Banū Salīma

Overview

Salīma is one of the sections the sources count among the descendants of Mālik ibn Fahm, and it is named with Hināʾa, Farāhīd and Maʿwala among the Azd recorded in ʿUmān. As with the rest of that list, the ordering is a scholarly reconstruction: a name given as a son in one book stands a generation lower in another. This page describes a historical section and makes no claim about any modern family.

One vowelling apart

This is the entry's most useful work. Three distinct names fall together once the vowels are dropped, as they are in ordinary modern writing. Salīma of the Azd is not Salima of the Khazraj — the Anṣārī Banū Salima of Medina, an entirely separate group in a different branch of the genealogies — and neither is Banū Sulaym of Muḍar, a large ʿAdnānī tribe with its own long record. The nisbas collide in the same way, so a family name spelled without vowels does not decide which of the three is meant, and the sources have to be read for the context rather than the spelling.

What can be said

What the classical books support is that a section called Salīma is reckoned to the Azd of ʿUmān as reported, and that the name is met in the Azdī chapters and in the settlement of Baṣra afterwards. What they do not support is any step from the name to a present-day household. That step is exactly where the three names above become one, and it is the reason this reference does not take it.

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.