Food Sources: Earth, Water, and Air - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 108

cavity of the soil and then covers them
with earth. The young hatch after forty
days and are able to take care of them-
selves (autophagous). The abb lays sev-
enty eggs and more, which resemble the
eggs of the pigeon. Its tail is jointed. It
has such great strength in its tail that it
can split a snake with it. If it is killed and
left for one night and then is brought near
a fire, it will move again. It devours its
young when hungry and eats its vomit
again; yet it is highly capable of enduring
hunger, being second, in this respect, only
to the snake. It likes eating dates. Its teeth
are all of one piece. It is afraid of man but
lives on friendly terms with the scorpion,
which it takes into its hole as a protection
from the human foe. It does not leave its
hole in winter. When exposed to the sun,
it assumes various colours like the cha-
meleon. It lives seven hundred years and
more. When old it foregoes food and is
satisfied with air. The male has two penes
and the female two vulvae. A certain kind
has two tongues. The abb drinks little or
does not drink at all and voids one drop
of urine in every forty days.
Some of the fabulous accounts have
their origin in ancient popular tradition,
mainly laid down in poetry and proverbs,
as pointed out in the zoological works
themselves.
Various medicinal properties were
ascribed to the heart, spleen, skin, blood,
fat and dung of the abb . Its significance
when seen in dreams has been treated
by Damīrī and in special works on that
subject.

sense, denotes any bird “which drinks
with one gulp and coos” ( kull ayr abba wa
hadara fa-huwa amām ), that is to say the
family of the Columbidae, with which
the mediaeval Muslim naturalists incor-
porated that of the Pteroclidae, the sand-
grouse ( aā ), morphologically very closely
related to the pigeons. The Columbidae,
which amām represents, are fairly wide-
spread from Irā to the Ma ∞ rib with
their different species of pigeons and
turtle-doves, both resident ( awābid ) and
migrant ( awāi ).
In the restricted sense, amām denotes the
domestic pigeons deriving from the rock-
dove, whether the free or “roof-pigeons”
that are established in towns ( amām ahlī,
amām al-amār ) and on which the Mec-
cans prided themselves ( amām Makka ), or
the artificially bred or “dove-cot” pigeons
( buyūtī, dā ¡ in ) trained to live ( muwaan ) in
private lofts ( amūd , pl. amida ) or official
pigeon-houses ( bur ¡ , pl. burū ¡ ). It is to
this last category that mediaeval writers in
Arabic devoted so much of their work in
both prose and verse; indeed; the contact
established between the Muslims and the
pigeon-loving Byzantines gave such a fillip
to pigeon-keeping ( lab bi 'l-amām ) among
the Arabs that it quickly became a pas-
time that attracted several caliphs, such
as the Abbāsids Mahdī, Hārūn al-Ra ª īd,
al-Wā º i and al-Nāir.
The theme of the “gentle dove”, the
messenger of love, peace, and good for-
tune, was the unfailing inspiration of Arab
poets of all periods and in all the Muslim
countries, and it would be useless to try to
enumerate all the aīdas which, in their
conclusion, evoked the image of eter-
nity in the tender cooing of turtle-doves
( al-hawātif ) high up among tall trees. In
Islam, as everywhere else, this bird is
regarded with popular affection, and a
pair in a cage are very often the chosen
companions of the Muslim home; at a very

(L. Kopf )

Pigeon

amām (Ar. pl. amāim, amāmāt ), a col-
lective substantive which, taken in a wide