Al-ʿIrāq

The name

The lexicographers read al-ʿIrāq as a description before it was a name. The ʿirāq is the bank or shore of water, and it is also the stitched hem along the folded edge of a waterskin: in both senses, an edge or a margin. The country is the margin of the Arab land along the Tigris and the Euphrates. A second derivation is reported from the roots of the palms and trees growing there, and the dictionaries record both without choosing between them.

What the sources mean by it

Classically al-ʿIrāq is the low, irrigated country of the two rivers. Yāqūt gives its breadth from al-Qādisiyya to Ḥulwān and its length down to ʿAbbādān at the sea; the sources differ over where its northern limit falls, and the upland between the two rivers above it is a separate country in the geographies, al-Jazīra. The classical ʿIrāq is accordingly narrower than the modern state that carries the name, and a source that places a group in al-Jazīra has not placed it in ʿIrāq.

In genealogy

Two of its towns matter to Arab genealogy more than any others outside the Ḥijāz: al-Baṣra and al-Kūfa. Both were settled by tribal contingents whose men were entered in the dīwān under their tribes, so the tribal map of the Peninsula was written out again here on paper. Many of the transmitters the later compilers name belonged to these towns, and a great part of ʿilm al-ansāb reaches us in their arrangement — the nassāba of Baṣra and Kūfa is a recognisable figure in the sources for that reason. Ṭayyiʾ and Banī Lām are among the tribes recorded moving north-east into this country from the Peninsula, and the nisba al-Lāmī is borne there — a placement, not a claim of descent.