Baynūna

Overview

Baynūna is entered by Yāqūt as a district of the eastern side of Arabia, placed between the country of al-Baḥrayn and ʿOmān — that is, along the shore of the Arabian Gulf south of the al-Khaṭṭ coast. The geographers give it as a stretch of country rather than a town: a name for ground, of the kind an early text uses to say roughly where a man or a raid was, not exactly where he lived.

The name

The word is in the lexicon before it is on the map. Ibn Manẓūr enters *baynūna* under b-y-n, the root of *bayn* — between — and of *bāna yabīnu*, to be separated or to be distant: *baynūna* is the noun of that, separation and the distance between two things. A district lying between two countries and carrying a name that means betweenness is a plain enough case, though the sources do not actually say the name was given for that reason, and the page does not put the explanation in their mouths.

Reading the name

Because the word is ordinary, a bare occurrence of *baynūna* in a text is more often the common noun than the place, and the reader has to judge from the sentence. Where it is the place, it is this stretch of the eastern coast that the geographers mean.