Hajar

Overview

Hajar is entered in the classical place-books as a town of eastern Arabia, and the word carries a double sense that anyone reading a name on this coast has to know. It is a town, which the geographers make the seat of the country called al-Baḥrayn — the mainland province of the eastern seaboard, not the island; and the same name is used for that whole country, so that a writer may put a man *bi-Hajar* and mean the province of which al-Qaṭīf, the al-Khaṭṭ coast and the oasis of al-Aḥsāʾ are parts. Yāqūt reports both usages, and he does not always separate them, because his authorities did not. That is the reason a name built on Hajar is met the length of this shore and not in one town only: it can record the town, and it can record the country.

The name and the nisba

Ibn Manẓūr enters Hajar plainly — *ism baladin mudhakkarun maṣrūf*, the name of a town, treated as masculine and fully declined — a point the grammarians take trouble over, because names of this shape often are not. The lexicon then gives the piece of information that explains the coast's two surnames: the nisba to Hajar comes out Hājirī, *ʿalā ghayri qiyās*, against the rule, beside the regular Hajarī. So both al-Hajarī and the written form al-Hājirī can point at this town.

The overlap does not stop there, and the honest thing is to say so. Al-Hājirī in eastern Arabia is more usually read as a nisba to the tribe of Banī Hājir, which is a different thing entirely; and *ḥajar*, stone, with the other *ḥāʾ*, is a different word again. The written forms cross. A bare occurrence settles nothing on its own.

Dates, and the proverb

What the Arabic language remembers best about Hajar is its dates. The proverb is in the lexicon: *ka-mubḍiʿi tamrin ilā Hajar* — like a man sending dates to Hajar — said of carrying a thing to the place that is full of it already, in the way other languages carry coals to a coal town. The lexicographers also record *qilāl Hajar*, the large jars called after the town, which are cited in the old books as a known measure; a vessel that becomes a unit of measurement is a vessel that travelled.

Hajar and al-Baḥrayn

Because the town gave its name to the country, the safest reading of an unqualified *Hajar* in an early text is the wide one: the eastern province, its coast and its oases together. Ibn Ḥazm, treating ʿAbd al-Qays, places that tribe's dwellings in this country, and the geographers' Hajar is the same ground under another word. Where a source means the town and not the province it will usually say so; where it does not, the reference does not choose for it.