Al-Tubi

Overview

Al-Tūbī is given here as one of the localities of the al-Qaṭīf oasis, on the shore the geographers call al-Khaṭṭ. One feature of the name is worth putting first, because it is unusual.

A place-name in the shape of a nisba

Most place-names take a nisba by adding the ending: *al-Qaṭīf* gives *al-Qaṭīfī*, *al-Shuwayka* gives *al-Shuwaykī*. Here the place-name already ends in that way. The written form of the locality, التوبي, and the written form of the family name attributed to it are the same six letters, and nothing on the page separates them; only the sentence around the word says which is meant.

A place-name that carries the shape of a relative adjective is not unheard of in Arabic — such a name may have begun as an attribution to something else and then hardened into the name of the ground itself — but the sources cited here do not report how that happened in this case, and the page does not invent it. What it records is the coincidence of the two forms, which a reader meeting the word in a list has to be told about.

The word

Read with tāʾ, the base is the root t-w-b. Ibn Manẓūr gives it with the sense of returning: *tāba* is to return from a fault, *tawban* and *tawba* and *matāban*, and *al-tawwāb* is built on the same root; *tawb* is also given as the plural of *tawba*. Whether the locality's name descends from that sense, or from a personal name of the same shape, or from something the lexicons do not carry at all, the sources cited here do not say. The derivation is not settled, and the page reports it as unsettled.

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