Riyāḥ of Banū Hilāl

Overview

Riyāḥ is entered among the branches of Banū Hilāl, and Banū Hilāl are reckoned by the genealogists to ʿĀmir ibn Ṣaʿṣaʿa of Hawāzin, under Muḍar — as reported, and with the usual divergence over the intermediate names, which the sources themselves do not settle. Of the works this reference cites, Ibn Khaldūn is by far the fullest on what became of the Hilālī branches after they moved west, and in his account Riyāḥ is the first of them in Ifrīqiya, holding the open country and the steppe rather than the towns. This page describes a historical tribe and makes no claim about any modern family.

The movement west

The movement of Hilāl and Sulaym out of Upper Egypt westward into Ifrīqiya in the middle of the fifth century AH is the subject Ibn Khaldūn returns to most often when he writes about the Arabs of North Africa, and it is the frame within which every branch name in this group has to be read. The tribes did not arrive as a single body and did not stay in one place. The reports distribute the branches across the country over generations — Riyāḥ in the eastern plains and the steppe behind them, Zughba further west, al-Athbaj scattered between them — and a branch that one report places in one district appears in the next a long way from it.

Ibn Khaldūn's account also carries his own judgement on what the movement did to settled life in the country it passed through. That judgement is his, it has been argued over ever since, and this page records the movement rather than the verdict.

Two groups called Riyāḥ

The name is borne by more than one unrelated group, and saying so is the most useful thing this page carries. Riyāḥ ibn Yarbūʿ ibn Ḥanẓala is placed by the genealogists in Banū Tamīm, with the country of Yarbūʿ in Najd — a separate line entirely, treated on its own page here. The Riyāḥ of this page is the Hilālī one, and it is this one that the accounts of the westward movement concern. Modern writing merges the two regularly. The script makes it worse: Riyāḥ, Rabāḥ and Rayyāḥ are distinct names that unvowelled writing does not tell apart, so a bare occurrence in a text may not be this name at all, and the nisba al-Riyāḥī is carried from all of them and from other origins besides.

The name

Ibn Manẓūr enters the root r-w-ḥ at length: al-rīḥ for wind, with riyāḥ and arwāḥ given as its plurals, al-rawāḥ for the latter part of the day and the going at that hour, and al-rāḥa for rest. The lexicon explains the word; it does not say why a people came to be called by it, and the derivation-stories the later compilers attach to tribal names are transmitted explanation rather than record.

In the genealogical tradition

The sections named under Riyāḥ in the accounts of Ifrīqiya include the Dawāwida, who are given as its leading house, alongside other names that the lists carry in different orders and sometimes place under a different parent. Ibn Ḥazm, writing in al-Andalus before the movement west had run its course, gives Hilāl and its branches as a matter of Arabian genealogy and not of North African settlement; al-Qalqashandī, four centuries later, is compiling from earlier books. Where a branch is given here it is given as the sources report it, and the differences between them are not resolved by this page.

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, and the genealogists differ among themselves. 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.