Osama bin Laden - Lion??

Names that mean "lion"

O graceful lion, son of opium

May 10th 2011, 21:09 by G.L. | NEW YORK

IN my recent post about Osama bin Laden I noted that Syria's former president, Hafez al-Assad, was called "the Lion of Syria". This is because asad in Arabic means "lion". But so, as R.L.G. then pointed out to me, does Osama, or Usama. And so do a bunch of other Arabic names: 'Abbas, Hamza, Heydar, Beyhas, Laith, Sab', Najidh, and perhaps others I've missed. Asad and laith (used more in poetry) literally mean lion, but how can so many other names mean it too?

A consultation with a couple of native speakers and a search through the estimable Arabic-English dictionary of Hans Wehr reveal a few clues. Some of the names seem to refer to attributes of lionhood. The verb 'abasa (the apostrophe denotes the letter ayin) means to frown, scowl or look angry, as lions often seem to. Najadha (the dh is the letter dhal) means to importune, but naajidh is a molar tooth, and to show one's molars (abda 'an nuwajida), according to Wehr, is to bare one's teeth in a hostile way—so Najidh, unless I'm wrong and it's Najid, means "the toothy one". Asada doesn't have a meaning in its basic form, but one of its variants, istasada, means to take on great, ie, lion-like, strength; this suggests that the verb came from the noun asad, lion, rather than the other way around.

Meanwhile, the root of Osama/Usama is wasama, which is to brand or stamp (eg, cattle). By extension, wisaam is a mark of distinction or honor and wasaama is grace or beauty—both things that lions have, even if the late Mr bin Laden was sorely lacking in either.

The sources of the others are less obvious. Heydar and Beyhas don't correspond to Arabic verbs, suggesting that they may be imports. Hamaza means to bite or burn the tongue—specifically, a taste that does so. Lion-ish? Maybe. Sab' does mean a predatory animal, but the root verb, saba'a, means "to make sevenfold", and from it come the words sab'a (seven) and usbu' (week). Is a predator one that rips its prey into seven (ie, many) pieces?

Some further digging, though, reveals that Arabic is far from the only language that puts lion names in pride, so to speak, of place. Someone has compiled this interesting list of lion names from other languages. I can't personally verify the provenance of them all but they include some well-known in the West as well as more esoteric ones and a few fictional ones; clearly the mythical power of lions carries their name into many tongues:

Ari or Aryeh (Hebrew) - lion
Arimathea (Biblical Hebrew/Aramaic) - "a lion dead to the Lord" (aryeh met Yah, in its modern Hebrew approximation)
Hari (Sanskrit) - lion, one of the names of Vishnu
Jansher (Persian) - life of a lion
Llewellyn (Welsh) - lion-like
Leo, Leon (English, French, Spanish, Gaelic, Latin, etc) - lion
Lev/Lew/Loeb/Leib (Slavic languages, German, Yiddish, etc) - lion
Senge (Tibetan) - Lion
Shardul, Simha, Singa (Sanskrit) - lion
Shombay (Swahili) - someone who walks like a lion
Tlv-da-tsi (Cherokee) - lion
Kiara - the female lion cub in The Lion KingJad-Bal-Ja (Pithecanthropi) - Golden Lion, from the Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs

It remains only to make two observations. The first is that according to a Cairene colleague, the Arabic word for lionness, labwa, colloquially means "nymphomaniac". The other is that according to Wehr, laden is the Arabic word for laudanum, which is an alcoholic tincture of opium, the drug that provided Mr bin Laden's protectors, the Taliban, with one of their revenue sources despite (or because of) their tight restrictions on its cultivation. I shall leave it to you, dear readers, to read as many layers of meaning into the name of the deceased as you see fit.

Source: