Nasab al-Nabī ﷺ

The nasab of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ, his lineage and descent, occupies a place of particular importance in the sīrah and in the early Arabic literature of genealogy (ʻilm al-ansāb). The Arabs of the Jāhiliyyah set great store by descent, preserving the pedigrees of the tribes and their branches with care, and the genealogy of the Prophet ﷺ, as the noblest of the Arabs in lineage, was recorded and transmitted with especial attention. The biographers open their works with his descent, tracing him through the most honoured houses of Quraysh back to Ismāʻīl and Ibrāhīm, and the tradition preserves his pedigree in agreed form for the generations nearest to him.

The agreed line of the Prophet’s ﷺ descent runs from him through his father to the eponymous ancestors of his clan and tribe: he is Muḥammad, son of ʻAbd Allāh, son of ʻAbd al-Muṭṭalib (whose name was Shayba), son of Hāshim, son of ʻAbd Manāf, son of Quṣayy, son of Kilāb, son of Murra, son of Kaʻb, son of Luʼayy, son of Ghālib, son of Fihr (who is called Quraysh, after whom the tribe is named), son of Mālik, son of al-Naḍr, son of Kināna, son of Khuzayma, son of Mudrika, son of Ilyās, son of Muḍar, son of Nizār, son of Maʻadd, son of ʻAdnān. Upon this line, from the Prophet ﷺ up to ʻAdnān, the genealogists agree, and it is this descent that is meant when he is called the Prophet ﷺ of the line of Hāshim, of Quraysh, of the Arabs.

Beyond ʻAdnān, the genealogists differed and the tradition grew uncertain. All agreed that ʻAdnān was of the progeny of Ismāʻīl, son of Ibrāhīm, and so that the Prophet ﷺ descended from the line of Ismāʻīl; but the number and the names of the generations between ʻAdnān and Ismāʻīl were variously given, and the Prophet ﷺ himself, by a well-known report, stopped at a certain point in reciting his ancestry and forbade going beyond it, saying that the genealogists had spoken falsely concerning what lay further back. The cautious among the scholars accordingly declined to fix the line above ʻAdnān, holding the connection to Ismāʻīl certain in principle but its particular links unestablished.

Within Quraysh, the descent of the Prophet ﷺ passed through its most honored branch. Quṣayy ibn Kilāb had gathered Quraysh into Makkah and united them about the Kaʻba, holding the offices of the sanctuary; and from his son ʻAbd Manāf descended Hāshim, who held the watering and the feeding of the pilgrims (al-siqāya wa-al-rifāda) and gave his name to the clan of the Prophet ﷺ, the Banū Hāshim. Hāshim was the great-grandfather of the Prophet ﷺ, and his son ʻAbd al-Muṭṭalib, the Prophet’s ﷺ grandfather, was a chief of Quraysh in his day and the guardian of Zamzam. Thus, the Prophet ﷺ came of the leading house of the leading tribe of Makkah, noble in lineage and charged with the honors of the sanctuary.

His mother was Āminah bint Wahb, of the Banū Zuhra, a clan of Quraysh descended likewise from Kilāb ibn Murra, so that his parents met in their common Qurashī descent. Through his ancestresses the Prophet ﷺ was connected to many of the houses of Quraysh and of the Arabs, and the genealogists recorded these maternal lines as well, for the nasab embraced both the agnatic descent that named a man and the network of kinship that bound the tribes. The purity and nobility of his descent on every side was a theme of the tradition, which held that he came forth always from the noblest of the two parties in each generation.

The nobility of the Prophet’s ﷺ lineage was understood in the tradition not as a ground of pride in the manner of the Jāhiliyyah, which Islam condemned, but as a part of the divine preparation for his mission and a sign of his honor. A celebrated prophetic saying declares that God chose Kināna from the children of Ismāʻīl, and Quraysh from Kināna, and the Banū Hāshim from Quraysh, and chose the Prophet ﷺ from the Banū Hāshim, so that he was the choicest of the choicest in descent. His coming of a known and honoured lineage was also held to have served his mission, for the Arabs knew his ancestry and could not impugn his origins, as the report of Hiraql (Heraclius) and Abū Sufyān attests, in which the emperor asked after the Prophet’s ﷺ descent and was told that he was among them of noble lineage.

The science of genealogy preserved and elaborated the nasab of the Prophet ﷺ in great detail, and the early works of ansāb, such as those of Ibn al-Kalbī, al-Zubayr ibn Bakkār, and later Ibn Ḥazm in his Jamharat ansāb al-ʻArab, set out the lines of Quraysh and the place of the Banū Hāshim within them. The biographers and the authors of the works on the Prophet’s ﷺ distinctions (khaṣāʼiṣ) treated his lineage as among his honors, and the recitation of his pedigree became a part of the devotional literature in his praise. The pedigree to ʻAdnān was learned and transmitted as a fixed text, while the discreet silence concerning what lay beyond was generally observed.

In the sīrah tradition, the nasab of the Prophet ﷺ stands at the threshold of his life: the descent through ʻAbd Allāh and ʻAbd al-Muṭṭalib and Hāshim, through Quṣayy and the houses of Quraysh, up through Kināna and Muḍar to ʻAdnān and the line of Ismāʻīl and Ibrāhīm. It joined him to the noblest lineage of the Arabs and to the legacy of the patriarch who had raised the foundations of the Kaʻba, and it furnished, in the understanding of the tradition, a fitting earthly descent for the final Messenger ﷺ, whose honour lay not in lineage alone but in the prophethood with which God distinguished him above all mankind.