Sanābis

Overview

Sanābis is one of the settlements of the al-Qaṭīf oasis, on the coast the geographers call al-Khaṭṭ — the spring-watered palm country behind the shore of al-Baḥrayn, which the classical sources treat as one country rather than as a list of villages.

More than one Sanābis

The first thing to say about the name is that it is not unique. Settlements called Sanābis are found on this coast and on the island of Awāl across the water from it, and the name is met elsewhere as well. So a text or a family name that carries the word does not by itself say which Sanābis is meant. The nisba al-Sanābisī is built on the name, and it inherits the same ambiguity: it records that an ancestor came from a place so called, and not which one.

The older books also know *Sinbis* as a name borne by people, which is a separate word-history again and is not to be run together with the village names. This reference notes the overlap and draws no conclusion from it.

The name

The name is written سنابس and vowelled Sanābis. It has the shape of an Arabic broken plural, but Ibn Manẓūr enters no root that yields it with a meaning, and the page supplies none: where the lexicographers cannot derive a name they leave it, and a manufactured etymology is worse than an admitted gap.

In the sources

The classical works this reference cites — Yāqūt, Ibn Manẓūr, Ibn Ḥazm, al-Qalqashandī, al-Hamdānī and Ibn Khaldūn — do not name this village. Yāqūt describes the coast under al-Khaṭṭ, the seaboard of al-Baḥrayn, and names al-Qaṭīf and the harbours along it. The page records the name, how it is written and vowelled, its ambiguity and the country it stands in. It records no history.