Food Sources: Earth, Water, and Air - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 80

shepherd himself, he was pleased to say
“Among all things, small livestock is an
invitation to modesty and an incitement
to choose poverty, leaving aside grandeur
and pomp; prophets and just men were
pastors of small livestock”. In his eyes,
the sheep-goat association was for man a
divine gift and he used to say, moreover,
“I recommend you to have the greatest
care for sheep, clean their mucus ( ru ∞ ām )
and clear their enclosure of every thorn
and stone, for these animals are also to
be found in Paradise”, advising the shep-
herd to perform his prayers near the fold.
Small livestock also provide him with a
metaphor to express his aspirations for
the Islamisation of the conquered regions
by encouraging the crossing of beasts with
a black fleece (= the Persians) with those
with a white fleece (= the Arabs, of supe-
rior race).
In the linguistic domain, sheep and
goats were defined by a considerable num-
ber of terms which the great Arab philolo-
gists of the 2nd/8th and 3rd/9th centuries
attempted to gather together in specialised
works, of which very few have been pre-
served for us. One of the first seems to be
al-Nar b. · umayl (d. 203/818) with his
Kitāb al- fi anam , the fourth volume of his
huge encyclopaedia of Bedouin life, the
Kitāb al-ifāt . At a later date there are a
Kitāb Nat al- ∞ anam and a Kitāb al-Ibil wa
'l- ª ā of Abū Zayd al-Anārī (d. 214/829),
a Kitāb al- fi anam ascribed to al-A ¶ fa ª
al-Awsa (d. ca. 215/830 or 221/835),
the Kitāb al- · ā of al-Amaī (d. 213/828)
and, finally, a Kitāb al- fi anam wa nuūtihā
of Abū Ubayd al-āsim b. Sallām (d.
224/838). Ibn Sīduh gives an idea of the
extent of ancient terminology concern-
ing goats and sheep in his Mu ¶ aa in
the chapter kitāb al- ∞ anam , consisting of
about forty pages. To this ancient base
must be added the other mass of mate-
rial contained in the different Arab and

Berber dialects, from Irā as far as the
Atlantic Ocean, of the tribes devoted to
the husbandry of small livestock. The
scanning of several lexicons dedicated to
these dialects, such as that of G. Boris for
South Tunisian ( Parler arabe des Marazig ,
Paris 1958) or that of Cl. Denizeau ( Par-
lers arabes de Syrie, Liban et Palestine , Paris
1960) allows the evaluation of a mini-
mum of two hundred terms, the elemen-
tary word-store which each tribal group
uses in the exercise of its pastoral activity;
this approximate figure still remains well
below the reality for some sections. Such
an abundance of vocabulary sets in relief
the vital character which the husbandry
of sheep and goats presents for a mass
of Muslim populations, sedentary as well
as nomadic; this linguistic richness is not
specifically that of the Arabic language,
but is to be found among Turkish-speak-
ing shepherds as well as Persian-speaking
ones and Berber speakers.
In spite of this plethora of terminology,
it remains hard to define precisely the
many strains of sheep and goats belonging
to the Arabs and other Islamised peoples,
just as in the West the zoötechnicians
have had some difficulty in unravelling
the skeins of the domestic strains of the
sheep ( Ovis aries ), undoubtedly descended
from an oriental wild sheep ( Ovis ammon ),
as well as those of the goat ( Capra hircus ),
possibly a descendant of the Aegagrus or
Pasang ( Capra ibex aegagrus ), as these two
species are naturally polymorphs. Among
the sheep one can distinguish, according
to the language and in a very general man-
ner, the strains with a large fatty tail ( alya )
or Barbary sheep (= from Barbary or the
Ma ∞ rib), those with a long, non-fatty tail,
those with long hoofs peculiar to India and
Guinea and from which derive the strains
of Northern Europe and, finally, those
of Spain with the “merinos” introduced
from the Ma ∞ rib under the dynasty