Al-Qalai

Overview

Al-Qalʿī is written القلعي, and the written form is reached from more than one direction. This page sets out the three, because a reader who assumes only the first will read the name too narrowly.

The first: a place called al-Qalʿa

The commonest reading is the plain toponymic. Ibn Manẓūr gives *al-qalʿa* under q-l-ʿ as the stronghold, the fastness that cannot be taken, plural *qilāʿ*. Ground carrying that name is found in country after country, and among the localities this reference records it answers to al-Qalʿa of the al-Qaṭīf oasis. Because such places are many, the nisba on its own does not identify which one is meant.

The second: uprooting

The same root gives *qalaʿa*, to pull a thing up by the root, to tear out; and *al-miqlāʿ*, the sling from which a stone is thrown. A byname may stand on that sense — on something said of a man, or of his trade or his manner — and arrive at the same letters with no place involved at all.

The third: the qalaʿi of the lexicon

The third route is one the lexicon supplies itself. *Al-raṣāṣ al-qalaʿī*, good lead or tin, and *al-suyūf al-qalaʿiyya*, swords of the same description, are entered by Ibn Manẓūr as attributed to a place called Qalaʿa, named as the source of the metal. That is already a nisba, formed long ago on a named place, and it is not the al-Qalʿa of this oasis. The vowelling distinguishes them in careful writing — *qalʿī* against *qalaʿī* — but modern writing rarely carries the vowels, and on the page the two are the same word.

On sources

The classical works this reference is permitted to cite do not document the locality of the Qaṭīf oasis called al-Qalʿa. The word and its senses are documented; the place is not, and no history, founder or date is supplied for the family name here. Which of the three roads a given family came by, only its own record can say.

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 word itself.