| How to pronounce Andalus | Up + New + DUst + pLay + pUt + Sit Each block is a syllable. Thick black border indicates stress/emphasis. Other pronunciations are acceptable. |
|---|---|
| Original Spelling | أَنْدَلُس How to write Andalus in the original language, such as Arabic or Persian |
| Alternate spellings of Andalus | Andalos Andalous Endelus All of the above spellings are acceptable for this name. You may also create your own spelling. |
This is NOT a Quranic name, but Muslims can use it since it has a good or neutral meaning.
Meaning of Andalus
Andalus is an Arabic name for boys and girls that refers to Muslim Spain and other European areas that were under Islamic rules for 800 years. The origin of the word is uncertain and may come from an ancient Germanic language.
Reader Comments:
on Thursday 16th of November 2017 10:49:51 AM
3 theories behind the name:
1- Vandal theory:
The name Andalusia or Vandalusia is traditionally believed to be derived from Vandal, the Germanic tribe that briefly colonized parts of Iberia, from 409 to 429.
That derivation goes back to the 13th-century De rebus Hispaniae but has been viewed critically from the 18th century. Reinhart Dozy (1881) recognized its shortcomings but still accepted it and suggested that geographically, it originally referred only to the harbour from which the Vandals departed Iberia for the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa in 429.
Dozy’s view was adopted in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam in 1913 and became the mainstream view held in 20th-century scholarship.
2- Atlantic theory:
Another proposal is that Andalus is an Arabic-language version of the name of the Atlantic. This idea has recently been defended by Vallvé (1986).
Vallvé writes:
Arabic texts offering the first mentions of the island of Al-Andalus and the sea of Al-Andalus become extraordinarily clear if we substitute this expressions with “Atlantis” or “Atlantic”. The same can be said with reference to Hercules and the Amazons whose island, according to Arabic commentaries of these Greek and Latin legends, was located in jauf Al-Andalus—that is, to the north or interior of the Atlantic Ocean.
The Island of al-Andalus is mentioned in an anonymous Arabic chronicle of the conquest of Iberia composed two to three centuries after the fact. It is identified as the location of the landfall of the advance guard of the Moorish conquest of Iberia. The chronicle also says that “Island of al-Andalus” was subsequently renamed “Island of Tarifa”. The preliminary conquest force of a few hundred, led by the Berber chief, Tarif abu Zura, seized the first bit of land they encountered after crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in 710. The main conquest force led by Tariq ibn Ziyad followed them a year later. The landfall, now known in Spain as either Punta Marroquí or Punta de Tarifa, is in fact the southern tip of an islet, presently known as Isla de Tarifa or Isla de las Palomas, just offshore of the Iberian mainland.
3- Gothic theory:
Halm (1989) proposed a Gothic etymology. Drawing attention to the term Gothica sors, a Latin exonym of the Visigothic Kingdom, which translates to “Gothic lot”, Halm reconstructs a Gothic term that would correspond to the Latin term, meaning “lot lands”, as *landahlauts. The hypothetical term would have given rise both to the Latin loan translation Gothica sors and to the Arabic al-Andalus, by phonetic imitation.