Al-Shariah

Overview

Al-Sharīʿa is given here as one of the localities of the al-Qaṭīf oasis, on the shore the geographers call al-Khaṭṭ. Of the names in this group it is the one with the richest entry in the lexicon, and the entry is the substance of the page.

The word: a watering place

Ibn Manẓūr enters *al-sharīʿa* under sh-r-ʿ with a concrete sense, and it is a precise one. A *sharīʿa* is the watering place: the descent to water, the *mashraʿ*, which people go down to and drink from and draw from. The verb belongs with it — *sharaʿa* is to enter, and beasts *sharaʿat fī al-māʾ* when they went into it — so the noun is the place of going down and going in.

The lexicographers then attach conditions to the word that show how exact it is. It is not called a *sharīʿa*, they say, unless the water is *ʿidd* — perennial, not cut off — and unless it is open and visible, drawn from without a rope and a bucket. A well that has to be hauled from is not a *sharīʿa*; a spring or a run of water a man can walk down to is. In a country watered by springs, ground named *al-Sharīʿa* takes its name from something everyone in it would have recognised at once.

From the same root the lexicon gives *al-shāriʿ*, the great open road that people enter upon — the road as a public way, named for the same act of going openly into a thing.

The legal sense

One further fact belongs on the page, stated bare. The same word carries, in the language, the legal sense — what is laid down and prescribed — and the lexicographers derive that use from the concrete one just given: the way down to water, taken openly, standing as the figure for it. This reference records that the one word carries both, and stops there. It takes no position on the legal sense, connects it with nobody, and says nothing further about it.

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. The word is fully documented; the place is not. Ground called al-Sharīʿa is found in more than one country, for the plain reason that watering places are, so a bare occurrence of the name in a text is not evidence for this coast. The nisba built on it is al-Sharīʿī.