Banū Muḥārib (of ʿAbd al-Qays)

Overview

Banū Muḥārib of ʿAbd al-Qays are entered among the sections of that tribe, and the chains commonly given place them under Lukayz through ʿAmr ibn Wadīʿa. Their country is the eastern coast: the shore Yāqūt calls al-Khaṭṭ, al-Qaṭīf and the villages along it, with Hajar and al-Aḥsāʾ inland. As elsewhere in this tribe, the compilers differ over the intermediate names, and the chain is reported here rather than asserted.

Not Muḥārib of Qays

This is the substance of the page. The sources record more than one unrelated group called Muḥārib, and the two that matter most are far apart in the genealogists' ordering.

Muḥārib ibn Khaṣafa is reckoned to Qays ʿAylān, in the Muḍarī branch, with a remembered range in Najd. Muḥārib of ʿAbd al-Qays is in Rabīʿa, on the eastern seaboard. The two are separate tribes with no line joining them except at the highest tiers of the scheme, where every ʿAdnānī name eventually meets. Ibn Ḥazm lists them in different chapters and does not join them; a third Muḥārib, in the line of Fihr from which Quraysh is reckoned, is a further name again.

The consequence is practical. The nisba al-Muḥāribī is the same word for all of them, so a source that gives only the nisba has not placed anybody. Because Muḥārib is also the ordinary Arabic participle meaning one who wages war, a nisba may equally have been built on a near forebear of that name with no tribal sense at all.

What tells them apart

Usually the country. A Muḥāribī placed at al-Qaṭīf, on al-Khaṭṭ, at Hajar or in the coastal villages of this seaboard is being placed among ʿAbd al-Qays; one placed in Najd, in the open country of Qays, is not. Failing that, only a source that names the father and the branch decides it, and many later compilations name neither.

The name

The root ḥ-r-b in Lisān al-ʿArab is war and the taking of goods: ḥaraba a man is to strip him of his property, and the ḥarba is the short spear. Muḥārib is the active participle of the third form. The lexicographers treat the word without reference to any tribe, which is precisely why the word alone identifies nothing.

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.