Banu Hanifa - Umayyad and Abbasid Eras

Umayyad and Abbasid Eras

Due to their role in the Apostasy movement, members of Banu Hanifa were initially banned from participating in the early Muslim conquests by the first Caliph, Abu Bakr. The ban was lifted by Abu Bakr's successor Umar, and members of Bani Hanifa subsequently joined Muslim forces in Iraq, with some settling in garrison towns such as al-Kufa.

Tribesmen from Banu Hanifa also supplied the ranks of rebellious movements such as the Kharijites. One member of the tribe by the name of Najdah ibn 'Amir, even founded a short-lived Kharijite state in al-Yamama during the Umayyad era. Thereafter the tribe seems to have resumed its pre-Islamic agricultural way of life, leading the famous Umayyad-era poet Jarir ibn Atiya to mock them in scathing satirical verse for choosing the "humble" life of the farmer over the "glorious" life of the Arab nomad, and accusing them of cowardice and incompetence in battle. Others such as the 8th century literary critic al-Jahiz, however, express admiration for their military prowess, surrounded as they were by hostile tribes from every direction. Al-Jahiz, however, also notes with curiosity that the tribe produced almost no poets of any repute. The tribes small pastoralist bedouin section, mentioned only fleetingly by Muslim sources, appears to have joined the rest of the bedouins of Bakr and 'Annizah in northern Arabia and southern Iraq, at some point after Islam according to al-Tabari.

Perhaps due to the legacy of the Ridda Wars and Najdah's Kharijites, the Umayyads and Abbasids made sure never to appoint a member of the tribe to governorship in their native province of Yamamah. In the 9th century, the Alid dynasty of Banul Ukhaidhir came to power in al-Yamama, having fled there from their native Mecca. According to Yaqut and others, Ukhaidhirite rule was harsh on Bani Hanifa, leading many of them to leave for Basra in Iraq, and to Upper Egypt, where sources such as al-Yaqubi of the 9th century state that Bani Hanifa formed the majority of the population of the valley of Wadi al-Allaqi, near Aswan, having moved there earlier with their women and children. There they worked in gold mining, and according to Yaqut, the "sultan of al-Allaqi" was a man of Bani Hanifa.

Geographers such as Al-Hamadani of the 10th century and Yaqut of the 13th seem to indicate that Bani Hanifa still resided in its ancestral lands at the time of their writings, though the tribe seems to have held little political power by then, and many of their old settlements had been taken over by other tribes, such as Bani Tamim and Bani 'Amir. Yaqut, however, reports that they still formed the majority in al-Yamama's provincial capital, Hadjr, though he could have been reporting from an earlier source.