Al-Baḥrayn (the historic region)

Two things with one name

This page is the historic region. In the geographies al-Baḥrayn is the long eastern seaboard of Arabia, running from the neighbourhood of Basra south to the borders of Oman, with Hajar — the oasis country now called al-Aḥsāʾ — as its seat, and taking in al-Qaṭīf and the islands the sources call Awāl. The modern state of Bahrain stands on those islands and carries the old regional name; its capital, Manama, has its own page here. When a classical source says a man is min al-Baḥrayn, it means the mainland region far more often than the islands.

The name

Al-Baḥrayn is a dual: 'the two seas'. The geographers disagree over which two waters are meant — the sea itself and the great springs and standing water inland are the usual pair — and Yāqūt records the disagreement without closing it.

A grammatical point worth knowing for family names: the nisba from al-Baḥrayn is Baḥrānī, not Baḥrī. Ibn Manẓūr gives the reason — Baḥrī would be taken for the ordinary word meaning 'of the sea' — so the irregular form is deliberate, and a Baḥrānī nisba points at this region rather than at a seafaring trade.

In genealogy

The early sources associate the region with ʿAbd al-Qays and with Bakr ibn Wāʾil, whose dwellings the genealogists place in it. That is an association of place as the sources record it, and nothing about any living family's descent follows from it.