Al-Nasirah

Overview

Al-Nāṣira is given here as one of the localities of the al-Qaṭīf oasis, the spring-watered palm country on the shore the geographers call al-Khaṭṭ, behind which lies the coast of al-Baḥrayn as the classical books use that name. This reference records the name and the country it stands in; the sources it cites carry neither a description of the place nor a date for it.

The name

The word is the active participle in the feminine, *al-nāṣira*, from the root n-ṣ-r. Ibn Manẓūr enters the root with its plain sense — *al-naṣr*, help given to one wronged, and *naṣara* to aid; *istanṣara*, to ask for aid — and with a second sense that matters more for ground than the first. Rain, in this root, is said to help the earth: *naṣara al-ghaythu al-arḍa*, the rain aided the land and watered it, and land that has been rained on is *manṣūra*. The lexicon carries both senses under one head, and a name of this shape given to ground may be read against either.

The sources cited here do not state the derivation of this particular locality, and the page does not decide it. It records the word, its root, and the fact that both senses live in the root.

More than one Nasira

The form is ordinary, and it is not the property of one country. Places built on n-ṣ-r — *al-Nāṣira*, *al-Nāṣiriyya*, and others — are found across the Arabic-speaking lands, and a bare occurrence of the name in a text is not evidence for this coast. The nisba built on the locality here is al-Nāṣirī, and that page says at greater length why the nisba on its own identifies nothing.

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 its root. The page records the name and the country it stands in, not a history.