Banū Nahd

Overview

Nahd is reckoned by the genealogists to Nahd ibn Zayd ibn Layth ibn Sawd ibn Aslum ibn al-Ḥāf ibn Quḍāʿah, which places it in the same cluster as Juhayna, Jarm and Saʿd Hudhaym, the ancestor given for ʿUdhra. Its early diyār are placed in the Ḥijāz and the country to its east, but the tribe is chiefly interesting for the direction it then takes: the sources follow sections of Nahd south, into Najrān and the eastern approaches of Yemen and Ḥaḍramawt, where al-Hamdānī names them among the peoples of that country. The nisba recorded for it is al-Nahdī. This page describes a historical tribe and makes no statement about any modern family.

In the sources

Most of the tribes in this reference are placed once and stay placed. Nahd is one of the cases where the geographers and the genealogists together record a move — a northern Quḍāʿī tribe named afterwards in the south — and it is worth pausing on what that does to a reader's assumptions. An attribution to a tribe is not a statement of where a family lives, because the tribe itself is recorded in more than one country across the period the sources cover; two groups carrying the same name may be separated by the whole width of the peninsula, and the sources give no way to close that gap. The southern material is also of a different kind from the northern: al-Hamdānī describes settlement and territory, while the northern notices are mostly genealogical, and the two do not join into a continuous account.

Reading the name

The lexicographers treat n-h-d as an ordinary root, with senses of rising and swelling running through its words, and they do not derive the tribal name from it; derivation-stories attached to tribal names by later compilers are transmitted explanation rather than record. The nisba al-Nahdī is borne in the biographical literature by men attributed to this tribe, and, as always, it may equally mark alliance (ḥilf) or clientage (walāʾ) — the compilers say which only when they know.

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.