Al-Dirah

Overview

Al-Dīra is given here as one of the localities of the al-Qaṭīf oasis, on the shore the geographers call al-Khaṭṭ. The name is a common one, and the useful content of this page is the word rather than a history, which the permitted sources do not supply.

Two readings of the word

Two readings stand open, and the page keeps both.

The first is al-dayr. Ibn Manẓūr enters *dayr* as a building of a known kind — the monastery — its plural *adyār*, and the man who keeps it *dayyār* or *dayrānī*. The word is the commonest single element in Arabic place-names of a whole class: settlements called Dayr and compounds beginning with it are found from one end of the Arabic-speaking lands to the other, and a place may keep such a name long after what stood there is gone.

The second is al-dār, from the root d-w-r — a dwelling, a house, a quarter where people alight; its plural is *diyār*, and the lexicon carries the old idiom *mā bi-l-dār dayyār*, there is not a soul in the place, which it explains as a form built on *dāra*. Ground named as the dwelling, the settled quarter, is at least as ordinary a naming as the first.

The sources cited here do not state which reading belongs to this locality, and the page does not choose. Where the derivation is not settled, saying so is the accurate report.

More than one Dira

The name, on either reading, is borne in many countries, and a bare occurrence of it in a text is not evidence for this coast. The nisba built on the locality here is al-Dīrī, and that name is likewise found far from this country.

In the sources

The classical works this reference cites — Yāqūt, Ibn Manẓūr, Ibn Ḥazm, al-Qalqashandī, al-Hamdānī and Ibn Khaldūn — do not record this locality of the Qaṭīf oasis. Yāqūt describes the coast under al-Khaṭṭ and names al-Qaṭīf; the lexicon gives the two words the name may stand on. The page records the name and the country, not a history.