Arab tribes

History, branches, and homelands of Arab tribes.

• Ghāfiq

  A group entered in the Azd line by some genealogists and under ʿAkk by others — and a name also borne by a town in al-Andalus, so that the nisba al-Ghāfiqī can

• Ghamid

  An Arab tribe historically associated with the highlands of southwestern Arabia (the Sarawat / al-Bahah region).

• Ghanī

  A small Qaysī tribe of Najd, reckoned with Bāhila to Aʿṣur, whose recorded nisba is al-Ghanawī rather than al-Ghanī.

• Ghassān

  An Azdī group of the Syrian frontier whose name, the genealogists agree, is not an ancestor's but a water's — and whose kingdom on that frontier is history, att

• Ghaṭafān

  A large Najdī grouping of the pre-Islamic period, parent of ʿAbs and Dhubyān.

• Ḥaḍūr

  A mountain of Yemen and the group that holds it; the sources differ on whether Ḥaḍūr belongs among the Ḥimyarī houses or with the Hamdānī groups of similar name

• Hamdan

  One of the great tribal confederations of Yemen, anciently attested, with its homeland in the northern highlands around Sanaa.

• Ḥanīfa

  A tribe the genealogists place under Bakr ibn Wāʾil, whose recorded country is al-Yamāma, the settled palm country of eastern Najd.

• Harb

  A large Arab tribe historically associated with the Hijaz in western Arabia, with many branches.

• Hashid

  One of the two famous branches of the Hamdan confederation in the northern highlands of Yemen.

• Hawāzin

  A large Muḍarī grouping of the Ḥijāz and Najd, parent of Thaqīf and Banū Hilāl in the sources.

• Ḥimyar

  One of the two great Qaḥṭānī groupings, and the name of the kingdom that ruled Yemen before Islam.

• Hudhayl

  A Hijazi tribe of the mountains around Mecca and Ṭāʾif, famous for its poets.

• Janb

  A section reported under Qaḥṭān. The classical genealogists give the name Janb under Madhḥij in Yemen, which is a different thing from the modern section: this

• Judhām

  A Qaḥṭānī tribe of the Kahlān line, entered beside Lakhm as a brother, whose recorded country is the north of the Ḥijāz — Ḥismā, Madyan and the road toward the

• Juhayna ibn Zayd

  The classical genealogical position of Juhayna inside Quḍāʿah, as the genealogists give it — the tribe itself has its own page.

• Juhaynah

  An ancient Arab tribe of the Hijaz, attested from pre-Islamic times and proverbial in classical Arabic.

• Juʿfī

  A Madhḥijī tribe of Yemen through Saʿd al-ʿAshīra, whose name already carries the shape of a nisba — a source of confusion worth naming. A historical tribe, wit

• Kahlān

  The other great Qaḥṭānī grouping, from which the sources reckon most of the migrating Yemeni tribes.

• Kalb ibn Wabara

  The great Quḍāʿī tribe of the Syrian desert, reckoned through Wabara ibn Taghlib ibn Ḥulwān, and the weight of the Yamanī bloc in early Syria.

• Kaʿb ibn Rabīʿa

  The ʿĀmirī node from which Qushayr, ʿUqayl, al-Ḥarīsh and Jaʿda are reckoned — not the Banī Kaʿb of the Gulf and lower Iraq.

• Khathʿam

  A southern grouping of the ʿAsīr highlands, to which Shahrān and Balqarn are reckoned.

• Khawlān

  A great Yemeni name borne by more than one people — Khawlān of Ṣaʿda in the north and Khawlān al-ʿĀliya east of Sanaa — whose ancestry the genealogists never ag

• Khuzayma

  The grouping the genealogists cite at the shaʿb level when illustrating the tiers of descent.

• Khuzāʿah

  The tribe recorded as holding Mecca before Quraysh.

• Khuzāʿah ibn ʿAmr

  Khuzāʿah under its full genealogical name — and the ʿAmr in that name is a different man depending on which chain a source follows.

• Kināna

  An ancient Hijazi tribe of the Muḍar line, from which the sources reckon Quraysh.

• Kinda

  An ancient Yemeni tribe famous for its pre-Islamic kings in central Arabia and for the poet Imru' al-Qays.

• Labīd (the Sulamī branch)

  A branch of Banū Sulaym recorded by Ibn Khaldūn in the eastern country of the Maghrib coast after the westward movement, and named beside Dabbāb. It is not the

• Lakhm

  A Qaḥṭānī tribe of the Kahlān line recorded on the Syrian and Egyptian marches, and the line to which the genealogists reckon the historical kings of al-Ḥīra.

• Lujaym

  An ancestral name in the Bakr line, from which both Ḥanīfa of al-Yamāma and ʿIjl are reckoned.

• Lukayz

  One of the two great limbs of ʿAbd al-Qays in the genealogists — Lukayz ibn Afṣā — and the stem under which most of the tribe's sections on the al-Qaṭīf coast a

• Madhhij

  A great and ancient Yemeni tribal confederation, recorded at length by the classical genealogists.

• Mahra ibn Ḥaydān

  The classical genealogical position of Mahra inside Quḍāʿah — a placement made in Arabic genealogy for a people whose own language is not Arabic.

• Masrūḥ

  One of the two divisions into which Ḥarb is usually described as falling, the other being Banū Sālim. Reported in the Ḥijāz, about Medina and westward to the co

• Māzin ibn Mālik

  Recorded as a branch of Banū Tamīm — and the clearest case of a tribal name that recurs in four or five unrelated lines.

• Maʿāfir

  A Yemeni tribe reckoned to Ḥimyar in the commonest report, whose name was carried by a district and by a famous cloth. A historical tribe, with no living family

• Muḍar

  One of the two great ʿAdnānī groupings, gathering many of the tribes of the Hijaz and Najd.

• Muḥārib ibn Khaṣafa

  A Qaysī tribe of Najd — and one of at least three distinct groups called Muḥārib that the genealogists keep carefully apart.

• Murād

  A large tribe of Madhḥij in Yemen whose name the genealogists report as a byname, and which must not be confused with the given name Murād. A historical tribe,

• Mutayr

  A large Arabian tribe historically associated with Najd and the northeast of the peninsula.

• Muzayna

  A Muḍarī tribe of the Hijaz about Medina, and one of the few the genealogists name after a woman.

• Muʿāwiya ibn Kinda

  The son of Kinda from whom the genealogists count its ruling house, and a chain the sources order in more than one way.

• Naṣr ibn Muʿāwiya

  The largest of the Hawāzinī bodies as the sources reckon them, in the high country around al-Ṭāʾif and eastward into Najd.

• Nukra

  A section of ʿAbd al-Qays that the genealogists enter directly under Lukayz, on the coast of al-Qaṭīf. The name is vowelled Nukra, and it is also an ordinary Ar

• Qahtan

  In the classical Arab genealogical tradition, Qahtan is one of the two great ancestral divisions of the Arabs (the Qahtanite or 'southern' Arabs), alongside Adn

• Qaḥṭān of ʿAsīr

  The ʿAsīrī branch of Qaḥṭān, distinguished in the sources from the Najdī sections of the same name.

• Qays ibn Thaʿlaba

  A large section of Bakr ibn Wāʾil in eastern Arabia — not to be confused with the far larger Qays ʿAylān of Muḍar.

• Qays ʿAylān

  The great northern grouping under Muḍar, to which the genealogists reckon most of the Najdī and upper-Ḥijāzī tribes of the ʿAdnānī line — and the name that late

• Qudam

  A thinly attested Yemeni name, recorded both as a group and as a place, and easy to misread because the letters spell an ordinary Arabic word.