Quraysh Erotic

The Quraysh were the Arab tribe that ran Mecca from about the fifth century CE until the rise of Islam turned them from a merchant oligarchy into the ruling caste of an empire, and they survive today not as a community but as a lineage: the Hashemite kings of Jordan, the sayyid and sharif families scattered from Morocco to Indonesia, and anyone carrying the surname Qureshi all trace back to them. What made them a group was less blood than a town. Tradition credits an ancestor named Qusayy with gathering scattered kin into the barren valley around the Kaaba sometime in the 400s, seizing custody of the shrine from its previous keepers, and building the Dar al-Nadwa, a council house where clan elders settled disputes. From then on, being Quraysh meant living in the hollow of Mecca, holding a share in the pilgrim trade, and speaking the Hijazi Arabic that the Quran would later fix as the prestige form of the language.

The tribe was never a single bloc. Genealogists counted ten or more clans, split between the Quraysh of the Hollow, who lived close to the sanctuary, and the Quraysh of the Outskirts, who held the surrounding slopes and counted for less. Makhzum and Umayya were the money and the muscle. Hashim held the hereditary offices of feeding and watering pilgrims, prestigious but poorer. A great-grandfather of Muhammad, also named Hashim, is remembered for the ilaf, a set of safe-passage pacts with Bedouin tribes and border powers that let Meccan caravans move north to Syria in summer and south to Yemen in winter without paying protection twice. Religion served the same ends. The Quraysh organized themselves into a confraternity called the hums, marked by a stricter ritual code at the pilgrimage and a pointed refusal to stand at Arafat with outsiders, while the shrine of Hubal and the three goddesses drew in tribes whose trade Mecca then captured.

Islam split the tribe along its own fault lines. The clan of Hashim produced the Prophet, Makhzum and Umayya led the opposition at Badr and Uhud, and when Mecca surrendered in 630 the losers were absorbed rather than destroyed. Every caliph for the next six centuries was a Qurayshi, the Umayyads and then the Abbasids built dynasties on the name, and a widely cited hadith that the leaders are from Quraysh made descent from the tribe a formal qualification for rule in Sunni political theory for a thousand years. The Sharifs of Mecca, a Hashimite line, governed the Hejaz until 1925. The tribe as a residential, self-governing body dissolved into the wider Arab and Muslim world long before that, but the name still carries weight, and across Pakistan and northern India Qureshi remains one of the commonest surnames.