Al-Baynuni

Overview

Al-Baynuni is the nisba to Baynūna, which Yāqūt enters as a district on the eastern side of Arabia, lying between the country of al-Baḥrayn and ʿOmān — that is, along the shore of the Arabian Gulf south of the al-Khaṭṭ coast. What the geographers give is a stretch of country rather than a town, and a nisba to a stretch of country is correspondingly loose: it says roughly where, not exactly where.

The word

The name is in the lexicon before it is on the map. Ibn Manẓūr enters baynūna under b-y-n, the root of bayn, between, and of bāna yabīnu, to be parted or to be distant; baynūna is the noun of that — separation, and the distance lying between two things. A district that lies between two countries and bears a name meaning betweenness is a plain enough case, but the sources do not say the name was given for that reason and this page does not put the explanation in their mouths.

One consequence follows for reading. Because the word is ordinary, an occurrence of baynūna in a text is more often the common noun than the place, and a byname built on the common word would be written identically.

On sources

The classical works this reference cites record the district. They do not record al-Baynūnī as a family name, and this page supplies no history for it. The nisba is regular, the place is documented, and the two facts together are the whole of what can be said: the page records the name and the country, not a descent.

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.