Ḥanīfa

Overview

Banū Ḥanīfa are placed by the genealogists under Bakr ibn Wāʾil, reckoned Ḥanīfa ibn Lujaym ibn Ṣaʿb ibn ʿAlī ibn Bakr ibn Wāʾil — as reported, with the usual disagreement over the intermediate names. Where most of the Rabīʿa tribes appear in the sources on the move, Ḥanīfa appears in one place: al-Yamāma, the country of wadis and palm groves in eastern Najd, whose seat the geographers name as Ḥajr.

That settledness is the tribe's distinguishing feature in the classical descriptions. Yāqūt treats al-Yamāma as a country of towns, cultivation and dates rather than of grazing, and the accounts describe the tribe as its people — farmers and townsmen holding a productive country astride the routes between al-Baḥrayn and the Ḥijāz. It is a useful corrective to the assumption that a tribal name implies a nomadic life; the sources describe plenty of tribes that did not move.

The name

The root ḥ-n-f turns on inclining. The lexicographers give al-ḥanaf as a bend in the foot, whence the by-name al-Aḥnaf, and al-ḥanīf as one inclining away from error toward the right way, which is the sense the religious vocabulary took up. The tribal name belongs to the ordinary stock of Arab personal names formed on that root, and carries no religious claim of its own.

Two confusions are worth heading off. The milla ḥanīfiyya is a term of religion, not a reference to this tribe. And the Ḥanafī school of law takes its name from the kunya of Abū Ḥanīfa al-Nuʿmān, as the compilers report it, not from the tribe — so a nisba written al-Ḥanafī may point to the school or to the tribe, and the two must be read apart.

In the sources

Al-Yamāma is where the accounts of the ridda place the movement of Musaylima and the battle that followed it, and this is the episode for which the tribe's name is most often met. It is history rather than genealogy, and it says nothing about descent: a tribe is not its most reported episode, and the sources that narrate the campaign are the same ones that go on describing the country's palms and markets afterwards.

Branch names are given in the genealogies under Ḥanīfa as under any large tribe, and they differ between books. They are recorded here as reported and not as a settled scheme.

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.