Banū Ḥushaysh

Overview

Banū Ḥushaysh — written بنو حشيش — are entered among the Hamdānī peoples, and are commonly placed on the Bakīl side of the division of Hamdān into Ḥāshid and Bakīl, though the lists are not uniform. Their country is the district immediately east and north-east of Sanaa, where the ground falls away from the plain of the capital toward the eastern wadis. Al-Hamdānī, describing the country about Sanaa in the fourth century of the hijra, names the district by them, as he does throughout his book. This page describes a historical tribe as the old books record it, and makes no claim about any modern family.

The district and the tribe share a name

This is the clearest case in the Yemeni geography of the pattern al-Hamdānī works by: the mikhlāf takes the name of the people who hold it, and thereafter the name belongs to the ground as much as to them. It is a useful fact and a treacherous one. Useful, because it fixes a tenth-century tribal geography with a precision no genealogist's list can match; treacherous, because ground keeps a name long after the people in it have changed, so that a district called by a tribe is evidence of where the tribe was, not of who lives there now, and still less of anyone's descent.

The name

The root ḥ-sh-sh is dry herbage. Ibn Manẓūr gives al-ḥashīsh for what has dried of pasture and is gathered as fodder, and al-ḥushāsh for a small remainder of it; Ḥushaysh is the diminutive shape. The later sense the word carries in modern usage is a much later development and has nothing to do with the name of these people or their district; readers who meet the name for the first time should take it in the sense the lexicon gives it, which is fodder and nothing else.

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.