Al-Kuwaykib

Overview

Al-Kuwaykib 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 diminutive, and the diminutive is what this page has to give.

The name

The word is al-kuwaykib, the diminutive of *kawkab*, on the pattern *fuʿayʿil* that Arabic gives to a quadriliteral base. Ibn Manẓūr enters *kawkab* under k-w-k-b with the sense everyone knows first — the star — and then with a set of extended senses that show how far the word travels. *Kawkab* of a thing is the greater part of it, its bulk; *kawkab al-māʾ* is the main body of the water; *kawkab al-rawḍa* is the blossom of a meadow, its flowering; *kawkab al-ḥadīd* is the flash and glitter of iron; and *kawkab* is used of the fierce part of the summer heat. A name of this shape given to ground is therefore not necessarily about the sky.

The sources cited here do not state which of those senses, if any, produced this locality's name, and the page does not decide it. It records the word, its root and its pattern.

On the diminutive

One thing should be said plainly, because it is easy to misread. The diminutive in Arabian place-naming is not a statement about size or importance. It is a formal habit: al-Shuwayka, al-Khuwaylidiyya and a long line of others on this coast and beyond carry the same pattern, and the pattern is descriptive rather than diminishing. Al-Kuwaykib belongs to that class and should be read with it.

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 word and the pattern. The page records the name and the country it stands in, not a history. The nisba built on it is al-Kuwaykibī.