Banū Walīʿa

Overview

Banū Walīʿa are named among the houses of Kinda in Ḥaḍramawt. They belong with the Kindite material generally — Kinda of Kahlān, and so of the Qaḥṭānī line — but what is recorded of them comes mainly from the historians rather than the genealogists: they appear in the accounts of the delegations of the last years of the Prophet's life and of the disturbances in Ḥaḍramawt that followed his death. That is a useful thing to notice about the sources themselves. A house can be well attested in narrative and poorly attested in descent, and the two kinds of record are not interchangeable. This page describes a historical house and makes no claim about any modern family.

The four kings

The best remembered of the name are four brothers whom the historians call the four kings — Mikhwas, Mishraḥ, Jamad and Abḍaʿa, sons of Maʿdīkarib — with their sister named alongside them in the same accounts. They stand in the narrative of Ḥaḍramawt in the years immediately after the Prophet's death. Here as elsewhere the sources are reporting the fortunes of a house, not registering its descendants, and the genealogists who take up the same names order them in more than one way.

The name

Lisān al-ʿArab gives walīʿ for the spadix of the palm while it is still enclosed in its sheath, white and tender, from a root that also carries walaʿ, attachment and eagerness; walīʿa is the single one of them. Names taken from the palm and its parts are common in old Arabic, which is what one would expect of a naming vocabulary drawn from what people lived among. As always, the lexicographers give the sense of the word and not the motive of the naming, and this reference does not invent one.

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.