Al-Mushaqqar

Overview

Al-Mushaqqar is entered by Yāqūt as an ancient fortress in al-Baḥrayn, the eastern country whose seat is Hajar; the place-books attach it to that town, and it belongs to the same ground as the al-Khaṭṭ coast and its oases. The geographers give it as a *ḥiṣn* — a fort, a walled stronghold rather than a settlement — and it is one of the few structures of this country that the classical literature names at all.

In the poetry

The reason the name survived is verse. Yāqūt records that the poets of the pre-Islamic age mention al-Mushaqqar, and a fortress that enters poetry enters the geography with it: the later place-books know it partly because the *dīwāns* obliged them to explain a word their readers met. The sources also attach the name to one of the remembered *ayyām*, the days or battle-days of the Arabs, called after the fortress. This reference records that the name is so used and goes no further; the accounts of that day belong to the books of *ayyām*, and nothing in them is repeated here.

The name

The lexicographers enter *al-Mushaqqar* as a proper name of this fortress, under the root sh-q-r — the root of *ashqar*, red or sorrel, said of a horse's colour and of a man's hair. Whether the fort was named for the colour of its stone or of its ground, the sources do not say, and the page will not decide it. The form itself is a passive participle of the second measure, of the shape a builder's name takes.

Reading the name

The word is a form before it is a place, and the classical books know more than one *mushaqqar* of ground. This one is the fortress of Hajar, and that is what an unqualified mention in a poem of this country will normally mean; a mention elsewhere is not evidence about this coast.