Banū ʿĀmir ibn al-Ḥārith

Overview

Banū ʿĀmir ibn al-Ḥārith are one of the sections of ʿAbd al-Qays, entered by the genealogists in the part of the tribe carried under Lukayz through ʿAmr ibn Wadīʿa. The compilers differ over the names between ʿAmr and ʿĀmir — this is the ordinary condition of such chains, and Ibn Ḥazm and al-Qalqashandī do not give them identically — so the placement is reported here and not asserted.

The country is the tribe's: the coast Yāqūt calls al-Khaṭṭ, with al-Qaṭīf among its towns, al-Zāra and the villages of the shore, the landing place of Dārīn, and the island of Awāl offshore, with Hajar and al-Aḥsāʾ inland.

Why the father's name is carried

ʿĀmir alone identifies nothing. It is among the most frequently borne names in Arabic, as a personal name and as the head of a tribal section, and the corpus of genealogy is full of it: Banū ʿĀmir ibn Ṣaʿṣaʿa of Hawāzin is a great tribe of the north; ʿĀmir ibn Luʾayy is a house in the line of Quraysh; and sections called Banū ʿĀmir occur in tribe after tribe with no relation between them.

This is why the genealogists write the father: ʿĀmir ibn al-Ḥārith, in the ʿAbd al-Qays chapter. A citation that gives only Banū ʿĀmir, or only the nisba al-ʿĀmirī, has named a word rather than a people, and the reader is entitled to ask which ʿĀmir and in whose chapter.

The name

The root ʿ-m-r in Lisān al-ʿArab is inhabiting and long life: ʿamara al-makān, he lived in a place and kept it inhabited; al-ʿumr, a lifetime; maʿmūr, a place that is peopled. ʿĀmir is the active participle. Names built on this root are names of good omen, and they are common for that reason.

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.