Al-Bahari (of the Qatif village)

Overview

Al-Bahari (al-Baḥārī) is the nisba to al-Baḥārī, one of the settlements of the al-Qaṭīf oasis, on the coast the geographers call al-Khaṭṭ — the spring-watered palm country between the shore of the Arabian Gulf and the sand country behind it. The village has its own page in this reference and its account is not repeated here.

Three names on one root

This is the page's substance, and it is worth stating flatly. The root b-ḥ-r stands behind three separate names that all belong to this one stretch of coast, and each was formed from a different thing.

Al-Baḥārī is formed from the name of a village of the al-Qaṭīf oasis. Al-Baḥrānī is formed from al-Baḥrayn, the name the classical geographers give to the whole eastern seaboard — a country, not a village, and the nisba to it is irregular for a reason its own page sets out. Al-Baḥrī is formed from al-baḥr, the sea itself, and is an ordinary descriptive word borne wherever there is a coast at all.

All three are written differently, and none of the three can be inferred from either of the others. But they are close in writing and identical in root, and a reader meeting one of them in an unvowelled or carelessly copied text should not assume he has met the one he was looking for. A family should establish which form its own record actually carries before reading a village, a country or a trade into its name. Further off in origin but nearer in writing, al-Bahrānī with hāʾ is the nisba of Bahrāʾ of Quḍāʿah and is not on this root at all.

On 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 and names al-Qaṭīf; Ibn Manẓūr gives the root, from the sea itself to what is named from it. The page records the name, its country and the distinction above, and constructs no history.

Bearing the name

A toponymic family name records a place an ancestor was attributed to — born there, settled there, known by it — as the name was applied to him, not a lineage. It attaches to no tribe, and two families bearing it need have no connection to one another beyond the place itself.