Kaʿb ibn Rabīʿa

Overview

Kaʿb ibn Rabīʿa ibn ʿĀmir ibn Ṣaʿṣaʿa is less a tribe in its own right than the point in the ʿĀmirī lineage from which several well-attested branches are counted. Ibn Ḥazm reckons to him Qushayr, ʿUqayl, al-Ḥarīsh and Jaʿda, and those names, rather than his own, are what the sources go on to use. Their country is placed in Najd, and later reports scatter sections of them eastward and northward. This page describes a historical lineage and makes no claim about any modern family.

Not the Banī Kaʿb of the Gulf

A reader searching for Kaʿb will find two different things in this reference, and they should not be run together. This page is the classical ʿĀmirī ancestor-node under Hawāzin. Banī Kaʿb, which has its own page, is the name carried by groups recorded on the Gulf coast and separately in lower Iraq, which the sources treat as distinct from each other and from this line. Kaʿb was among the commonest Arab personal names, which is enough on its own to explain groups of the name arising independently — the same point Banī Mālik and Banī Saʿd exist to make.

The name

Ibn Manẓūr gives the kaʿb as the bone standing proud where the shin meets the foot, and by extension the node of a cane or a spear-shaft — the joint from which new growth starts. From the same sense comes the idiom of a man being ʿālī al-kaʿb, high of node, for eminence. Which of these senses a father intended in naming a son the lexicographers do not undertake to say.

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.