Hanzala

What Does the Name Hanzala Mean?

Hanzala is an Arabic given name meaning "colocynth," the bitter, gourd-like plant known to botany as Citrullus colocynthis. It comes from the Arabic noun ḥanẓalah (حنظلة), which names a single fruit or specimen of the species ḥanẓal (حنظل). Arabic dictionaries describe the ḥanẓal as a creeping plant of dry, sandy ground whose fruit is intensely bitter, so the name carries the plain sense of the plant itself rather than a moral or spiritual quality.

The name is written in English in several ways - Hanzala, Hanzalah, Handala, Hanẓala - all transliterations of the same Arabic spelling; the differences reflect how translators handle the Arabic letter ẓāʾ and the final -h. It is not related to the similar-sounding Arabic names Ḥamza or Ḥanīfa, which come from different roots and have different meanings.

Hanzala Name History & Origins

The name belongs to the pre-Islamic Arabic stock of personal names taken from plants and natural features, and it was already in use among Arab tribes before the rise of Islam. Its best-known early bearer is Hanzala ibn Abi Amir, a young man from Medina who became a companion of the Prophet Muhammad. He was killed at the battle of Uhud in 3 AH (625 CE); traditional accounts relate that he had left his home in a state of ritual impurity and that the angels washed him, giving him the byname Ghasil al-Mala'ika, "washed by the angels." His father, Abu Amir, was known as "the Monk" and later opposed the Muslim community, which made Hanzala's own loyalty a memorable part of the story.

Other early bearers include Hanzala ibn al-Rabi', remembered among those who wrote down the revelation, and Hanzala ibn Safwan al-Kalbi, an Umayyad governor of Egypt in the eighth century. The name also appears in Arab genealogies, where clans traced descent from an ancestor named Hanzala. Because the name is an ordinary Arabic word, it spread with Arabic-speaking Muslim communities and keeps its Arabic form rather than being translated; in South Asia and in older English texts it is often written Hanzalah, while the spelling Handala is common in modern English writing about the Middle East.

In the twentieth century the spelling Handala became familiar through the Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali, who in 1969 gave the name to a barefoot child refugee character who appears with his back turned in his drawings. Al-Ali took the name from the same bitter desert plant. That is a modern artistic use of a very old personal name, not its origin.