Umm al-Sāhik

Overview

Umm al-Sāhik 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.

The name

The name is written أم الساهك and vowelled Umm al-Sāhik. Like Umm al-Ḥamām on the same coast, it is an *umm*- compound: *umm* here is the frame, meaning the place of a thing or the ground characterised by it, and there is no woman named in it — the descriptive word is the second one.

That second word answers to the root s-h-k. Ibn Manẓūr gives *sahakat al-rīḥu al-turāb*: the wind scoured the dust and stripped the surface of the ground, and *rīḥ sāhika* is a wind that runs hard and scours as it goes; the root also carries *sahak* for a rank smell. A name from a scouring wind or from ground stripped by one would sit naturally on the edge of a sand country. The sources cited here do not state the derivation, and the page records the root without asserting the origin.

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; the lexicon gives the word. The page records the name, its pattern and its root, and the country it stands in. It records no history.