Awāl

Overview

Awāl is the name the classical geographers give the island lying out from this coast in the Gulf. Yāqūt enters it as an island of al-Baḥrayn with villages, palms and cultivated ground on it — a settled island, not a bare rock — and the writers who describe this sea note the pearl banks worked along it. It is reached from the shore of al-Khaṭṭ, and the sources treat it as belonging to the same country as the mainland opposite.

Awāl and al-Baḥrayn are not two names for one thing

This is the confusion worth taking trouble over, because readers make it constantly and in both directions.

In the classical geography al-Baḥrayn is the long eastern seaboard of Arabia, running from the neighbourhood of al-Baṣra south to the borders of ʿUmān, seated at Hajar — the oasis country now called al-Aḥsāʾ — and taking in al-Qaṭīf and this coast along with the islands off it. Awāl is one island within that. So a reader who meets *al-Baḥrayn* in Yāqūt and supplies the island has shrunk the word to a fraction of what it meant; and a reader who meets *Awāl* and supplies the region has done the opposite, and stretched an island into a seaboard.

The two are easy to merge because the modern island state stands on Awāl and carries the old regional name. That is why this reference keeps two pages: al-Baḥrayn as the historic region, and Awāl as the island the geographers name. When a classical source says a man is *min al-Baḥrayn*, it means the mainland region far more often than the island.

The name

The geographers give Awāl without deriving it, and this page does not derive it either. Yāqūt reports that the name was also that of an idol, associated with Bakr and Taghlib in the time before Islam. That is what he records, and nothing more attaches to it here.