Banū Makhzūm

Overview

Banū Makhzūm is a house of Quraysh at Mecca, reckoned by the genealogists to Makhzūm ibn Yaqaẓa ibn Murrah ibn Kaʿb ibn Luʾayy. The point of the chain worth noticing is where it separates: as the sources give it, Makhzūm branches at Murrah, which is above Quṣayy, so in their reckoning it is not a house of ʿAbd Manāf's line at all but a cousin house to the whole of that line. This page describes a historical house and makes no statement about any modern family or surname.

The name and its root

The root kh-z-m in Lisān al-ʿArab is piercing and threading — khazama is to pierce, and the khizāma is the ring set in a camel's nose to lead it by. Makhzūm is the passive participle of that verb. As with most tribal eponyms, the dictionary explains the word and not the man: the lexicographers give the sense of the name without offering a reason why a particular ancestor bore it.

The office recorded for it

In the standard list of the offices of Quraysh, the sources place with Banū Makhzūm the qubba and the aʿinna: the tent in which the equipment of war was gathered, and the reins, that is the command of the horse. The lists of these offices vary from one compiler to another, and they are recorded here as offices of the pre-Islamic tribe.

Among the Aḥlāf

When the accounts divide Quraysh into the Muṭayyabūn and the Aḥlāf over the offices held after Quṣayy, they count Makhzūm among the Aḥlāf, the confederates, with Banū ʿAbd al-Dār and with Jumaḥ, Sahm and ʿAdī. That is a ḥilf, an alliance, and the sources name it as such — which is a reminder in the middle of a genealogy that Quraysh acted in blocs formed by agreement as well as by descent.

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.