Al-Sharii

Overview

Al-Sharīʿī is the nisba to a place called al-Sharīʿa. Among the localities this reference records it answers to al-Sharīʿa of the al-Qaṭīf oasis, but the base word is an ordinary noun of the landscape and the name is not sealed to that one place.

The word

Ibn Manẓūr enters *al-sharīʿa* under sh-r-ʿ as the watering place: the descent to water that people go down to, drink from and draw from, the *mashraʿ*. The verb *sharaʿa* is to enter, and beasts *sharaʿat fī al-māʾ* when they went into it. The lexicographers add the conditions that make the term exact — the water must be perennial and not cut off, and it must be open and visible, taken without a rope and a bucket. From the same root comes *al-shāriʿ*, the great road that people enter openly upon.

That is the sense a place-name draws on, and it is a common one: any country with running or standing water has such places, and ground is named from them freely. Consequently al-Sharīʿī is borne in more than one country, and a bare occurrence of it in a text is not proof of origin on this coast.

One word, a second sense

One fact is recorded here plainly and left alone. The same word carries, in the language, the legal sense, which the lexicographers derive from the concrete one above. This page takes no position on that sense, attaches it to nobody, and says nothing more about it. It is noted only because a reader who meets the written form should know that the word is not exclusively a word for ground.

On sources

The classical works this reference is permitted to cite do not document a settlement of this name in the Qaṭīf oasis. The lexical entry is documented in full; the place is not, and no history, founder or date is supplied for the family name here.

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.