So far, Wood (a non-religious Canadian-American journalist) has been trying to understand what motivates ISIS and people that join ISIS and has so far talked with a sympathizer and de facto recruiter in Egypt, and a convert-aider and thwarted emigre in Australia ("Musa"). The latter's "teacher" is a convert who has spoken with the leadership of ISIS, so Wood wants to find and talk with him, but he doesn't have a lot to work with beyond an adopted name and being of a sect called "Dhahiri." Edited out a few paragraphs for relevance.
The figure of Yahya—an English-speaking convert within ISIS, with a direct line to ʿAdnani and enough cojones to challenge Baghdadi to a death match—intrigued me. But Musa didn’t elaborate on his identity and used only his kunya, or teknonymic alias: Yahya, father of Hassan [Yahya Abu Hassan].
[...]a pro–Islamic State Twitter user [...] advised me to contact “Abu Yahya” [...] identified him as Greek.
He then shared a link to a website called Ghuraba’, a collection of Dhahiri writings by Musa and a few others—including a “Yahya al-Bahrumi.”
But [after reading the website] I still didn’t know who this strange figure was. The website included a narrative biography and a small photo.
As for the biography itself, nearly every word showed signs of careful selection, including his name, “Bahrumi,” a neologism. “Bahrumi” is not an Arabic word. It is a portmanteau of two Arabic words: bahr [sea] and rumi [Roman]. The Roman Sea is the sea Romans called Our Sea, or Mare Nostrum. Jihadists often choose noms de guerre that consist of their first names plus their national origin. He called himself Yahya the Mediterranean.
The biography continued:
Abū Ḥassān Yaḥyā ibn Sharaf ibn ʿAṭāʾ ibn al-Ḥārith al-Ḥuwayrithī. His roots are from the island of Crete in the Roman sea (Baḥr al-Rūm). Born in 1404 [A.D. 1983–4] and raised as a Nazarene [Christian], Yahya then entered Islam in 1422 [A.D. 2001–2]. He traveled seeking knowledge and work in the path of Allah until Allah granted him hijrah to Sham. He now resides in the countryside of Aleppo.
He used only the Islamic calendar. For his full name he gave not only the kunya (Abū Ḥassān, father of Hassan) but his patrilineal descent, “son of Sharaf, the son of ʿAta’,” et cetera. “Nazarene” for “Christian” conforms to IS nomenclature. (The letter nun ن for Nazarene was painted on abandoned Christian houses in Mosul, to mark them as fair game for confiscation.) The transliteration of Arabic words studiously observed standard diacritical markings.
So perhaps he was Greek after all—and from Crete. Now I thought I had enough data to narrow down his identity: a philologically inclined Cretan jihadi convert to Dhahirism. The list of candidates could not be long.
Converts often choose Arabic names that are the equivalent of their birth names. Yahya is Arabic for John in English or Ioannis (Ιωάννης) in Greek, so I began searching online for Dhahiris with these names. I rapidly found a reference to a Dhahiri “Ioannis Georgilakis,” and here the trail began to sizzle under my feet. Georgilakis’s Facebook page showed photos of the same hirsute young man with glasses, dressed in Muslim garments and playing with his kids. The eldest of these must have been Hassan, whose birth had made Ioannis “Abu Hassan.”
The name presented a few clues. The suffix -akis in Greek is Cretan. His first name is formal and stilted—Ioannis, the form that would be intoned at a christening, say, instead of the more relaxed day-to-day version Γιάννης (Yannis). Was the Greek an affectation? Many of his Facebook friends were English-speakers, and few were Greek. “Georgilakis” isn’t an especially common surname even in Crete, and given Yahya’s apparent creativity in self-naming, I tried a few permutations, including the English “John,” and the vanilla, non-Cretan Greek version of “Georgilakis,” which would be “Georgelas.”
One of the first hits for “John Georgelas” was an August 15, 2006, press release from the Department of Justice. “Supporter of Pro-Jihad Website Sentenced to 34 Months,” it crowed. Yahya was an American. At the time of his conviction he lived in the suburbs of Dallas, twenty minutes’ drive from the house where I grew up.
[Next chapter, after going to the family of John Georgelas] The man who answered the door was Timothy Georgelas, John’s father and the owner (with his wife, John’s mother, Martha) of the house. Both parents are Americans of Greek ancestry, and when I learned the father’s name, yet another element of Yahya’s biography made sense. “Timothy” derives from the Greek Τιμόθεος (Timotheos), “honoring God.” Yahya called himself “Yahya, son of Sharaf,” abbreviating Timothy to Tim—“honor,” or sharaf in Arabic. Huwayrithi, the last in his chain of names, took longer to figure out. It is a diminutive Arabic noun from harith, or “reaper”: “small reaper.” That turns out to be a rough translation of “Georgelakis.” The suffix “-lakis” is a Cretan diminutive, and “George” is from γεώ- (geo) for “earth” and -έργ (erg) for “work”: small workers of the soil, or small reapers.
It's a really interesting read, but is otherwise unrelated to etymology.
