Why one scholar has five names
Ibn Sina appears in libraries under at least four names: Ibn Sina, Avicenna, Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina, and Pur Sina. None of them is a nickname and none is wrong. They are, in order, a patronymic, a Latinisation, a full formal name, and a Persian form - four different naming systems pointing at one man. This is the single biggest obstacle to looking anything up in premodern Islamic history, and it is why every one of the 153 figures in this atlas carries its name in Arabic script and a list of alternative forms: 380 aliases across the corpus, all of them searchable.
Nubala · Published · 7 min read
Two separate things are going on, and it helps to keep them apart. First, an Arabic name has parts, each doing a specific job, and different traditions quote different parts. Second, Arabic has sounds and letters that no Latin alphabet spells consistently, so even one part of one name has several English spellings. Sort out the structure first; the spelling is the easier half.
The five parts of a classical Arabic name
A formal name in this period is built from up to five components, and the full version of Al-Razi's name - stored on his page as Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi - contains four of them at once.
Abu Bakr is the kunya: Abu means father of, Umm means mother of, and the kunya is an honorific teknonym, often conventional rather than literal. Muhammad is the ism, the given name. Ibn Zakariya is the nasab, the patronymic chain - son of Zakariya - and it can run back several generations, which is why formal names get long. Al-Razi is the nisba, an adjective of origin: from Ray, the city near modern Tehran where his page says he was born and died. The fifth part, the laqab, is a title or epithet, and it is the one most often mistaken for a surname.
Short forms pick one part. The Latin West picked the nisba or the nasab and Latinised it; Arabic bibliography usually cites the nasab or the nisba; Persian and Urdu traditions sometimes use the ism with a different patronymic particle. Nothing in the system corresponds to a European family name, which is why alphabetising by last name produces nonsense here.
| Part | In Al-Razi's name | What it does | Another example in the atlas |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kunya | Abu Bakr | Father of - an honorific, often formulaic | Zubaida bint Ja'far is also recorded as Umm Ja'far |
| Ism | Muhammad | The given name | Mehmed II - Muhammad, in Turkish form |
| Nasab | ibn Zakariya | Son of; bint for daughter of | Zubaida bint Ja'far, daughter of Ja'far |
| Nisba | al-Razi | From a place, tribe or trade | Al-Khwarizmi, from Khwarezm |
| Laqab | - | A title or honorific, not a name | Nizam al-Mulk, order of the realm |
The laqab trap: a title that looks like a name
Several figures in this atlas are known almost exclusively by a title. Nizam al-Mulk - order of the realm - was the Seljuk vizier whose given name, recorded on his page as Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn Ali al-Tusi, almost nobody uses. Salahuddin al-Ayyubi is a laqab too: Salah al-Din, righteousness of the faith, which Europe shortened to Saladin. His page records the fuller form, al-Nasir Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, in which Yusuf is the actual given name.
The trap is that a title can be held by more than one person, and this atlas contains a clean example. Arwa al-Sulayhi, the Yemeni queen who lived from 1048 to 1138 and ruled from around 1067, is recorded under the alias al-Sayyida al-Hurra - the noble lady. Four centuries later, Sayyida al-Hurra, about 1485 to about 1561, governed Tetouan under the same title, which is now the name her page is filed under. Two women, one honorific, 437 years apart. A search for al-Sayyida al-Hurra should return both, and in this atlas it does.
So when you meet a name that translates as a virtue, a rank or an abstraction - order of the realm, light of the faith, the greatest master, proof of Islam - treat it as a job description and look for the ism underneath it.
The Latin names, and why they look nothing like the Arabic
From the twelfth century onwards, Arabic scientific works reached Latin Europe through translation, mostly in Iberia and Sicily, and the authors' names were reshaped to fit Latin. The results are so far from the originals that a reader can study Avicenna for a term without realising they are reading Ibn Sina.
Several figures here carry a Latinised alias; the eight below are the ones a medieval European medical or astronomical curriculum would have been built on.
| Latin name | The figure | What Europe read |
|---|---|---|
| Avicenna | Ibn Sina | The Canon of Medicine, a standard text for centuries |
| Averroes | Ibn Rushd | The commentaries on Aristotle |
| Rhazes, Rasis | Al-Razi | The clinical encyclopedia al-Hawi |
| Alhazen, Alhacen | Ibn al-Haytham | The Book of Optics |
| Albategnius | Al-Battani | Measurements that refined Ptolemaic astronomy |
| Geber | Jabir ibn Hayyan | The alchemical corpus |
| Johannitius | Hunayn ibn Ishaq | Galen, Hippocrates, Plato and Aristotle in Arabic and Syriac |
| Algazel | Al-Ghazali | The works Latin Europe read under the name Algazel |
Transliteration: the same name, six spellings
Even with the structure settled, one Arabic name has several English spellings, for reasons that are all mechanical rather than arbitrary.
Arabic has consonants with no single English letter. The letter qaf is written q or k, which is why Qushji and Kuşçu are the same man - Ali Qushji's page carries both. The glottal stop, hamza, and the pharyngeal ayn are written with an apostrophe, a reversed apostrophe, or nothing at all: Ja'far, Jafar, Jaʿfar. Long vowels may be marked with a macron in scholarly work and dropped elsewhere: Sina or Sīnā. And the definite article al- assimilates in speech - al-Din is pronounced ad-Din - which is why this atlas holds both Nur ad-Din Zangi and the alias Nur al-Din Mahmud for the same person.
On top of the Arabic there are regional orthographies. Turkish writes the same names with Turkish letters: Suleiman the Magnificent is also Kanuni Sultan Suleyman, and Mehmed II is Fatih Sultan Mehmet and Muhammad al-Fatih. Persian and Urdu add their own: Ibn Sina is Pur Sina in Persian, where pur means son, exactly as ibn does in Arabic. And Timur is Tamerlane in English, from Timur-i-lang, Timur the lame - an alias his page also records.
Vowels in the first syllable drift too, which is why Omar Khayyam and Umar Khayyam are the same poet, and why his page lists both.
How to find a figure whose spelling you are unsure of
Search in this atlas matches aliases, not just names, and it normalises before matching: diacritics are stripped, and apostrophes and the ayn and hamza marks are optional. So Sa'di and Sadi both reach Sa'di, and Salah al-Din, Salahuddin and Saladin all reach the same page.
Three practical tactics when a spelling fails.
Search the distinctive part rather than the whole name - the nisba or the nasab, not the kunya. Haytham finds Ibn al-Haytham where Abu Ali al-Hasan may not help, because that kunya and ism are shared by dozens of people.
Try the Latin name if the figure was read in medieval Europe - the eight in the table above are all indexed under both. And try the place: if you know the person worked in Cordoba or Samarkand, the city hub lists everyone the atlas associates with it, which is often faster than guessing a transliteration.
- Every figure page carries the name in Arabic script, so you can paste it into a catalogue search.
- 380 aliases across 153 figures - the most on any one page is four.
- Search strips diacritics and treats ' and ʿ as optional, so ASCII spellings work.
- A name that translates as a virtue or a rank is a laqab: look for the given name underneath.
- Do not alphabetise by the last word: al-Razi is not a surname, and ibn Zakariya is a father's name.
Questions readers ask
Why is Ibn Sina also called Avicenna?
Avicenna is the Latinised form his name took when his medical and philosophical works were translated in medieval Europe, reaching Latin through intermediary forms of Ibn Sina. Both are stored on his page, along with Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina and the Persian Pur Sina, and search matches all four.
What does al- mean at the start of a name?
It is the Arabic definite article, and in a name it usually introduces the nisba - an adjective of origin. Al-Khwarizmi means the one from Khwarezm; Al-Razi means the one from Ray. It is not a family name and should not be used for alphabetising.
What is the difference between ibn and bint?
Ibn means son of and bint means daughter of; both introduce the nasab, the patronymic. Zubaida bint Ja'far is Zubaida, daughter of Ja'far. Persian uses pur for the same relationship, which is why Ibn Sina is also Pur Sina.
Can two people have the same name in this atlas?
Titles can be shared. Arwa al-Sulayhi, who lived from 1048 to 1138 and ruled in Yemen from around 1067, and Sayyida al-Hurra of Tetouan, about 1485 to about 1561, are both recorded under the honorific al-Sayyida al-Hurra. Searching the title returns both.
Which spelling should I use in my own writing?
Use whichever your field's style guide specifies and stay consistent, then give the alternative once in brackets on first mention. For a figure read in medieval Europe, naming both forms - Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) - saves your reader a search.
Sources
- Annemarie Schimmel, Islamic Names (Edinburgh University Press, 1989).
- Jacqueline Sublet, Le voile du nom: essai sur le nom propre arabe (Presses Universitaires de France, 1991).
- Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement (Routledge, 1998) - cited on the Hunayn ibn Ishaq page.
- Charles Burnett, "The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Programme in Toledo in the Twelfth Century," Science in Context 14, no. 1-2 (2001).
- Lenn E. Goodman, Avicenna (Cornell University Press, 2006) - cited on the Ibn Sina page.
Counts in this guide are derived from the atlas data itself, so the prose cannot drift from the corpus. How to read the sources a figure page cites explains how the bibliographies are built and what each kind of work can carry.