Jibāl (Arabic: جبال‎‎) was the name given by the Arabs to a region and province located in western Iran, under the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates. Its name means "The Mountains", and is the plural of jabal, "mountain, hill", highlighting the region's mountainous nature. Between the 12th and 14th centuries, the name Jibal was progressively abandoned, and it came to be mistakenly referred to as ʿIrāq ʿAjamī ("Persian Iraq") to distinguish it from "Arab Iraq" in Mesopotamia. The region never had any precisely defined boundaries, but was held to be bounded by the Maranjab Desert in the east, by Fars and Khuzistan in the south, by Iraq in the south-west and west, by Adharbayjan in the north-west and by the Alborz Mountains in the north, making it roughly coterminous with the ancient country of