Medicine Dietetics and Pharmacology - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 255

tional identity from one end to the other
of the Dār al- Islām.
It is reasonable to speculate on the
extent to which the pro-commercial ide-
ology of the new conquerors directly
influenced their urban policy in captured
or newly-established towns. P. Chalmeta
stresses the importance of the building
of sū s at the orders of Hi ª ām b. Abd
al-Malik: according to him, it was this
period which saw clear evolution towards
what is now recognisable as the sū , and
its ultimate transformation into the con-
structed sū , an enclosure with gates, with
permanent shops ( ānūt ), a base for the
levying of taxes. H. Kennedy relies on the
results of the excavation of a presumed
Umayyad sū at Palmyra in proposing
the notion that the steppe region became,
with the Arab conquest, a place of revived
commercial activity after a late Byzantine
phase of stagnation.
The desert was henceforward an active
space, bordered by points which could be
animated, among other activities, by com-
merce. An obvious point of reference here
is the work of O. Grabar, City in the desert ,
Harvard 1978. The article by Roll and
Ayalon, The market street at Apollonia-Arsuf ,
in BASOR , (1987), 61-76 describes a town
of regional importance, the only harbour
serving a quite extensive hinterland, where
the elements of a sū have been established:
a narrow commercial street 2.5 m wide by
65 m in length, within the fortified town,
which was apparently in use from the late
7th/early 8th century, where Umayyad
coins have been found. In sum, however,
in the absence of publications in sufficient
number on the Umayyad period and of
firmly- established chronologies, questions
remain unanswered, especially for major
cities such as Aleppo and Damascus where
the transformation of the large central
avenues into a sū follows a chronology
which, since the work of Sauvaget.

These urban transformations have an
undeniable religious, social and judicial
dimension. In the Arabo- Muslim world
of the first five centuries, one of the most
respected functions was that of the mer-
chant/disseminator of adī º , who enabled
all the inhabitants of this region to acquire
the same access both to the commodities
of material culture and to the fundamen-
tal elements of religious culture. In medi-
aeval Arabic literature, religious as well as
secular, the travelling merchant plays a
predominant role: he transports the goods
which he buys or sells from one mar-
ket to another, between the time of the
dawn prayer and the time of the midday
prayer. Similarly, he memorises or diffuses
prophetic traditions, from one mosque to
another, between the afternoon prayer
and the final prayer. The isba , a branch
of Islamic legislation precisely defining the
functions of the mutasib , a civilian official
appointed by the āī to uphold Islamic
order in the town and, in particular, to
supervise the markets, is well understood,
since numerous texts concerning it, often
very concrete and practical, have been
preserved. As will be seen especially with
regard to the towns of the Muslim West,
these documents make it possible to fol-
low the daily functioning of the sū.
Whether it was a case of ancient cities
captured by the Arabs or newly-founded
ones, all maintained certain similar, essen-
tial functions. The pattern of organisation
of these large urban areas is well known:
in the centre of the city, the ¡ āmi -mosque
and the governor's palace, dār al-imāra ,
constituted a local outpost of caliphal
authority, communal prayer, upholding
of Muslim order and levying of fiscal rev-
enues. These buildings/institutions sym-
bolised the town, a space for mediation
between Arab tribes belonging to tradi-
tionally mutually hostile confederations,
or between Arab Muslims and converted