Misr, qasaba and town in al-Muqaddasi

In his Ahsan al-taqasim, al-Muqaddasi ranks settlements and compares them to the ranks of a state: the amsar are like kings, the qasabat like chamberlains, the towns like soldiers and the villages like foot-soldiers; he says he follows custom and good usage here, as the masters of the law did with questions of contracts of manumission and oaths. ¹

Al-Muqaddasi reports the disagreement over the word misr: the jurists say a misr is any town with a congregational mosque where the legal penalties are applied, where a governor resides, which is self-sufficient and gathers its rural district, such as Aththar, Nablus and Zawzan; the philologists say it is anything that forms a barrier between two sides, such as Basra, Raqqa and Arrajan; and in common usage it is any great and important town, such as San'a', Ramla and Marw. ¹ "By the measure of our science", however, a misr is any town where the supreme ruler resides and where the government offices are gathered. ¹

He says that balad covers the misr, the qasaba, the rural district, the kura and the nahiya; that when he describes a chief town within its district he calls it by its official name, such as al-Fustat, Bumijkath and al-Mahdiyya, and elsewhere by the name people know, Bukhara or Isfahan. ² He notes that he sometimes treats the same town as masculine and feminine: the masculine refers to the misr, the feminine to the qasaba or city. ² See also the fourteen regions.

This passage on the ranks of settlements and the meaning of misr is not in the main text of de Goeje's edition but in its apparatus, as an addition found only in the Constantinople manuscript (C). ¹