Al-Rabīʿiyya

Overview

Al-Rabīʿiyya is one of the settlements of the al-Qaṭīf oasis, on the coast the geographers call al-Khaṭṭ — the spring-watered palm country 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 الربيعية and vowelled al-Rabīʿiyya, a feminine relative adjective from the root r-b-ʿ. Ibn Manẓūr's entry is a rich one and several of its words could stand behind a place-name. *Al-rabīʿ* is the season of growth and the rain that brings it. *Al-rabʿ* is a dwelling and the people of it — the ground a group stops on, from *rabaʿa*, to stay in a place; *ribāʿ* is its plural, and the word is common in poetry for the traces of a camp. *Al-marbaʿ* is the ground where people pass the spring. The root also gives the personal name *Rabīʿa*, and a relative adjective on a personal name is an ordinary way to name a settlement.

Which of these named this village, the sources cited here do not say, and the page does not decide it — nor does it attach the name to any person or family.

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. Yāqūt describes the coast under al-Khaṭṭ and names al-Qaṭīf; the lexicon gives the root. The page records the name, its vowelling and its root, and the country it stands in — and no history.