Hajar

Origin

As a woman's given name today, Hājar is the arabized form of a non-Arabic (Hebrew/Aramaic) name. Classical philologists count it among the foreign proper names, and a foreign name is not given an Arabic derivation.

Two forms that share a spelling

Arabic does have a root h-j-r — parting and severance, from which *hijra* — and an active participle *hājir* can be built from it. So the same written shape can arise twice, from two different origins: a forebear called by the Arabic participle, and the foreign name arabized. The nisba al-Hājirī is referred to the tribe of Banī Hājir or to a forebear of that name — not to the arabized woman's name. The resemblance between them is one of form, not of origin.

Attestation

Hājar is known from the transmitted accounts of the prophet Ibrāhīm and from what is reported with them about Mecca and Zamzam. Her name is not in the Qur'anic text itself: sura 14 records Ibrāhīm settling some of his offspring by the sacred house without naming her. This reference reports the name as it reaches us — through transmitted narrative — and says so rather than implying a scriptural attestation the text does not carry.

Three names modern writing merges

• Hājar, the woman's given name — foreign in origin, arabized. This page.
• Banī Hājir, the tribe of eastern Arabia and Qatar, whose nisba al-Hājirī has its own page here.
• Ḥājir with ḥāʾ, which Yāqūt records as a halting place on the pilgrim road to Mecca; and Hajar, a town of eastern Arabia whose nisba is al-Hajarī.

The sources keep these apart. Modern writing runs them together, and a reader who meets الهاجري and supplies the woman's given name has misread it.