Banū Kaʿb ibn ʿAmr

Overview

Banū Kaʿb ibn ʿAmr are reported as the largest division of Khuzāʿah, and in the Meccan reports it is usually this branch that the bare name Khuzāʿah refers to. Their placement follows the tribe's own: whichever ʿAmr a source names, Kaʿb is hung from him, so the ʿAdnānī and Qaḥṭānī readings both reach this branch unchanged. This page describes a historical group and makes no statement about any modern family.

Which Kaʿb

This is the point on which the page earns its place. Kaʿb was among the most frequent of Arab personal names, and tribal names built on it are recorded independently in several lines that the genealogists keep entirely apart. Kaʿb ibn ʿAmr is placed in Khuzāʿah. Kaʿb ibn Luʾayy stands in the Qurashī chain as the genealogists arrange it, and is a different man in a different tribe. Kaʿb ibn Rabīʿa ibn ʿĀmir ibn Ṣaʿṣaʿa is reckoned among the tribes of Hawāzin. And the Banū Kaʿb recorded on the Gulf coast and, separately, in lower Iraq have their own page and their own reported attribution, which is not this one. A nisba formed from Kaʿb therefore tells a reader almost nothing on its own — it names a common ancestor's name, not a common ancestor.

The word

Ibn Manẓūr gives kaʿb for the projecting bone at the ankle and, by extension, for any joint of the bone; from the same sense of rising comes its figurative use for eminence, as in a man's kaʿb of honour being high. A name of this kind was available to every Arab family, which is exactly why it recurs so widely and why the recurrence proves nothing.

Homelands

With the rest of Khuzāʿah, the sources place them in the country of the sanctuary and the road below it — Marr al-Ẓahrān, ʿUsfān and Qudayd, all of which Yāqūt describes on the Meccan road. The sub-branches counted under Kaʿb differ between the books in both number and arrangement, and no list of them should be treated as final.

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.