This expression, meaning “the place where two seas meet”, is included in the Quran due to a story about Hz. Musa. Accordingly, Musa, together with his young assistant, went to the place where two seas meet to meet a righteous person who was granted mercy and knowledge by Allah, whose name is mentioned as Hızır in the hadiths, and wanted to learn some things from him; however, when he could not bear the patience of the events whose nature he could not understand and continued to ask questions despite his promise, their relationship ended (al-Kahf 18/60-82).

There is no information in the Quran or the hadiths about where Majma’ul-Bahrain is, and there are various interpretations in Islamic literature about the place Majma’ul-Bahrain indicates, both in terms of the identity of Musa in the story and the meaning expressed by the concept of Bahr. In Arabic, the word Bahr is used for abundant water, and therefore for a sea, lake, or large river; the Dead Sea is called el-Bahr al-Mayyid (Dead Sea), and the Nile is called Bahr or Bahru Misr (EI2 [Fr.], VIII, 38). On the other hand, the word Bahrain is used in the Quran in four places, one of which is in the form of Bahran; however, these have nothing to do with Majma' al-Bahrain, the place where Moses and Khidr met (see BAHREYN).

Although the word Bahrain, which is the name of a country today, was a name given to Eastern Arabia, including the oases of Katif and Hasa, before Islam and in the early periods of Islam (ibid., I, 970), commentators did not consider the possibility that Bahrain in the 60th verse of the Surah Kahf was the name of a place and accepted that it meant two seas whose names were not given and the place where they met; because it is stated that if Bahrain is a proper noun, the singular pronoun should be used, whereas in the verse, by saying “when they came to the place where those two met”, it refers to two separate seas (Elmalılı, V, 367-368).

The place where the two seas meet is debatable. Based on the meaning of the word bahr and the characteristics given in the Quran, commentators suggest that the two places referred to by bahrain can be a river and the sea where this river flows, or two separate seas, or a river and the lake where it flows; they state that a strait should not necessarily be understood from the place where two seas meet, since it indicates that there is an obstacle in between.

In this context, it is narrated that bahrain is the Euphrates and Nile rivers and the sea where they flow, mecmau’l-bahrain is the place where these rivers flow into the sea, or Bahr-i Faris (the Atlantic Ocean due to its connection with the Persian Gulf) and the Byzantine Sea (the Mediterranean), and the place where these two seas meet is the Strait of Tangier and Gibraltar, or the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, or even between the Kur and Res rivers in the Caucasus or Ifriqiya (around Tunisia). It is suggested that Bahr-i Faris is the Persian Gulf, the Sea of ​​Rum is the Red Sea, majma'u'l-bahreyn is Bab al-Mandab, and it could also be the Strait of Hormuz between the Persian Gulf and the Sea of ​​Oman. It is also said that Majma'u'l-bahreyn is the place where the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean meet (approach each other), that is, the Suez region and the Jordan River and Lake Tiberias where it flows (Taberi, XV, 271; Qurtubi, XI, 9-10; Mustafavi, I, 205; M. Tahir Ibn Ashur, XV, 362). On the other hand, it is stated that the incident took place in Sudan where the Blue Nile and the White Nile meet (Mawdudi, III, 182). It is also said that the “junction of the great waters” in the cuneiform tablets and the mecmau’l-bahreyn in the Qur’an are the region where the island of Bahreyn is located (Erdem, p. 115 [1986], p. 5), and a connection is established with the Epic of Gilgamesh, Alexander’s novel and a Jewish legend (EI2 [Fr.], IV, p. 935-937).

However, according to the strongest possibility, mecmau’l-bahreyn is the place where the Gulfs of Aqaba and Suez meet. Because this is the point where the two seas separate and meet. As understood from the information in a hadith reported by Ibn Abbas (Bukhari, “Tefsir”, 18/2-4, “ʿIlim”, 44, “Anbiyâʾ”, 27; Muslim, “Fażâʾil”, 170, 172), the event took place after Hz. Moses led the Children of Israel out of Egypt and took them to Mount Sinai and received a revelation there. The two seas closest to Mount Sinai and the Sinai desert are the Gulfs of Suez and Aqaba. It is unlikely that Hz. Moses went to the Strait of Gibraltar or the place where the Nile rises or the island of Bahrain in the Gulf of Basra in order to meet Khidr. Because, as far as is known, Hz. After leaving Egypt, Moses crossed the sea and followed the western coast of the Sinai peninsula to the south, reaching Mount Sinai, then he went up the eastern side of the Sinai peninsula to go to the promised land, when the Israelites did not listen, he returned, spent forty years in the Sinai peninsula (al-Maidah 5/26) and, according to the Torah, died on Mount Nebo opposite Jericho (Deuteronomy 34/1-4).

Although Majma'u'l-bahrayn has been interpreted as two seas of knowledge, one of which is the apparent knowledge represented by Moses and the other is the hidden knowledge represented by Khidr, or as the union of the spiritual and physical worlds (Abdurrezzak al-Kashani, II, 237), the first interpretation has been evaluated as heresy (Zamakhshari, II, 490).



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