Al-Ahkaf (Barr al-Ahkaf, southern Arabia)

Al-Ahkaf is the title of Sura 46 of the Qur'an and the name of a region in southern Arabia. Dictionaries usually read the word as "curved sand dunes", but the regional name points to the mountains behind the coast of southern Arabia.

The title of Sura 46 comes from the passage in which 'Ad are said to have warned their people in al-Ahkaf. Dictionaries, works of tafsir and translations usually render ahkaf as "curved sand dunes". Medieval Arab geographers placed al-Ahkaf as a sand desert of southern Arabia between Hadramawt and Oman, in the eastern part of al-Ramla or al-Rub' al-Khali, and some modern writers identify it with all of al-Ramla or its western half. ¹

C. Landberg showed that al-Ahkaf as a regional name is used in southern Arabia roughly as a synonym of Hadramawt in the broadest sense, and is not applied to the sands farther north. For the southern bedouin, Barr al-Ahkaf is the mountainous area behind the coast from Zufar west to Aden, whose central valley is Wadi Hadramawt. To them akkaf means mountains, not dunes, or caves. A report of a statement made to 'Ali b. Abi Talib by a man of Hadramawt suggests that the word was used this way in ancient times. ¹