Banū Shibām

Overview

Shibām is entered among the divisions of Hamdān by the genealogists, and the lists differ over where exactly it sits — some place it under Ḥāshid, others treat it as a division standing beside the two great halves rather than inside one of them. Its country is the highland district north-west of Sanaa, below the mountain of Kawkabān, which is why the sources so often write the name as Shibām Kawkabān when they need to be exact about which Shibām they mean. Al-Hamdānī, who was of Hamdān himself and writing in the fourth century of the Hijra, describes this country from close acquaintance rather than from report. This page describes a historical tribe and makes no claim about any modern family.

More than one Shibām

Yāqūt enters Shibām as a name shared by several places in Yemen and separates them deliberately, which is the most useful thing a geographer does for a genealogist. The best known to readers outside Yemen is Shibām of Ḥaḍramawt, the tall walled town in the wādī, and it is not the Shibām of Hamdān's country at all. A third is recorded in the Ḥarāz mountains. The consequence is practical: a man written down as al-Shibāmī has been attributed to one of these places, and the nisba by itself does not say which. The classical writers knew this and added the qualifier; modern writing usually drops it, and the confusion is manufactured at exactly that point.

The name

Ibn Manẓūr records the root sh-b-m for coldness: shabam is said of water that is cold, and the poets use it of a cold morning. He records shibām separately as a piece of wood set across a kid's mouth to keep it from suckling. The lexicographers give the words; they do not derive the tribal name from either of them, and neither does this reference. Where the sources report no derivation, reporting none is the accurate thing to do.

On lineage

This page describes a historical tribe as the classical sources record it, and makes no claim about any modern family. Branch lists and affiliations are given as reported by the genealogists, who themselves disagree. Nothing here 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.