Banū Jadhīma (of ʿAbd al-Qays)

Overview

Banū Jadhīma are entered among the sections of ʿAbd al-Qays, in the part of the tribe the genealogists carry under Lukayz through the line of ʿAmr ibn Wadīʿa. The compilers differ over the intermediate names, and this page gives the placement as they report it. The country is the country of the tribe: the coast Yāqūt calls al-Khaṭṭ, al-Qaṭīf and the villages of the shore, with Hajar and al-Aḥsāʾ inland.

The name

The root j-dh-m in Lisān al-ʿArab is cutting off: al-jadhm is to sever a thing, and from it comes the sense of a limb lost. The same root gives a word that reads oddly beside it — jidhm of a thing is its stock or root, the base from which it grows, and the lexicographers use it exactly as a genealogist would, of the stem of a people. A name of this shape sits comfortably in the older layer of Arab naming, and nothing about the group follows from it.

The written form is unstable in the books. It appears as Jadhīma and as the diminutive Judhayma, and manuscripts carry both for what is plainly the same name; a reader should expect either.

More than one Jadhīma

The name is borne by unrelated groups and men, and the sources keep them apart while later citation does not.

There is a Banū Jadhīma in Kināna, in the northern scheme, entirely separate from this one. There is Jadhīma the pre-Islamic king remembered in the accounts of al-Ḥīra, whom the genealogists reckon in the Yemeni branch, among al-Azd and Tanūkh as the reports run. And there is this section of ʿAbd al-Qays on the eastern coast. Three lines, one word.

The nisba built on the name is therefore not a placement. As with al-Dīl and Muḥārib on this same coast, only a source that names the father, the branch or the country tells a reader which Jadhīma is meant.

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.