Al-Hajiri (with ha)

Overview

Al-Hajiri, written الحاجري with ḥāʾ, is the nisba to Ḥājir. Yāqūt enters Ḥājir as a manzil — a halting place, a stage with water where the caravans stopped — on the road the pilgrims travelled toward Mecca, in the Najd country crossed by that road. It is a road-name, not a town-name: what the geographers describe is a station on a route, and men were attributed to it as they were attributed to any place they were known to have come from or camped at.

This page therefore begins by saying plainly what it is not. Ḥājir does not lie on the eastern coast, and this name has no business being read as a name of al-Qaṭīf or of the country of al-Baḥrayn. It is written here because two names that do belong to that coast keep pointing at it, and a reader who follows either of them arrives at a third name with no page of its own. That gap is what this entry closes.

The third of three

The two others are already in this reference and each says the same thing from its own side. Al-Hājirī, written الهاجري, is attributed in eastern Arabia to Banī Hājir, and is also built on the ordinary personal name Hājir. Al-Hajarī, written الهَجَري, is the nisba to the town of Hajar and to the seat of the country the geographers call al-Baḥrayn. Both of those pages state that al-Ḥājirī with ḥāʾ is a third and different name, and neither of them could carry it, because it is not theirs.

Set side by side the three separate cleanly. الحاجري opens with ḥāʾ and points at a watering-stage on the Najdī pilgrim road. الهاجري opens with hāʾ and carries the alif, and points at a tribe or at an ancestor's given name. الهَجَري opens with hāʾ and has no alif, and points at a place on the eastern seaboard. The distinction is a matter of one letter in the first case and one alif in the second, and both are exactly the kind of mark that careless writing loses. Losing them merges three unrelated names into one, which is why the three are kept apart here.

The word

Under the root ḥ-j-r Ibn Manẓūr gives ḥajr for forbidding and withholding — the sense behind ḥajara, to bar or to interdict — and ḥājir as the active participle of it. He gives ḥājir a specific use in the language of watercourses: the raised lip of a valley or the rim of ground that holds the water back and keeps it standing, the lexicographers noting that the form is fāʿil in the sense of mafʿūl. Ground that catches and holds water is exactly what a caravan stage on a desert road needs to be, though the sources do not say in so many words that the station was named for it, and no derivation is asserted here.

A byname built on the ordinary participle, of a man who withheld or barred something, is written in the same letters and cannot be told from the place-name 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.