Al-Awjām

Overview

Al-Awjām is one of the settlements of the al-Qaṭīf oasis, on the coast the geographers call al-Khaṭṭ — the spring-watered palm country behind the shore of al-Baḥrayn, which the classical sources treat as one country rather than as a list of villages.

The name

The name is written الأوجام and vowelled al-Awjām. As a word, *awjām* is in the lexicon: Ibn Manẓūr enters *wajam* under w-j-m for stones heaped one on another on a rise, set up as a mark on the ground, and gives *awjām* as its plural. The same root carries an unrelated sense — *wajama*, to fall silent in grief or anger — which has nothing to do with a place name.

Whether the village takes its name from those stone marks, the sources cited here do not say, and the page does not assert it. What can be said is that the form is a sound Arabic plural and that the lexicon supplies the word.

In the sources

The classical works this reference cites — Yāqūt, Ibn Manẓūr, Ibn Ḥazm, al-Qalqashandī, al-Hamdānī and Ibn Khaldūn — do not name this village. Yāqūt describes the coast under al-Khaṭṭ and names al-Qaṭīf; the lexicon has the word but not the place. So the page records the name, how it is written and vowelled, the word behind it and the country it stands in — and no history. The family name al-Awjāmī is the nisba built on it.