Al-Mallāḥa

Overview

Al-Mallāḥa is one of the settlements of the al-Qaṭīf oasis, on the coast the geographers call al-Khaṭṭ — the palm belt watered from springs 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 الملاحة and vowelled al-Mallāḥa, and unlike most of the village names of this oasis it is a word the lexicon accounts for. Ibn Manẓūr enters it under m-l-ḥ, the root of *milḥ*, salt: *al-mallāḥa* is the place where salt is got, a salt pan or salt ground. The same root, on the same pattern, gives *mallāḥ*, the boatman or sailor who works a ship — a word that belongs to a coast as naturally as the first does. Both senses are in the lexicon and both are at home here; which one named the village, the sources do not say.

That double reading is the reason the family name al-Mallāḥī cannot be read as one thing only: it may record this village, and it may record the old trade.

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, and describe it well: Yāqūt enters it as al-Khaṭṭ, the seaboard of al-Baḥrayn, and names al-Qaṭīf and the harbours along it. The lexicon gives the word; the place-book does not give the place. So this page records the name, its vowelling and its root, and the country it stands in. It records no history, and nothing here should be read as one.