Food Sources: Earth, Water, and Air - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 99

man of the desert and one of the infor-
mants of al- ⁄ āi, gave pride of place to
the hare in the metaphor “If the uromas-
tix-lizard ( abb ) had been a chicken, the
hare would be a francolin ( durrā ¡ )”. Ori-
ental cookery topics esteem hare highly in
their chapters on meats. To serve jugged
hare ( arnabī ) or roast saddle of hare ( a ¡ z
ma ª wī ) to a guest was a mark of honour,
especially if one kept the kidneys for him;
these were regarded as the finest morsel,
as can be seen from the pituresque maxim
aim a ¶ ā-ka min kulyat al-arnab “feed your
brother with hare's kidneys”, which meant
using the tenderest words to console a
friend in difficulty.
Al- ⁄ āi draws attention to the double
benefit which the hare provides. Apart
from its highly desirable flesh, its fine
warm pelt also has a commercial value in
the fur trade and the textile industry. An
anonymous satirical line of verse alludes
to the trade in these terms: “When gentle
folk move (among them), it is to see them
touching hare skins with their hands wide
open”. The sentence expresses the scorn
which has always attached to rabbit skin
dealers. Rabbit skin is not distinguished
from hare skin in the making of fabrics
called muarnab/murnab and certain felts.
The fur is also used to line gloves and
slippers and to trim winter bonnets. It is
not inconceivable that they were also used
as counterfeit furs, which would normally
be more highly priced, but the secrets of
dyeing and other treatments were known
only to the tricksters. The colour of the
fur can vary from light brown almost to
blonde according to the hare's habitat,
and certain beige materials are called
marnabānī “hare coloured”; conversely,
in popular French the hare is known as
“capuchin” because of the brown habit
worn by the monks of that order. The
hare's tail is black on top and immacu-
lately white underneath; it is conspicuous

even from a distance because the tuft is
always erect. The Saharans have a name
( a ) bū nawwāra , “the one with the flower”
which is used for the hare as well as for
the fox.
As Islam expanded westwards to Spain
and north-eastwards to the Indus, Arabs
were introduced to a second leporid, the
rabbit ( Oryctolagus cuniculus ), both wild and
domestic. Since there was no specific term
for rabbit in the arabiyya, arnab was used.
At first they regarded the wild rabbit sim-
ply as a small hare, and it was sometimes
called “levret” ( ¶ irni ). The duality of the
term arnab in the East to cover hare and
rabbit is a source of constant confusion,
but one of the first to find difficulty with it
was Ibn al-Muaffa. When he was trans-
lating the fables of Bidpay from Pahlavi,
he encountered the typically Indian epi-
sode of the elephants who were looking for
water and trampled over a rabbit warren
( ar li 'l-arānib ), crushing the inhabitants
in their burrows ( ¡ ur , pl. a ¡ ār, a ¡ ira,
¡ aara ), but the clever rabbit Fayrūz (=
Felix) became their spokesman and drove
away the elephants by a trick. This story
could not possibly be concerned with
hares, for they do not live in colonies and
they do not tunnel underground. Once the
domestic rabbit was being bred on a large
scale, it became necessary to add epithets
to arnab to make the word more specific;
arnab barriyya or wa ª iyya was used for the
hare, and arnab ahliyya or dā ¡ ina or baladi-
yya for the domestic rabbit, but the wild
rabbit hardly had any specific name. In
the Muslim West the same confusion did
not arise, because in Spain as well as in
the Ma ∞ rib the wild and domestic rab-
bit kept its original Latin name cuniculus
in Arabised form (compare Fr. connil or
connin , Provençal couniéu , Sp. conèjo , Port.
coélbo , It. coniglio , Eng. cony , Ger. Kaninchen ,
Swed. kouin ). The Hispano-Arabic names
kunilya/unilya, ullīn, ulayn are still found