Food and Culture in Pre-modern Muslim Societies

            As a religious tradition and a movement of conquest, Islam emerged from western central Arabia, the Hijaz, in the mid-seventh century. With the rise and expansion of Muslim rule from the seventh through the tenth centuries, first northward into Syria, then eastward towards India and westward towards Spain there came a rich, multiple and varied inheritance based upon the conquered lands. Compared to the relative scarcity of their own native environment, the Arab conquerors discovered lands of plenty in the great river valleys of the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates and the Indus together with the established technologies of agriculture and irrigation of these and other regions. In contrast with the basic dual source of Arab nourishment, the date palm and the camel, they encountered in abundance the famous triad of the classical world, wheat, the grape and the olive.

            This contrast of environments is reflected in early Islamic dietary laws. Of the four schools of Sunni legal practice, the Shafi, Hanbali, Hanafi and Maliki, only the last originated in the Hijaz cities of Mecca and Medina where the nagging reality of scarcity (and possibly hunger) were of more pressing concern than in the more richly cultivated centres of Iraq, Syria and Egypt. Hence, legal scholars of the Hijaz were alone in their attitude to the consumption of birds and beasts of prey; they permitted the eating of birds of prey while merely disapproving beasts of prey whereas the scholars of all other schools strictly prohibited the consumption of both categories.

            With the Muslim expansion and as roots were set down in the conquered territories, new customs were encountered, new ways of doing things. One such novelty was the variety of indigenous culinary traditions that were expressed to some extent in the appearance of cookbooks written in Arabic for the new urban leisure class as discussed above. Another sphere was, in the broadest sense, a medical tradition also of composite nature but ultimately reflecting the Greek corpus of writings represented by Hippocrates as reworked and developed by Galen, and then notably the compendium on medical material by Dioscorides. While not to forget, however, that in addition to the Greek legacy other influences reached the Arabs from Sassanian Persian, Syriac and, albeit only marginally, from Indian and Chinese sources.

            On the other hand, Muslims made contributions of their own to the new, evolving trans-cultural domains of Islam that stretched from the Iberian Peninsula to India and beyond. Two may be noted briefly here as they are both related to the food cultures of Muslim societies. The first was the encouragement given during the early Muslim era to the diffusion of a number of crops from India through Persia westward across the Middle East and North Africa. The crops included sorghum, sugar cane, banana, spinach and the eggplant described by Andrew Watson in his book Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World [Cambridge, 1983] together with the routes and mechanics of diffusion and their acclimatisation in new environments.