The Genealogy of the Prophet ﷺ and the Races of the Arabs

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The books of Sīrah begin by asking: who are the Arabs? There is nothing scientific here; these are the legends the Arabs carried down the generations, and this is the standard narrative.

❧The races of the Arabs

The Arabs divide first into the extinct Arabs (al-ʿArab al-Bāʾidah), the most ancient peoples of the land, such as ʿĀd and Thamūd named in the Qurʾān, whose progeny, by the dominant opinion, Allah wiped out entirely; and the surviving Arabs (al-ʿArab al-Bāqiyah). These in turn are two branches. The pure Arabs (al-ʿArab al-ʿĀribah) are the Qaḥṭānīs of the south, the ancient civilisations of Yemen, descended from Qaḥṭān, whose son Yaʿrub is said to have first spoken Arabic (from Yaʿrub, they say, comes the very word ʿArab). The Arabized Arabs (al-ʿArab al-Mustaʿribah) are the ʿAdnānīs, descended from Ismāʿīl ibn Ibrāhīm, who settled in Makkah and took up the Arabic tongue, for Ibrāhīm himself spoke not Arabic but an ancient Semitic language nearer to old Hebrew.

Both Qaḥṭān and Ibrāhīm trace to Sām, the son of Nūḥ, from whom we get the word Semite; and there is a ḥadīth in al-Tirmidhī, which some grade authentic, that Sām is the father of the Arabs, Yāfith the father of the Romans, and Ḥām the father of the Africans, the same three sons the Bible names. We know Qaḥṭān predated ʿAdnān, because Ismāʿīl married into Jurhum, a branch of Qaḥṭān.

❧Twenty generations, set in stone

The Prophet ﷺ is an ʿAdnānī Arab. Between him and ʿAdnān are exactly twenty generations, agreed upon without a shadow of dispute and memorised: Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim ibn ʿAbd Manāf ibn Quṣayy ibn Kilāb ibn Murrah ibn Kaʿb ibn Luʾayy ibn Ghālib ibn Fihr ibn Mālik ibn al-Naḍr ibn Kināna ibn Khuzayma ibn Mudrika ibn Ilyās ibn Muḍar ibn Nizār ibn Maʿadd ibn ʿAdnān. Ibn al-Kalbī, one of the greatest scholars of genealogy (d. 204 AH), held that Maʿadd son of ʿAdnān lived in the time of ʿĪsā, which by a rough reckoning of three generations to a century places ʿAdnān around thirty years before ʿĪsā. Preserving all this was the work of a rare classical science, ʿIlm al-Ansāb, the science of lineage, in which a learned man was one who had memorised the branches and trees of the Arabs.

❧What we know, and what we do not

The lineage falls into three parts. From the Prophet ﷺ back to ʿAdnān is certain and agreed. From ʿAdnān back to Ismāʿīl is a question mark: the Jews and Christians do not record Ismāʿīl's line (though the Bible does name his son Qaydar, Kedar), and Arab folklore is poorly preserved, so al-Ṭabarī records seven differing opinions, some counting seven ancestors, some forty-one; we simply do not know. And from Ismāʿīl back to Ādam we have only the Torah, which we cannot rely upon. The charts hung in Muslim homes that run the Prophet's ﷺ line all the way to Ādam in some fifty-five generations are part fact, part myth, part fiction; the fifty-five fit the Jewish and fundamentalist-Christian claim of a six-thousand-year humanity, which the shaykh holds (as a matter of ẓann, not certainty) is not Islamic. Our tradition binds us to no such timeline; carbon dating and cave art run back tens of thousands of years, and even a ḥadīth in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, in which Ādam is shown his son Dāwūd who will live "at the end of time", suggests far more generations between Ādam and us than a short chart allows.

❧The chosen line

Of his lineage the Prophet ﷺ said, in a report in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim: إِنَّ اللَّهَ اصْطَفَىٰ كِنَانَةَ مِنْ وَلَدِ إِسْمَاعِيلَ، وَاصْطَفَىٰ قُرَيْشًا مِنْ كِنَانَةَ، وَاصْطَفَىٰ مِنْ قُرَيْشٍ بَنِي هَاشِمٍ، وَاصْطَفَانِي مِنْ بَنِي هَاشِمٍ, "Allah chose Kināna from the sons of Ismāʿīl, and chose Quraysh from Kināna, and chose Banū Hāshim from Quraysh, and chose me from Banū Hāshim." There is no man named "Quraysh" in the spine; it is a title, and the scholars name three candidates, a greater, a middle, and a lesser Quraysh: al-Naḍr, Fihr, and Quṣayy. The stronger view is Fihr, the twelfth ancestor, for it is at Fihr that all the clans of Quraysh, and the lineages of the ten promised Paradise, converge.

❧The truth about noble lineage

His was therefore held the noblest lineage among the Arabs, for whom status, cause, and trust all rested on nasab; when Jaʿfar spoke to the Najāshī and al-Mughīra to the emperor of Persia, they said, "Allah sent us a man whose lineage we know, the best of us in land and house and tribe, and he himself the best of us." Yet the Prophet ﷺ taught its limit plainly: لَا فَضْلَ لِعَرَبِيٍّ عَلَىٰ عَجَمِيٍّ، وَلَا لِأَبْيَضَ عَلَىٰ أَسْوَدَ إِلَّا بِالتَّقْوَىٰ, no Arab is above a non-Arab, nor white above black, save by taqwā; your lineage will not admit you to Paradise or the Fire.

But this does not make nasab and sharaf irrelevant in this world. The whole world acknowledges lineage as something one may be modestly proud of, so long as it does not swell into fakhr; even in America a Kennedy or a Rockefeller finds doors open, for prestige is built by what one's ancestors did. So it is that Sunnīs, without the Shīʿah's excess, still confer an honour on Quraysh and on the Ahl al-Bayt: the Prophet ﷺ said الْأَئِمَّةُ مِنْ قُرَيْشٍ, the leaders are from Quraysh (and for a thousand years, through the Umayyads and ʿAbbāsids, they were), and Zakāh is withheld from the Ahl al-Bayt as beneath their dignity. The righteous among them earn a double respect; the unrighteous are not saved by their blood. And what lineage would we expect Allah to choose for His Messenger ﷺ but the noblest in the history of mankind, built up by ancestors each of whom, as we shall see, changed the course of Quraysh.