geographers regularly record a district or a settlement under the name of the people said to hold it. This means a mention of the name in a geography may fix where a group lived rather than whom it descended from, and the two kinds of statement should not be read as one. Where a source gives only the name, what it establishes is the association, not the line.

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.