BANU and BANI (short A, about equal stress on the two syllables) are the two inflections (nominative and accusative-dative-genitive, respectively) of a collective noun contracted from BANOON and BANEEN, which mean "sons of, but more generally, "children or descendants of." BANU is the filial counterparts to ABU (“father of”).

BANU has been used since ancient times in reference to familial, dynastic, tribal, and even national groups, typically thought of as descendants of a common male ancestor. The Qur’an refers to the Israelites as BANU ISRA’EEL (X:46) and BANI ISRA’EEL (II:40). The Abbasi dynasty that ruled the Islamic world from Baghdad were referred to as BANU AL-ABBAS. The family in which the Prophet Muhammad was born was called BANU HASHIM. In this sense, “house of” is not far off.

Indeed, Arabs referred to themselves as BANU YA’RUB, and during their early contacts with Europeans sometimes called them BANU AL-ASFAR (“children of the yellow one,” possibly referring to the pale pigmentation of their skin and hair). Humanity as a whole is called BANU ADAM.

With the degeneration of Arabic into regional dialects, case inflections disappeared from conversational Arabic, which favored word order as a structural paradigm. Outside of classical Arabic, BANU became superfluous, while BANI survived the linguistic devolution. Since locales often take their names from their inhabitants, it is not unusual to find place names with the prefix BANI. The European spelling BENI is clever in that it accurately captures the sound of the short A.

Webster’s New Geographical Dictionary mentions Beni Abbes (Morocco), Beni Hasan (Egypt), Beni Saf (Algeria), and Beni Suef (Egypt), but no Valencian or Spanish place names with the prefix "Beni".


The web site of the University of Valencia has the following to say about this topic:

http://www.uv.es/ICOM-3/FORcity/community.html

“Other mementos of five centuries of Islamic settlement are the names of towns, cities and rivers. A town that begins with "Al" (Arabic for "the") is a giveaway. Alicante is a prime example. Those that begin with "Beni" (such as Benidorm) are what remain of the one-time Muslim tribal districts of Valencia. The word means "sons of" and in the Middle East and North Africa was commonly matched with a proper name to identify a tribe. And, as elsewhere in northern Spain, river and gorge names beginning with "guad" are also derived from Arabic. The word is a deformation of "wadi", which means valley.”

Fuad