What names mean, and schools

This lesson asks you to write in Arabic about communities where it is spoken and aspects of their cultures, and to link what you write to your own experience. The museum offers an observation on what people's names mean and the story of how the madrasa began. Education systems in different communities today, posters and tourist letters, your class brings. ¹

Before you write, decide what you want to tell your reader, what you need from the two records, and what you will add yourself and attribute to its source.

Al-Hamdani observed that the Arabs tended in men's names towards the thorny trees that grow in pasture, because of their roughness, sharpness, hardness and patience with scarce water. Among their men's names are Talha, Samura and Sabra ². Among women's names, he observed, are names of tenderness and fruits, such as Bashama and Busra ². This is the record on Arab naming of children after plants.

The record keeps only al-Hamdani's observation, and says that what is not recorded there needs a further source ². On schools, Yeomans writes that madrasas began in eastern Persia as small informal establishments attached to the houses of teachers and Sufi shaykhs, and that the first state-funded one was the Nizamiyya, founded by the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk in Baghdad in 1068 ³. He sees the rise of the Fatimids as the spur for Sunnis to build madrasas; that is his view ^{4 3}.

Al-Hamdani explains men's names from the plants: roughness, hardness, patience with scarce water ². Give a reason: is a name a good way to keep a quality in mind, in a plant or in a person?

• Arab naming of children after plants: al-Hamdani's observation as the record keeps it.
• Madrasa: what Yeomans writes about how madrasas began and reached Egypt.

Read the records on Arab naming after plants and on the madrasa. Write a paragraph on the origin and meaning of a name you know, and a two-column chart comparing the madrasa as the record describes it with your school.