Food Resources and their Transformation - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 123

rifices offered by murikūn or ahl al-ilāf ,
unless one had witnessed that the name of
God had been pronounced over it. They
were thus assimilated to the Ahl al-kitāb.
The Mālikīs discouraged the eating of
meat which came from a bidī , while for
the īīs that which came from the ene-
mies of the ahl al-bayt was unlawful.
The variations according to way of life
are probably the most considerable. The
Bedouins differ from the settled popu-
lations in their food as well as in other
details. Bedouin women refused to marry
town-dwellers because they hated the food
of the towns, especially green vegetables
and the same repugnance is found also
among the nomadic azas in Central
Asia. Milk products were a typical food of
nomads everywhere in the ancient world
and they suffered if they were deprived of
them when in settled districts. The differ-
ence between peasants and town-dwellers
was also often emphasized.
There was hardly any difference
between the food of men and women,
except perhaps that the idle lives of rich
women inclined them to greediness, the
love of sweet things, etc. The excursions
of groups of women of leisure for picnics
etc. were accompanied also by purchases
of cakes, fruit, and ices. Hence a regula-
tion of the 10th/16th century forbidding
women to go into the shops of the aymačı s
of Eyyūb and laying down that the Chris-
tians should avoid them. Similarly when
in the baths women ate sweetmeats and
special dishes. In Iran, the offerings to
Fāima are eaten only by men, at least in
one of the first phases of the rite. More-
over, in some places, customs based on
magic forbid certain foods to women.
Differences in diet according to age
depend on theoretical (and even scientific)
opinions concerning food. We shall deal
with them below. On the other hand a
certain number of differences according to

social classes can be traced to economic
and social factors. Naturally consider-
ations of price alone restricted the food
of the poor both in quantity and quality
and had the same effect on that of misers,
who were voluntarily poor. In some of the
literature about misers, particularly in the
masterpiece of al-āi, the K. al-Bualā ,
much is said about their meagre diet. The
food of the poor and of misers was apt
to include in particular “filling” dishes
which were, at least in appearance, rich
in nutritional value while consisting of
inexpensive ingredients, like Harpagon's
haricot of mutton. Several such dishes
are mentioned in the time of al-āi:
ifīla, harīsa, fuliyya, kurunbiyya . At the
beginning of the 7th/13th century lentils
also were mentioned as a dish of poor
people and they were again despised as
the food of the fallā by al-irbīnī. The
distinction between the dishes of the poor
and those of the rich was clearly under-
stood by the collective consciousness, as
expressed in proverbs, popular literature,
etc. Examples of this are found in current
proverbs about burul (Turkish bulgur )
“crushed wheat”, a dish of the poor and
peasants in Syria-Palestine and Turkey in
contrast to rice, the dish of the wealthy
town-dwellers. The K. arb al-maū has
precisely as its main theme the contest
between the food of the poor and that of
the rich. The food of the rich was distin-
guished by the variety of the dishes, their
complexity, their expensiveness, the length
of time needed for their preparation, an
ostentatious freedom of choice expressed
by eating foods of little nutritional value.
There was obviously an effort to improve
the quantity and quality of the diet, but
still there were applied the rules of “con-
spicuous consumption” in food intended
to set apart the élite from the masses. The
members of the élite were expected to be
familiar with the most esoteric dishes, and