Banū Nawfal

Overview

Banū Nawfal is a house of Quraysh at Mecca, reckoned to Nawfal ibn ʿAbd Manāf ibn Quṣayy — the fourth of the sons the genealogists record for ʿAbd Manāf, alongside Hāshim, ʿAbd Shams and al-Muṭṭalib. It is the least written about of the four, and in the division of Quraysh into the Muṭayyabūn and the Aḥlāf the accounts place Nawfal with ʿAbd Shams, apart from Hāshim and al-Muṭṭalib. This page describes a historical house and makes no statement about any modern family or surname.

The name and its root

The root n-f-l in Lisān al-ʿArab is giving beyond what is owed: the nafl is a gift or a grant that is not a due, whence the nāfila, the voluntary act added to an obligation. The lexicographers record nawfal for the man of much giving, and also as a name of the sea. As elsewhere, the dictionary gives the word's sense without accounting for why an ancestor carried it.

A small house with a genealogist in it

The sources report of this house al-Muṭʿim ibn ʿAdī ibn Nawfal, whom the accounts of Mecca name in the matter of the boycott document and in the granting of protection, and after him his son Jubayr ibn Muṭʿim, whom the compilers count among the most learned of Quraysh in the genealogy of Quraysh, and who is reported to have said that he took the science from Abū Bakr. That detail has its place in a reference of this kind: it shows ʿilm al-ansāb being handed from one named man to another inside Quraysh itself, so the figure of the nassāba is not something introduced late but is already recognisable in the earliest layer of the material.

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. Nawfal was also a common personal name among the Arabs generally, so the name by itself attributes nobody to this house.