Banū Zuhra

Overview

Banū Zuhra is a house of Quraysh at Mecca, reckoned by the genealogists to Zuhra ibn Kilāb ibn Murrah — that is, to the man they name as the brother of Quṣayy, so the house separates from Quṣayy's line one generation above him. The sources count it among Quraysh al-Biṭāḥ, those settled in the hollow of Mecca around the sanctuary, as distinct from Quraysh al-Ẓawāhir on the slopes outside it. This page describes a historical house and makes no statement about any modern family or surname.

The name and its root

The root z-h-r in Lisān al-ʿArab carries brightness and beauty: al-zuhra is a shining whiteness, the zahra of a thing is its bloom or its best, and a plant is called zahr when it opens. The lexicon gives the sense of the word; it does not record why an ancestor was named with it, and the genealogists do not supply a reason either.

Maternal kin, not a line of descent

The one thing repeated about this house in every treatment is that Āmina bint Wahb ibn ʿAbd Manāf ibn Zuhra is recorded of it, so the sources call Banū Zuhra the maternal kin, the akhwāl, of the Prophet. It is worth being exact about what that means in the Arab reckoning: khuʾūla is a tie through the mother, and the ʿamūd al-nasab, the line by which descent is counted, runs through fathers. A house recorded as maternal kin has not thereby become a line of descent, and the distinction between the ʿamm and the khāl is not a courtesy of speech but a rule of the register.

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. Zuhra is in any case a common word in Arabic and among its names, so the name by itself attributes nobody to this house.