Al-Bahrani (of al-Bahrayn)

Overview

Al-Bahrani (al-Baḥrānī) is the nisba to al-Baḥrayn. The point that has to be made first is what the word meant to the writers who used it: in the classical geographers al-Baḥrayn is not an island but the whole eastern seaboard of Arabia, the country running from the neighbourhood of Basra down toward Oman, taking in al-Aḥsāʾ and al-Qaṭīf and the shore the same books call al-Khaṭṭ. The island lying off that shore has its own classical name, Uwāl, and the sources do not use the two interchangeably. So a man entered as al-Baḥrānī in an old book is placed in a country, not on an island, and not in any one town of it.

An irregular nisba

The form is worth explaining because it is not what the rule would give. Al-Baḥrayn is a dual, and the regular nisba to it would be Baḥraynī. Lisān al-ʿArab states that the Arabs said Baḥrānī instead, and gives the reason: they wanted the nisba to al-Baḥrayn kept apart from the nisba to al-baḥr, the sea, which is baḥrī. The irregularity is therefore deliberate — a distinction built into the word — and it is old, not a later slip. It also has a consequence the next section turns on: by dropping the yāʾ, al-Baḥrayn arrives at a written shape almost identical to one reached from a completely different starting point.

Names easily confused

Al-Baḥrānī, البحراني with ḥāʾ, and al-Bahrānī, البهراني with hāʾ, are two names, and this reference keeps them on two pages. The second is the nisba of Bahrāʾ, a tribe the genealogists reckon to Quḍāʿah, whose remembered country is the northern steppe toward the Syrian marches — nowhere near this coast. It too is irregular: from Bahrāʾ, ending in the extended alif, comes Bahrānī rather than Bahrāʾī. So both names are irregular, both end at nearly the same shape, and they differ by a single dotted letter that careless handwriting and untidy typing routinely lose. Neither can be inferred from the other. A family should establish which letter its own record carries before reading either country into its name.

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.