Food Sources: Earth, Water, and Air - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 81

Na ¡ d and whose hair was black or deep
red. The ª āmiyya “Syrian” strain was
long-haired, being related to the strains of
Asia whose most renowned representative
across the centuries remains the “angora”
( anarī ) from the name of the great Turk-
ish commercial centre where its “flock”
( mirizz, mirizzā, mirizzā ) was woven
( º awb mumaraz ) and exported, but which
came, in fact, from the herds of Arme-
nia and the Causacus of Tibetan stock.
The success which the textile “mohair”
(an Arabo-English term derived from
mu ¶ ayyar “chosen” with the complement
of “hair”) still has on the world market
and the different “camelots” (diapered,
waved, moiré and watered) testifies to the
high quality of the goat fleeces and confers
on them an equal rank in value to that of
the best sheep's wools. It is the same with
the goats of Kashmir and Tibet, whose
silky down covered with long gander is
collected daily by carding and woven and
gives the shawls of India their renown.
Among the pastoral peoples, nomadic
and sedentary, the methods of husbandry
of each species have hardly varied since
antiquity, having attained by experience
a degree of adaptation which would be
hard to improve upon. For the former,
the rhythm of the seasons unfolds in a per-
manent quest for even only slightly green
pastures ( marāī ) and unpolluted watering
places, in the steppes bordering the great
deserts, for access to the luxuriant, jealous-
ly-guarded oases is forbidden to them just
as that to the private imā was forbidden
to them in pre-Islamic times. In Africa as
well as in the East and in Asia, these move-
ments are apparently organised, i.e. codi-
fied, according to ancestral agreements
in the manner of customary right based
on group precedence; there is no need to
dwell on the interminable conflicts which
these questions of pasturage can lead to,
especially in the period of drought. At the

of the Marīnids whose Hispanicised
name it has kept. All these strains are sub-
divided, according to the desired aim of
their breeding, into wool sheep and dairy
sheep; the sheep kept for its meat, despite
the absolute legality of the consumption
of its flesh, has not attained in the lands of
Islam the importance that it has attained
in feeding Western Christendom.
On the subject of zoological strains, the
Arab authors and al- ⁄ āi in particular,
speak only of a few, especially in Arabia,
the most widespread being distinguished
by some typical anatomical anomaly such
as dwarfishness. Also among the species
with a very foreshortened shape there is
the a £ af “the docked one” of the i ¡ āz
and Yemen with a black fleece and almost
without a tail and ears; similar was the
ahd , but with a russet-coloured fleece.
Barayn had the naad “puny beast”, a
stunted sheep, but a good wool producer,
whose small size gave rise to the image
a £ all min al-naad “slighter than the dwarf
sheep”. In Yemen the aballa is still bred,
itself a dwarf, and the imim with shorn
ears and with a woolly dewlap under the
throat; whereas the sā ¡ isī was large and its
wool of a pure white, while the ¡ alam of
āif, very high on its hooves, had a fleece
so smooth that it appeared bald; it was of
African origin. Among the strains with a
fatty caudal wen, apart from the Barbary
sheep (dial. mazmūzī ), the “Caracul” of
Central Asia cannot be omitted, with its
long wavy black fleece whose lambs were
frequently sacrified for their precious coat
called (“breitschwanz” or “astrakhan”).
As for the goats, it can be maintained
that the majority of the strains of Arabia
and the Near East were of African origin.
The nūbiyya “Nubian” and the aba ª iyya
“Abyssinian” goat were distinguished from
each other, both large with broad, hang-
ing ears and a short fleece. Quite similar
was the aaniyya (from Mount aan) in