Food Resources and their Transformation - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 113

prescribes that plenty of water should be
added in order to be able to give some
to neighbours, especially a broth of mar-
rows ( dubbā ) and of adīd . When on expe-
ditions, soldiers took with them sawī , a
kind of dried barley meal to which was
added water, butter or fat from the tails
of sheep. Several dishes belong to the
broad category of gruels, the usual food
of agricultural peoples ( e.g. , gruels made
with milk and with samn ); these include
arīra , made from flour cooked with milk,
talbīna , a similar dish eaten at funeral
meals, azīr (or azīra ), a gruel gener-
ally made from bran and meat cut up
into small pieces and cooked in water.
We notice that the general tendency is
a search for fat, for greasy and heavy
food, a tendency which still continues in
Bedouin cooking and which is probably
dictated by physiological needs. There is
little tendency mentioned to spiced foods.
The Arabs engaged in the transport of
spices, but they were too precious a mer-
chandise for them to use themselves at all
frequently. We find mentioned, however,
camphor and ginger (urān, LXXVI, 5,
17), cloves, pepper, aloes and the sweet
wood called lignum aloes.
There seem to have been few prohi-
bitions concerning food, imposed rather
by custom (as with us) than by a definite
code of laws, and often restricted to one
or to several tribes. It is, at least in part,
against pagan taboos of this sort that the
urān seems to inveigh (II, 163/168 ff.,
VI, 118 ff.); there were often prohibitions
concerning specific animals (and not a
whole species), not as impure, but as con-
secrated to the Divinity (urān, V, 102,
VI, 139/138, where there is also men-
tioned a harvest— ar —which is taboo;
the flesh of newly-born animals was for-
bidden to women, with the exception of
still-born animals: urān, VI, 140/139).
Even at Mecca itself, at the time of the

irām , the ums, i.e. , the holy families serv-
ing the local sanctuaries, abstained from
meat, from clarified butter, from ai
(and perhaps from all milk-products) as
well as from oil. There were various por-
tions of meat which were not eaten: the
heart among the ufī tribe, the fat tail
of the sheep among the Balī of uāa
who, not being assimilated with the rest of
the Islamic population, still retained this
taboo in Andalus, the testicles, at least
on feast days; but there may have been
here, as in present-day Arabia (in spite
of the religious agitation which appears
to have been provoked among the ufī
who were forced by Muammad to break
the taboo) “rational” motives: in north-
western Arabia they do not eat the hearts
of birds for fear of becoming as timorous
as they are; Hualī poets reproach the
South-Arabian tribe of Marad for eating
grasshoppers, but this was rather a special
distaste for this food, or an affectation. A
later saying claimed that the Bedouin ate
“everything that crawls or walks except
the chameleon” ( umm ubayn) . According
to Sozomenus (5th century A.D.), the Sar-
acens abstained from pork and observed
a number of Jewish ceremonies; it was
probably a case of the Arab neighbours of
Palestine coming under Jewish-Christian
influences. But Pliny had already noted
the absence of pork in Arabia. In case of
vital necessity, which often arose in the
severe conditions of desert life, all the
taboos were relaxed, even the general
taboo on human flesh though it should
not therefore be thought that cannibalism
was general, but during battles the heat of
passionate hatred, or particular rites, often
led men to drink or lick up the blood or
the brains, to gnaw the liver of the dead,
etc. Vows were made of temporary absti-
nence: from samn , milk, meat, wine, some-
times even to fast completely. In some
regions wine must have played a religious