Al-ʿAwwāmiyya

Overview

Al-ʿAwwāmiyya is one of the settlements of the al-Qaṭīf oasis on the al-Khaṭṭ coast, among the spring-fed palm ground behind the shore.

The name

The name is written العوامية and vowelled al-ʿAwwāmiyya. It is built on the root ʿ-w-m, which Ibn Manẓūr enters for swimming — *ʿāma yaʿūmu* — whence *ʿawwām*, one who swims much or swims well; the same root also gives *ʿām*, a year. The form here is the feminine of a relative adjective, the shape Arabic uses equally for a place named from a word and for a place named from a man who bore that word as a byname. Which of the two happened is not recorded, and the sources cited here do not say.

This is worth stating plainly, because the name is an ordinary word-form rather than a distinctive one. A page or a register that meets العوامية in a text has met a common Arabic shape, and the shape by itself neither locates a place nor identifies a family.

In the sources

The classical works this reference cites — Yāqūt, Ibn Manẓūr, Ibn Ḥazm, al-Qalqashandī, al-Hamdānī and Ibn Khaldūn — do not name Al-ʿAwwāmiyya. They describe this coast, and they describe it well: Yāqūt enters it as al-Khaṭṭ, the seaboard of al-Baḥrayn, and names al-Qaṭīf and the harbours along it. Ibn Manẓūr explains the word; neither he nor Yāqūt mentions the village. The page therefore records the name, how it is written and vowelled, and the country it stands in. It does not record a history, and nothing here should be read as one.