Banū Salima

Overview

Banū Salima is one of the sections the genealogists place under al-Khazraj at Medina, reckoned through Jusham ibn al-Khazraj by a chain the compilers give with several intervening names and do not give identically. Their quarter lay toward the south-west of the settlement, and the accounts of Medina place the mosque known as that of the two qiblas among them. This page describes a historical section and makes no statement about any modern family, surname or claim of descent.

The vowelling, and why it matters

The name is Salima with a kasra on the lām, not Salama and not Sulaym. Lisān al-ʿArab gives al-salima, so vowelled, as a hard stone, with the plural silām — a name from stone, of the kind Arabic forms readily. The point is not pedantry. Arabic writes short vowels only when it chooses to, and this name is one of a small set where the vowelling is the whole distinction.

Salamī and Sulamī

The relative adjective from Banū Salima is formed irregularly: the kasra of the lām opens to a fatḥa and the nisba is Salamī, on the same rule that gives Namarī from Namir. Banū Sulaym, an entirely separate tribe of Muḍar in the Ḥijāz, gives Sulamī. Written without vowels the two are the same four letters. A reader who meets the unvowelled form in a source has not yet been told which of the two is meant, and a family register that merges them has merged two unrelated 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. Because the nisba is written identically to that of Banū Sulaym, an unvowelled attribution is not evidence for either, and none is affirmed here.