Food Sources: Earth, Water, and Air - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 103

which seemed to desert its own eggs for
those of others and which, in the hottest
hours, going to forage, left it to the sun's
heat to take care of the incubation, when
“this simpleton” of a male did not take its
turn; for them, one could not be ama
min naāma “stupider than an ostrich” or
a ª rad min naāma “more cowardly than an
ostrich” or a £ all min bayat al-balad “viler
than the egg [of an ostrich abandoned]
in the sand”. Besides, to the credulous
and superstitious spirit of the nomads, the
ostrich was the mount of the demon ogre
( ∞ ūl ) of the desert, the terror of travellers.
Added to these beliefs is the tale according
to which the hunted ostrich believes that
it screens itself entirely from the view of
its pursuer by hiding only its head behind
some rugged ground.
As game, the meat of the ostrich is rec-
ognised, in Islamic law, as being licit con-
sumption, but it does not seem, according
to the authors, that the Arabs appreciated
it as much as that of the large, wild quad-
rupeds. As for the Ma ∞ rib, al-Umarī
(8th/14th century) and then Leo Afri-
canus (9th/15th century) report that the
population of Constantine freely cap-
tured young ostriches in large numbers
in order to fatten them and put them on
the spit. Among the Touaregs, the nobles
abstained from eating the meat of the
ostrich, but the im ∞ ad and slaves were
fond of it, as were the sedentary people
of the towns of the Sudan who bought it
from the nomads. In the 10th/16th cen-
tury, al-Maallī further mentions in his
Tufat al-mulūk the abundance of ostriches
and their eggs between Fās and Tlemcen.
This remark confirms the interest shown,
even from the prehistoric period, in ostrich
eggs. The deposits in the sand of collec-
tive clutches, which could reach thirty
eggs and more, were assiduously visited;
a single egg constituted a substantial dish
for several people, its weight equivalent

to two dozen hens' eggs. To outwit the
distrust of the sitting birds, the collector
would content himself with lifting one or
two eggs at a time, at the time when they
were going to forage. The empty shells
( tarīa , pl. tarāik ) after the hatching of the
chicks and those that were emptied ( ay )
for the consumption of their contents,
were carefully recovered and fashioned
to serve many uses (receptacles, oil lamps,
braising pans, etc.). Introduced in the
mosques at first as a decorative element,
these shells became the subject, in the
late Middle Ages, of an export trade to
the Christian countries. The early Church
had made the egg a symbol of the Resur-
rection, and each religious building was
set on possessing among its treasures one
of these enormous and uncommon ostrich
eggs, often mounted in an art object and
set with precious metals; the first that
arrived in Western Europe were taken, in
the naive popular imagination, for those
of the fabulous gryphon.
In the East, ancient therapeutic lore
accorded specific properties to certain
anatomical parts of the ostrich; azwīnī
and al-Damīrī mention some of them to
us. It is known that the gall, considered
to be a violent poison, became an effi-
cacious antidote for every other mortal
poison, and, prepared as an eye lotion,
constituted a beneficial remedy for blind-
ness. On the other hand, the marrow of
the long bones could, by absorption, cure
consumption. The melted fat, used as
an unguent, reabsorbed tumours, while
the dung ( awm ) burnt and ground into
powder healed ulcers. The roasted meat
facilitated the elimination of wind, bad
mixtures of humours, warts and itch-
ing. Some fragments of ostrich egg shell
thrown into the water of a cooking pot
on a fire had, it seemed, the property of
accelerating boiling considerably. Even
more extraordinary, indeed magical, was