Banū Jahḍam

Overview

Jahḍam is a section the genealogists reckon to al-Azd, and they differ over exactly where within the Azdī tree it attaches — a common state of affairs in these chapters and one this reference reports rather than resolves. Its nisba, al-Jahḍamī, is met most often in the literature of Baṣra, where Azdī groups settled in numbers after the conquests and where whole quarters of the new city carried tribal names. This page describes a historical section and makes no claim about any modern family.

The name

The lexicographers refer the word to the root j-h-ḍ-m: al-jahḍam is described as the broad and heavy in build, wide between the shoulders and full in the chest, and a man so called is imposing in body. As with most tribal names, the dictionaries give the sense of the word without saying why an ancestor came to bear it, and nothing further should be read into it.

A city nisba

A name that is common among transmitters and scarce in the reports of the desert is telling you something about the sources, not about the size of a group. The biographical dictionaries record the men whose names passed through the schools of a city, so an Azdī section that settled in Baṣra appears in them far more than one that did not. This is worth keeping in view before treating frequency in the books as a measure of anything else.

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.