Food Resources and their Transformation - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 185

Europe and North Africa and Apis fasciata
in Egypt and the Near East.
One cannot trace here the primordial
economic role that, thanks to honey, bees
have played in man's nutrition since pre-
historic times. The sedentary populations
of the mountainous and wooded zones
of the Mediterranean rim, following the
example of the Greeks, very soon domes-
ticated the bee and organised bee-keeping
( niāla, tarbiyat al-nal , Turk. arıcılık ) quickly
took its place among agricultural activi-
ties, successfully taking over from the haz-
ardous collection of wild honey.
With Islam, the bee's beneficial nature
for humanity was clearly described in
sūra XVI of the urān entitled precisely
al-Nal “the Bees” and in which it is stated
(verses 68-9): “Your Lord has revealed to
the bees: Establish your dwellings in the
mountains, in the trees and in the places
built by men, then eat all the fruits. Fol-
low meekly in that way the paths of
your Lord./From the bodies of the bees
comes forth a drink of various hues
which is a healing for men”. The Prophet
Muammad confirmed this divine pro-
tection on several occasions; according to
one of his adī s, “Every fly is destined
for hellfire, except the bee”. He said fur-
ther, “Among the small creatures, there
are four that should not be killed: the ant
( namla ), the bee ( nala ), the shrike ( urad )
and the hoopoe ( hudhud )”. Finally, speak-
ing of honey, he declared, “For you [Mus-
lims] there are two remedies: the urān
and honey”. Besides, among the para-
disial delicacies reserved for the elect are
promised “Rivers of purified honey ( anhār
min asal muaffā )”, XLVII, 15). Several
other maxims of the Prophet give the bee
as a model to follow for every Muslim, as
much in his private life as in the heart of
the community; after the fashion of the
industrious insect, all his acts will aspire to
the good and the beautiful and reject the

bad and the ugly. The physiological pro-
cess of making honey ( al-ary ) in the body
of the bee staying unexplained among the
scholars of Antiquity, the Muslims saw
in it a clear sign of divine intervention
beyond human comprehension.
On the scientific level, it must be noted
that the Arabic-speaking naturalists who
spoke of the bees, such as al-āi
(3rd/9th century), azwīnī (7th/13th
century) merely reproduced what had
been said by Aristotle and then the poet
Virgil and Pliny the Elder, and they add
nothing new. Despite this, we find, in the
4th/10th century, an excellent synthesis
of all that was known until then about
bees in one of the Epistles of the Iwān
al-afā in which the representative of the
bee race makes a vibrant indictment of
man who, in every age, has exploited for
his own profit the hard work of his fellow
bees. Later, it is the authors of treatises on
agronomy who, in applied zoology, deal
with bee-keeping and, more especially,
the Hispano-Arab agronomists such as
Ibn Baāl of Toledo (5th/11th century)
and Ibn al-Awwām of Seville (7th/13th
century). Finally, some practical informa-
tion was supplied by the “calendars” on
times for different operations which are
necessary in the practice of bee-keeping,
such as the Calendar of Cordova .
The internal life of the hive ( aliyya,
assāla, kiwāra, ūra, miwāra, mutār ,
Marib ab, aba , Syria manala , Kab-
yle irasin , Turk. arı kovanı ) was quite
well observed after Aristotle, and the three
social categories comprising a community
of bees were already recognised. This
community formed from a swarm ( dabr,
thawl, iz, aram , Marib far, sirb ) is
grouped around the “chief” ( yasūb, amīr,
malik , Kabyle agellid , Pers. pādiāh , Turk.
kıral ) who reigns as sovereign and who, in
fact, is the queen; but it was not until the
17th century that the two naturalists, the