Mu'jam ma Ista'jam (al-Bakri's geographical dictionary)

The Mu'jam ma sta'jam is a geographical dictionary by Abu Ubayd Abd Allah ibn Abd al-Aziz ibn Abi Mus'ab al-Bakri, whom the edition's title page calls "the jurist, hadith master, man of letters and vizier". ¹ At its opening al-Bakri says he recorded all the halting places, abodes, villages, cities, mountains, ruins, waters, wells and enclosures named in hadith, reports, histories and poetry, located and defined, arranged by the letters of the alphabet and carefully vocalized, because he saw that these names "had become obscure to people" and wanted to give each place "with its form made clear and its letters pointed", so that no confusion or corruption could arise. ²

Al-Bakri explains that the correctness of such names cannot be reached by intelligence and wit as other things can, and lists examples of place names that look alike or differ by a dot: Na'ija and Ba'ija, Nakhla and Nahla, Jund and Janad, Tihama and Nihama, Sumn and Suma, Shaba and Shama. ² He tells, after Ibn Qutayba, how a verse of Abu Dhu'ayb with "Dhat al-Dayr" was read to al-Asma'i, and a Bedouin present said it was "Dhat al-Dabr", with a b, a mountain pass in his country; and al-Asma'i adopted the reading. ²

Al-Bakri says he attributes every statement to the philologist or transmitter who made it and gives the derivation of a name where known, and that everything he cites from al-Sakuni comes from Abu Ubayd Allah Amr ibn Bishr al-Sakuni's book on the mountains of Tihama and their places, transmitted from Abu al-Ash'ath al-Kindi from the Bedouin Arram ibn al-Asbagh al-Sulami. ³

Al-Bakri begins with the Arabian peninsula and the settlement of the Arabs in it and elsewhere, the place of each tribe, places shared by two or more tribes, and tribes that overcame their neighbours and kept a place to themselves, opening with Hisham ibn Muhammad al-Kalbi's report from his father from Ibn Abbas on the sons of Nizar ibn Ma'add. ³ He then gives the scholars' definitions of the peninsula: Malik's, that it is Mecca, Medina, al-Yamama and Yemen; al-Asma'i's, that it is what the kings of Persia never reached, from the far end of Aden Abyan to the edges of Syria in length and from Jidda to the farmland of Iraq in breadth; and those of al-Sha'bi and Abu Ubayd. ^{3 4} He explains that it is called an "island" because the Persian Gulf, the Abyssinian Sea, the Euphrates and the Tigris surround it, tracing the waters round it from the Euphrates to the sea, then to al-Qulzum, the Nile and the Syrian sea. ⁴ This introduction fills the opening pages until the dictionary begins with the chapter of hamza and alif. ⁵

Al-Bakri orders the letters of his book "in the manner of the Maghribis", and the edition prints a table of this order before the text. ⁶

Volume 1 of Ferdinand Wüstenfeld's edition, made from the Leiden, Cambridge, London and Milan manuscripts and published in Göttingen and Paris in 1876, was read. ⁷ In his German preface Wüstenfeld says that the Leiden manuscript was copied in 709 AH (1309) in a naskh hand often lacking diacritical points, and that the Cambridge manuscript, acquired by Burckhardt, is one of the best Arabic manuscripts, fully vocalized in a fine Maghribi hand, completed from other copies by a Damascene Hanafi scholar, Ibrahim ibn Sulayman al-Jinini, between 1095 and 1100 AH. ^{8 9} Wüstenfeld quotes Dozy's French verdict that the dictionary is "unique in its kind", unmatched in the extent and exactness of its detail, and an invaluable help in reading old Arabic poetry. ¹⁰