Al-Mushaqqari

Overview

Al-Mushaqqari is the nisba to al-Mushaqqar, which Yāqūt enters as an ancient fortress in al-Baḥrayn, attached by the place-books to the town of Hajar and belonging to the same ground as the al-Khaṭṭ coast. It is a ḥiṣn — a walled stronghold rather than a settlement — and it survived in the geography largely because the pre-Islamic poets named it, so that the later place-books had to explain a word their readers met in verse.

The reference records the place on its own page and does not repeat its account here. The sources also attach the fortress's name to one of the remembered ayyām of the Arabs; this page records that the name is so used and goes no further.

On sources

The classical works this reference cites record the fortress. They do not record al-Mushaqqarī as a family name, and no history is manufactured for it. The nisba is formed regularly from the place-name, and a man so called was attributed to the fortress or to the ground around it. Because the name is known chiefly from poetry, an occurrence of it in a text is as likely to be a literary reference as a statement about where anyone lived.

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.