Muʿāwiya ibn Kinda

Overview

Muʿāwiya is named among the sons of Kinda in the genealogists' reckoning — Kinda itself being the byname of Thawr ibn ʿUfayr in the line of Kahlān, and so of Qaḥṭān. From Muʿāwiya they count Banū al-Ḥārith ibn Muʿāwiya and the house they call Muʿāwiya al-Akramūn, and it is through this side of Kinda that the ruling house of the tribe is traced. The name is a level in a chain rather than a group anyone is called by, and it should not be read as the Umayyad caliph's name: Muʿāwiya was an old and widely used Arab name, and it stands as an ancestral name in unrelated chains, among them lines counted under Hawāzin on the ʿAdnānī side. This page describes a historical grouping and makes no claim about any modern family.

The sons of Kinda as reported

Ibn Ḥazm and al-Qalqashandī name Muʿāwiya, Ashras, al-Sakūn and al-Sakāsik in this material, and they do not agree on the tier each occupies: some place al-Sakūn and al-Sakāsik as sons of Kinda directly, others put them a generation lower as sons of Ashras. The disagreement is instructive rather than embarrassing. It shows that a tier in these chains is a scholarly ordering of remembered names, and that a name can move up or down a step between one genealogist and the next without either being charged with error.

The house of Ākil al-Murār

The kings of Kinda who held authority in Najd before Islam are traced, as reported, through al-Ḥārith ibn Muʿāwiya to Ḥujr, known by the byname Ākil al-Murār, and the poet Imruʾ al-Qays is reckoned to that house. This is history rather than genealogy of the living: the house belongs to the pre-Islamic record, and nothing here attaches it to any family of the present day.

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.