Dārīn

Overview

Dārīn is a furḍa — a landing place, a harbour where a cargo is put ashore — on this coast, which Yāqūt sets in al-Baḥrayn. It is a small place with a very large name, and the name comes from one commodity.

The musk of Dārīn

*Musk of Dārīn* is proverbial in the classical language. Yāqūt explains it in a line: musk was carried to Dārīn from India, and so people said "musk of Dārīn". Ibn Manẓūr gives the same account from the other end, in the lexicon rather than the geography: al-dārī is the dealer in aromatics, the *ʿaṭṭār*, and he is called that after Dārīn, a furḍa in al-Baḥrayn to which musk was brought from the direction of India. The ordinary classical word for a perfumer therefore runs through the name of this harbour.

That is exactly the mechanism at work in al-Khaṭṭ and its spears, one coast and two proverbs built the same way: a good is named for the port where it was landed and sold, not for the country it came from. Between them they say something true about this shore — that its fame in the language is a fame of trade.

The nisba

The nisba is Dārī. It does not point here on its own. The lexicographers give more than one origin for the form: Dārīn, and also Banū al-Dār, a group the genealogists enter under Lakhm, and derivations from *dāra* and from *dār*. So a family called al-Dārī may be named from this harbour, from a lineage, or from a trade in aromatics carried on anywhere at all — and the written form does not distinguish them.

Where it stands

Yāqūt gives the harbour, on this coast near al-Qaṭīf, and does not describe an island under a separate name. Later usage attaches Dārīn to the island now called Tārūt, which lies off that shore. That identification is later than the sources cited here, and this page reports the harbour as the geographers report it.