Al-Baḥārī

Overview

Al-Baḥārī is one of the settlements of the al-Qaṭīf oasis, on the coast the geographers call al-Khaṭṭ — the spring-watered palm country between the shore of the Arabian Gulf and the sand country behind it, which the classical sources treat as one country rather than as a list of villages.

The name

The name is written البحاري, and the root behind it is plain: b-ḥ-r, the root of *baḥr*, the sea. Ibn Manẓūr's entry runs from the sea itself to everything named from it — *baḥrī* for what belongs to the sea or lies toward it, and the country's own name al-Baḥrayn in the dual, which the geographers use for this whole eastern province. A name of this shape on a coast needs no explanation beyond its root, though the sources cited here do not state the derivation of this particular village and the page does not assert it.

The word is ordinary, which means the name is not distinctive: forms from *baḥr* name places and people in many countries, and a bare occurrence of one is not evidence for this coast. Al-Baḥrānī, the well-known nisba of this province, is a separate formation and should not be run together with the village name.

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, the seaboard of al-Baḥrayn, and names al-Qaṭīf and the harbours along it. The lexicon gives the root; the place-book does not give the place. The page records the name and the country it stands in, and no history.