Al-Hijazi

Overview

Al-Hijazi (al-Ḥijāzī) is the nisba to the Ḥijāz. The word is from ḥ-j-z, to bar or to come between: in Lisān al-ʿArab a ḥijāz is that which separates two things, and the geographers explain the region's name by the mountain wall that stands between Najd, the high interior, and Tihāma, the coastal lowland.

Where the geographers put it

In the classical books the Ḥijāz is that barrier and the country upon it — not the whole western seaboard. Which towns fall inside it is disputed: some geographers count Mecca in Tihāma rather than in the Ḥijāz, and the reports on Medina differ likewise, so a town's regional attribution can change from one book to the next. Modern usage takes the Ḥijāz as the entire western region from the sea to the escarpment, which is a wider thing than the geographers meant. A family name attributed to the Ḥijāz sits with neither reading in particular.

A name usually given from outside

A nisba to a region rather than a town is characteristically applied from beyond it — nobody inside the Ḥijāz is usefully distinguished by being Ḥijāzī. Names of this kind therefore tend to fix on families after a move, and they are borne in Egypt, the Levant and Iraq as readily as in the region itself.

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.