Al-Hajari

Overview

Al-Hajari (al-Hajarī) is the nisba to Hajar. Yāqūt enters Hajar as a town of eastern Arabia and reports that the name is used in two widths: of one named settlement, and of the seat of the whole country the geographers call al-Baḥrayn — the seaboard that takes in al-Aḥsāʾ and al-Qaṭīf. That double use is why the nisba is met right across this coast and cannot be pinned to a single village: a man called al-Hajarī in an old book may be from the town, or from the country the town gave its name to, and the text often does not say which.

Hajar is proverbial in the classical language, in the saying about the man who carries dates to Hajar — the place already full of what he brings. The lexicographers repeat it under the root, which is one reason the name stayed familiar far from the coast.

The pair with al-Hajri

This page is the counterpart of another. The nisba al-Hājirī, written الهاجري, is attributed in eastern Arabia to the tribe of Banī Hājir, and is also formed on the ordinary personal name Hājir; that page says plainly that al-Hajarī, the nisba to the town of Hajar, is a different name which modern writing merges with it, and that al-Ḥājirī with ḥāʾ — Yāqūt's halting place on the pilgrim road — is a third. Read from this side, the distinction completes itself: الهَجَري is built on هَجَر with no alif and points at a place; الهاجري is built on هاجر with the alif and points at a tribe or an ancestor's name; الحاجري opens with a different letter altogether. The lexicons also report an irregular hājirī used of a man attributed to Hajar, outside the ordinary pattern, and that report is a further reason the two written forms drift together in later copying. None of that makes them one name.

The word

The root h-j-r in Lisān al-ʿArab is parting, leaving off, and severance — the root of hijra — and Hajar as a place-name is entered separately from those senses. A byname built on the ordinary word rather than on the town is written exactly the same way and cannot be told from it on the page.

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.