Al-Qalah

Overview

Al-Qalʿa is given here as one of the localities of the al-Qaṭīf oasis, on the shore the geographers call al-Khaṭṭ. The word is one of the plainest in Arabic place-naming, and the lexicon has more in it than the obvious sense.

The word: a stronghold

Ibn Manẓūr enters *al-qalʿa* and *al-qalaʿa* under q-l-ʿ as the stronghold — the fort that cannot be taken, the fastness on a height — with the plurals *qilāʿ* and *qulūʿ*. That is the sense that has planted the word in the naming of ground from one end of the Arabic-speaking lands to the other: any place with a fort, or with the remains or the memory of one, may carry it. A name of this kind is therefore descriptive, and this reference does not attach it to anyone: the sources cited here say nothing about who built or held any structure at this locality, and the page invents nothing.

The rest of the root

Two further things sit under the same letters and are worth setting down, because the family name built on this place has to be read against them.

The first is *qalaʿa*, to pull a thing up by its root, to uproot and tear out; from it comes *al-miqlāʿ*, the sling from which a stone is thrown. A byname could stand on that sense with no fort involved.

The second is a nisba the lexicon itself records: *qalaʿī*, said of good lead or tin — *al-raṣāṣ al-qalaʿī* — and of swords, *al-suyūf al-qalaʿiyya*, which the lexicographers attribute to a place called Qalaʿa, named as a source of the metal. That is a nisba to a specific named place, and it is not this locality; but it produces the same written form.

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 senses. Places called al-Qalʿa are numerous, so a bare occurrence of the name is not evidence for this coast. The nisba built on it is al-Qalʿī.