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, a town of al-Andalus, modern Guadix, now in the province of Grenada [see gharnāṭa ] 60 km/37 miles northwest of the province’s capital, chef-lieu of a partido judicial and seat of the diocese of Guadix-Baza, with a population of ca. 20,000, perhaps twice what it had in Islamic times. The name goes back to a pre-Islamic toponym, perhaps Iberian, Acci , rendered Ās̲h̲ by the Arabs, prefixed by the element Wādī [see wādī. 3.], applied not only to the town and the river on which it stood but also to the surrounding region. Sometimes the forms Wādī ’l-As̲h̲ā(t) and W. Yā…

(a.), pls. awdiya , awdāʾ , etc., in Syrian colloquial widyān (see A. Barthélemy, Dictionnaire arabe-français . Dialectes de Syrie , Paris 1935-54, 889), in the Arab lands in general, a river valley. The conventional English spelling is wadi. 1. In the Arabian peninsula. In desert terrain, a wadi is usually dry, but may carry seasonal water, or occasional floods ( sayl ), which are often a mixture of water, mud and stones. These ¶ desert valleys are very different in both topography and gradient from those in lands of higher and more regular rainfall; for while it is …

, Guadalquivir, the name given by the Arabs to the ancient Betis river in Southern Spain. It has remained in Spanish toponymy through the Spanish-Arabic dialect form Wād al-Kibīr. According to the Arab sources, it is also called al-Nahr al-Akbar or al-Nahr al-Aʿẓam (the Great River), Nahr Ḳurṭuba (River of Cordova) and Nahr Is̲h̲bīliyā (River of Seville), but it is seldom called Nahr Bīṭī/Bīṭa (Betis River). In poetry sometimes it is called Nahr Ḥimṣ (River of Ḥimṣ), that is, River of…