Wilaya

A wilayah (ولاية in Arabic, velâyat/ولایت in Persian, vilayet in Turkish and ولایت in Urdu), is an administrative division, usually translated as "province", or occasionally as "governorate". The word comes from the Arabic "w-l-y", "to govern": a wāli—"governor"—governs a wilayah, "that which is governed". Under the Caliphate, the term referred to any constituent near-sovereign state.

In Arabic, wilayah is used to refer to the states of the United States, and the United States of America as a whole is called "الولايات المتّحدة الأمريكية" (al-Wilāyāt al-Muttaḥidah al-Amrīkīyah) literally meaning "the American United States".

For Morocco, which is divided into provinces and wilāyas, the translation "province" would cause the distinction to cease. For Sudan, the term state, and for Mauritania, the term region is used.

The governorates of Iraq (muhafazah) are sometimes translated as province, in contrast to official Iraqi documents and the general use for other Arab countries. This conflicts somehow with the general translation for muhafazah (governorate) and wilāyah (province).

In the ethnically-diverse Xinjiang region of northwest China, the seven undifferentiated prefectures proper (Chinese: 地区; pinyin: dìqū; that is, not prefecture-level cities, autonomous prefectures, etc.) are translated into the minority Uygur language as Vilayiti (ۋىلايىتى). For the other, more numerous types of administrative divisions in Xinjiang, however, Uygur uses Russian loanwords like oblasti or rayoni, in common with other Xinjiang languages like Kazakh.

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