Al-Khuwaylidiyya

Overview

Al-Khuwaylidiyya 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, treated in the classical sources as one country rather than as a list of villages.

The name

The name is written الخويلدية and vowelled al-Khuwaylidiyya. Its shape is transparent: a feminine relative adjective, *-iyya*, built on Khuwaylid, which is the diminutive of *Khālid* from the root kh-l-d — the root of *khulūd*, lasting and permanence. Diminutives of this pattern were ordinary personal names in the classical period, and a settlement named with the feminine relative adjective of a personal name is one of the commonest ways an Arabian village gets called what it is called.

What the pattern does not tell you is whose name it was. The sources cited here do not say, and this reference attaches the place to nobody: it records the form of the word and stops there. The nisba built on the village is al-Khuwaylidī.

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. They describe the coast: Yāqūt enters it as al-Khaṭṭ, the seaboard of al-Baḥrayn, and names al-Qaṭīf. The lexicon gives the root and the diminutive; neither gives the place. The page therefore records the name and the country it stands in, and no history.