Banū Sāʿida

Overview

Banū Sāʿida is one of the sections the genealogists place under al-Khazraj at Medina, reckoned to Sāʿida ibn Kaʿb ibn al-Khazraj — so a section standing beside Banū al-Najjār, Banū Salima and Banū al-Ḥārith rather than under any of them. This page describes a historical section and makes no statement about any modern family, surname or claim of descent.

The name

The root s-ʿ-d in Lisān al-ʿArab is aid and support: sāʿadahu musāʿadatan is to help a man, and the sāʿid is the forearm, the part of the arm that does the work, from the same idea. Sāʿida is an old and unremarkable Arab personal name formed from it. As always, the lexicon gives the sense of the word and not the reason this man was called by it.

The saqīfa

A saqīfa in Arabic is a roofed shelter or portico, the kind of covered space a quarter used as its meeting place. The sources name one at Medina after this section, the saqīfa of Banū Sāʿida, and it is by that name — a piece of ordinary settlement topography — that the section is best remembered. What was decided there after the Prophet's death is a matter for the historians and the books of sīra, not for a genealogical page, and nothing about it bears on the descent this page reports.

The name is not confined to them

Sāʿida was a common personal name, and sections called Banū Sāʿida are recorded in more than one tribe, in the way Banū Mālik and Banū Saʿd are. The name alone therefore locates nobody: two groups carrying it may be reckoned by the sources to entirely different lines.

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. Sāʿida being a common name across tribes, an attribution to a section of this name is not by itself an attribution to al-Khazraj.